The Practical Critical Educator: Critical Inquiry and Educational Practice

I am delighted to have the opportunity to write this foreword for Karyn Cooper’s and Robert White’s splendid and compelling edited text on The Practical Critical Educator. Critical practice in education is grounded in two bodies of thought and action: critical theory and critical pedagogy. Drawing on classical Marxism and its articulation of how oppression and injustice arose through capitalism’s economic exploitation of labour, critical theories of society took a cultural turn in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, European Jewish refugees who fled to America, where they articulated how the power relations and oppressive forces of capitalism expressed themselves in the alienating symbolic forces of culture, music and art. When booming demographics and an economic surplus fuelled the student movement of the late 60s, and in to the 70s, in many Western nations, new forms of cultural Marxism were added to this body of critical theory, extending beside but also far beyond the classical Marxist preoccupations with economic equalities of social class. British writers, such as the articulate and elegant cultural Marxist Raymond Williams, revived and refined the “lost” work of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci from the 1920s, and his concern with the influence of what he called hegemony – the force through which ruling classes could maintain existing structures of domination by defining, through language, media and culture, what was normal, natural, true, beautiful and defensible, and what was eccentric, unreasonable, or unworthy of serious consideration.

Table of Contents:
Critical literacy for a democratic education: Critical literacy in action: action research in a grade three classroom.- A critical issue in critical literacy: the "popularity effect".- Soup kitchen democracy: practical, critical lessons in theory.- Critical literacy educators at work: examining dispositions, discursive resources and repertoires of practice. Critical learning for a democratic education: Critical theory for schooling-education and society: grounded in political economy.- Shared authority in democratic classrooms; communities-always-in-the-making.- Teaching the queer character of racism.- Not rocket science: on the limits of conservative pedagogy: Critical leadership for a democratic education.- Duplicity, democracy and domesticity: educational leadership for democratic action.- Ghosts in the procedures: notes on teaching and subjectivity in a new era.- Reaching out and reaching in: "we had to develop ourselves first, before anybody can develop us".-Opening the text: voicing a future. Epilogue - Literacy, learning and leadership: a critical focus on democratic schooling.- Index.

Review :
"Cooper and White’s inspiring and imposing collection brings together and publishes for the first time some of the best writers and writing from across the world in critical theory and critical pedagogical practice.... Karyn Cooper’s and Robert White’s book makes critical theory practical for any and all teachers who are authentically concerned about promoting social justice among their students and in their world. Modest, not messianic in personality, witty not weary in disposition, compassionate rather than cutting in their engagements with those around them, Cooper and White have produced a book that reflects their vision as professionals and their values as people. If you want to make a difference, and want to change the world, this is the book that will get you started and keep you going." (Andy Hargreaves, Boston College)