Our educational system is in turmoil. Many would argue that it has been assaulted and oversimplified by the right. There is growing concern that we are becoming a liberal nation-state with an increasingly anti-liberal population and an electorate that is disinterested in politics. In this globalized world, the power of capital is so great that opposition to it is often discouraged and disheartened, leaving many citizens few political precepts by which to consider their institutions. This contemporary failure of vision has opened the way for the unimpeded return of the philosophy of the free market. As a result, social and educational policies are debated almost solely in terms of how they fit with the needs of the market. Social and ethical understandings are replaced by a failed economic theory that requires a radical constraint of our political and economic choices. Compassion for the poor, the market lets us know, is wrong-headed because any interference with the labor market will always result in unfortunate economic and social consequences. Moral issues are eclipsed by market needs. In Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? the contributors discuss how the field of critical pedagogy should respond to such dire conditions in a way that is theoretically savvy and visionary, while concurrently contributing to the struggle to improve the lives of those most hurt by them. Critical Pedagogy is essential reading for every classroom teacher and pre-service teacher. It is also a valuable tool for use in undergraduate and graduate-level classrooms.

The belief in the transformative potential of education has long underpinned critical educational theory. But its concerns have also been largely political and economic, using education as the means to achieve a better - or ideal - future state: of equality and social justice. Our concern is not whether such a state can be realized. Rather, the belief in the transformative potential of education leads us to start from the assumption of equality and to attend to what is "educational" about education. In Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy we set out five principles that call not for an education as a means to achieve a future state, but rather that make manifest those educational practices that do exist today and that we wish to defend. The Manifesto also acts as a provocation, as the starting point of a conversation about what this means for research, pedagogy, and our relation to our children, each other, and the world. Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy invites a shift from a critical pedagogy premised on revealing what is wrong with the world and using education to solve it, to an affirmative stance that acknowledges what is educational in our existing practices. It is focused on what we do and what we can do, if we approach education with love for the world and acknowledge that education is based on hope in the present, rather than on optimism for an eternally deferred future.

At its core, the main goal of critical pedagogy is deceptively simple—to construct schools and education as agents of change. While noble and ambitious, it is not always realistic in a climate of increased commodification, privatization of schooling, and canned curriculum. By assuming rather than articulating its own possibilities, critical pedagogy literature itself is often its own worst enemy in its call for transformation. With such challenges from both within and without, is the idea of liberatory pedagogy for social change out of reach or can critical educators really achieve the rather high call for social change? What alternative visions of schooling does critical pedagogy truly offer against the mainstream pedagogy? In short, what are the political projects of critical pedagogy? This powerful and accessible text breaks with tradition by teasing out mere assumptions, and provides a concrete illustration and critique of today’s critical pedagogy. Veteran teacher educator Seehwa Cho begins the book with an engaging overview of the history of critical pedagogy and a clear, concise breakdown of key concepts and terms. Not content to hide behind rhetoric, Cho forces herself and the reader to question the most basic assumptions of critical pedagogy, such as what a vision of social change really means. After a thoughtful and pithy analysis of the politics, possibilities and agendas of mainstream critical pedagogy, Cho takes the provocative step of arguing that these dominant discourses are ultimately what stifle the possibility for true social change. Without focusing on micro-level approaches to alternatives, Cho concludes by laying out some basic principles and future directions for critical pedagogy. Both accessible and provocative, Critical Pedagogy and Social Change is a significant contribution to the debates over critical pedagogy and a fresh, much-needed examination of teaching and learning for social justice in the classroom and community beyond.

In a globalized neo-colonial world an insidious and often debilitating crisis of knowledge not only continues to undermine the quality of research produced by scholars but to also perpetuate a neo-colonial and oppressive socio-cultural, political economic, and educational system. The lack of attention such issues receive in pedagogical institutions around the world undermines the value of education and its role as a force of social justice. In this context these knowledge issues become a central concern of critical pedagogy. As a mode of education that is dedicated to a rigorous form of knowledge work, teachers and students as knowledge producers, anti-oppressive educational and social practices, and diverse perspectives from multiple social locations, critical pedagogy views dominant knowledge policies as a direct assault on its goals. Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction takes scholars through a critical review of the issues facing researchers and educators in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Refusing to assume the reader’s familiarity with such issues but concurrently rebuffing the tendency to dumb down such complex issues, the book serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most important and complicated issues of our time.

This book simultaneously provides multiple analyses of critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century while showcasing the scholarship of this new generation of critical scholar-educators. Needless to say, the writers herein represent just a small subset of a much larger movement for critical transformation and a more humane, less Eurocentric, less paternalistic, less homophobic, less patriarchical, less exploitative, and less violent world. This volume highlights the finding that rigorous critical pedagogical approaches to education, while still marginalized in many contexts, are being used in increasingly more classrooms for the benefit of student learning, contributing, however indirectly, to the larger struggle against the barbarism of industrial, neoliberal, militarized destructiveness. The challenge for critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century, from this point of view, includes contributing to the manifestation of a truly global critical pedagogy that is epistemologically democratic and against human suffering and capitalist exploitation. These rigorous, democratic, critical standards for measuring the value of our scholarship, including this volume of essays, should be the same that we use to critique and transform the larger society in which we live and work.