Cultural Education towards Exclusivism. Or, the Role of Education in shaping Exclusivism

The way in which the “traditional” system of education ends up deflecting people's attention from the things that make us, human beings, a whole, a species, and a unity, is constantly and ascendingly challenged and thought against. Currently, we need to find out what features of the former educational system, especially those institutionalized, maintained by the school and society, are highlighted here to be eliminated and what is their authentic value in the system. In the present approach, we will refer, as an example, to religious education. These characteristics that we intend to discuss here do not target a “radical” pedagogy but question the educational system in relation to the inclusion-exclusion binomial. The stereotype, bias, and pretentious choices strained by exclusivism through education actually dehumanize us and stress on features that do not honor us. Is it possible to ever lose them along with all their harmful social consequences?

Critical language pedagogy

There are long and diverse strands of thinking about how schools and schooling, teaching, curriculum, and learning could be conceptualized and developed so as to foster what is often loosely called social justice. Many of these strands go back (in Europe) at least to the French Revolution. The original term that encompasses this area is ‘radical pedagogy’ (that is to say, a pedagogy suitable for radicals or radical purposes; cf. Crookes, 2009). Emerging out of this area in the post-World War Two era, one version of this thought and practice that has become somewhat influential in language teaching is ‘critical pedagogy’, and ‘critical language pedagogy’ (CLP) is a key term used to refer to applications of the concepts of critical pedagogy to second language (L2) contexts.

Music as an Emancipatory Pedagogical Tool in International Relations Classes in the Global South

The purpose of this paper is to present considerations about the use of music as a critical and radical pedagogy in an International Relations class in the Global South. How can music help students understand the processes of marginalization, resistance, and struggle? Can it be understood as a tool to be used in the classroom to transcend traditional and marginalizing pedagogies? The contribution of our proposal derives from the possibility of a symbiosis between the teaching of critical, decolonial, and postcolonial perspectives and the language used to communicate these concepts and ideas to a young audience with different backgrounds. In this sense, we bring perceptions of the engagement with music as a pedagogical tool in an undergraduate course entitled “Decolonizing International Relations: epistemic violence and emancipation in Global South.” By playing songs, not only the learning process became deeper and more meaningful to students, but it also opened margins to a dialogical interaction. We share our experience hoping to contribute to a meaningful debate among scholars, inspiring teachers to engage with decolonial/critical pedagogies.

Recepcja idei postmodernizmu w pedagogice radykalnej Petera McLarena

The aim of this paper is to comprehensively reconstruct the reception of postmodernism in Peter McLaren’s critical/radical pedagogy. On a more general level, the article discusses the pedagogical perils of uncriticalinfatuation with poststructuralist and postmodernist principles of dismantling grand metanarratives and debunking the notions of truth, totality, and universalism and replacing them with the notions of pluralism and perspectivism. The author seeks to verify the statement that McLaren’s response to postmodern developments in philosophy and social theory is in as much similar to that of Henry Giroux’s that it produces a project of education informed by postmodern ideas. The thesis – advanced in the mid 1990s by Tomasz Szkudlarek – is refuted on the basis of thorough a analysis of both earlier and more contemporary texts of McLaren where the main tenets of postmodern theory are severely criticized. The argument about the evolution of McLaren’s thought from a cautious appropriation of some elements of postmodernism to its downright condemnation is supported by the theory of its increasing radicalization under the influence of Marxism. The alternative to the illusory radicality of postmodernism – denounced as affirming the status-quo – is “pedagogy of revolution,” which emerges as strictly political, interventionist praxis whose aim is no longer discourse analysis but concrete social struggle against the oppressive capitalist class relations.

Lucia Moholy's Idle Hands

At the time that she was affiliated with the Bauhaus, Lucia Moholy took a series of photographs at the nearby feminist commune of Schwarze Erde (also known as Schwarzerden), which was founded in 1923 by the poet Marie Buchhold and the pedagogue Elisabeth Vogler (and counted among its members Tilla Winz and Ilse Hoeborn). These photographs focus our attention on androgynous hands engaged in prosaic domestic tasks, as well as on the bodies of women and children involved in the commune's radical pedagogy of renewed bodily movement. The centrality of these images in Schwarzerden's publicity materials, along with their subsequent service as models for future photographs (most notably by Ruth Hallensleben), stands in contrast to the lack of appreciation Moholy received for performing similarly domestic labor for her male peers at the Bauhaus, including, above all, her husband, László Moholy-Nagy. By tracing the various ways in which idleness unfolds as a pictorial equivalent of housework, I argue that these images amount to a critique of an avant-garde photographic discourse that privileged “originality” and “production” over “documentation” and “reproduction.” Reading the photographs against the intention of their maker, who herself dismissed their “artistic value,” I propose that in mounting a challenge to artistic authorship, such images render visible the gendered contradictions of New Vision photography.