Education to Address Social and Environmental Challenges: A Critical Pedagogy Perspective on Saudi Public Education

In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. This has led to a proliferation of anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles programmes that are funded, devised and implemented by private sector players (e.g. McDonald’s, Nestlé) in schools across the globe. This corporate-friendly version of education attempts to erode the democratic purposes of public education, and at the same time, shape children as consumers. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of the governmental assemblage, I argue that culture jamming techniques, such as pranking and détournement, may act as tactics within a broader critical pedagogy of consumption that both challenges and counter-exploits this new ‘brand’ of education and corporation. Culture jamming provides an opportunity to develop students and teachers as counter-political agents: those that contest anti-politics, create new truths, unmask corporate interests and ‘unsettle’ the corporatised education assemblage.

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Down the Rabbit Hole: A Fantastical First Year of Teaching

#CritEdPol Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at Swarthmore College ◽

10.24968/2473-912x.3.1.6 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 81-119

Author(s):

Tabitha Dell'Angelo ◽

Maria DeGenova

Keyword(s):

Public Education ◽

Critical Pedagogy ◽

Beginning Teachers ◽

Curriculum Design ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Beginning Teacher ◽

First Year ◽

First Year Teachers ◽

Multiple Dimensions ◽

Competing Demands

Interviews and observations of first year teachers in the northeastern United States were used to construct a comic. The comic communicates the excitement, fears, and competing demands of a beginning teacher. The dialogue and setting are presented as surrealist to help the reader gain an understanding of the affective realities that the teachers expressed when describing their early teaching experiences. This approach allows for the multiple dimensions of the teachers’ lived experiences to be experienced in ways that a traditional text does not allow. The work takes a critical look at the transition of beginning teachers into their careers and is meant to trouble notions of standardization in both teacher preparation and curriculum design. This arts-based approach recognizes performance as both a method of investigation and representation (Worthen, 1998). Given that public education is often a prominent part of societal discourse, this modality allows the reader the opportunity to make meaning of the data by experiencing the words on the page (Leavy, 2009). The illustrations allow the reader to experience the words differently than traditional text. In this way, dramatizing the data is a form of critical pedagogy (Denzin, 2006).

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La transparencia en las universidades: El derecho a la información, la modernización irreflexiva y la claudicación de la pedagogía crítica

CPU-e Revista de Investigación Educativa ◽

10.25009/cpue.v0i4.128 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 190-197

Author(s):

Rollin Kent Serna

Keyword(s):

Public Education ◽

Critical Pedagogy ◽

The Right

En esta ponencia el Dr. Kent pone de manifiesto la opacidad que ha caracterizado históricamente a las universidades. Plantea además la necesidad de la transparencia y la rendición de cuentas en las instituciones de educación pública, así como la lucha permanente por el derecho a la información. El autor subraya que hay elementos que han entorpecido el desarrollo de la ciudadanía universitaria crítica, entre los que ubica a la modernización irreflexiva y al ejercicio de una pedagogía tradicional y autoritaria que poco espacio ha dejado para el desarrollo de una pedagogía crítica. Termina remarcando que la transparencia es un asunto que se inscribe en las luchas por una modernidad democrática enfrentada a una visión excluyente, tecnocrática y anodina de la modernidad como moda, como espectáculo mediático insustancial.AbstractIn this lecture the Dr. Kent shows the opacity that has characterized historically to the universities. He raises in addition the necessity to the transparency and the accountability in the institutions of public education, as well as the permanent fight by the right to the information. The author emphasizes that there are elements that have obstructed the development of the critical university citizenship, between that locates to the irreflexive modernization and the exercise of a traditional and authoritarian pedagogy which gives a little space for the development from a critical pedagogy. The author ends emphasizing that the transparency is a subject that registers in the fights by a democratic modernity faced to an excluding vision, tecnocratical and anodyne of modernity like fashion, like insubstantial mediatic show.

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