Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a 'Post-Critical' Climate: The Return of Freirean Thinking

Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a 'Post-Critical' Climate provides an urgent reflection on Freire's work, in particular his central principles of pedagogy and praxis, offering a variety of critical responses from philosophical, sociological and egalitarian perspectives. The editors explore whether Freire's revolutionary work has stood the test of time and its relevance to educational discourses today - discourses that frequently contest the ontological and historical aspects of human development While Freire's work emerged as a response to the problem of providing a transformative educational praxis for justice and equality within a specific cultural and economic milieu, Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a 'Post-Critical' Climate seeks to explore the value and possibilities of transformative praxis in perpetually diverse educational settings and within an increasingly divided globalised world. By building on the earlier emancipatory approach of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it creates an international conversation between academics, educational practitioners and community activists for a new generation.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction, Andrew O'Shea (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland) and Maeve O'Brien (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland) 1. Towards a Pedagogy of Care and Well-Being: Restoring the Vocation of Becoming Human through Dialogue and Relationality, Maeve O'Brien (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland) 2. Paulo Freire and the Tasks of the Critical Educational Scholar/Activist, Michael W. Apple (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA) 3. Resistance, Struggle and Survival: The University as a Site for Transformative Education, Mags Crean (University College Dublin, Ireland) and Kathleen Lynch (School of Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland) 4. Liberal Education, Reading the Word, and Naming the World, D. G. Mulcahy (Central Connecticut State University, USA) 5. Conscientization: The Art of Learning, Anne Ryan (Adult and Community Education in National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland) 6. Taking Educational Risks With and Without Guaranteed Identities: Freire's 'Problem-Posing' and Judith Butler's 'Troubling', Karl Kitching (University College Cork, Ireland) 7. A Post-Modernist Rendering of Freire's Educational Vision? Some Reflections on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Jones Irwin (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland) 8. Rethinking Transformation in Light of Post-Modern Education: 'Freire is Dead, Long Live Freire!' Andrew O'Shea (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland) Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Andrew O'Shea is Lecturer in Philosophy of Education and Human Development at St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University, Ireland. Maeve O'Brien is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Co-ordinator of Human Development at St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University, Ireland.

Review :
This book provides a thoughtful reassessment of the work of Paulo Freire against the background of recent developments in the theory and practice of education. It provides a powerful reminder of the need to bring the personal back into the political project that education ultimately is. This text is timely, prescient, passionate and purposeful, bringing together a set of powerful voices, perspectives and dispositions that breathe new possibilities into pedagogies more likely to liberate and transform than oppress and marginalise ... an important contribution to contemporary educational discourses that is at once deeply humanising, enriching and rewarding. Read it, and be inspired to continue Freire's transformative agenda. This compelling book is an important challenge to the new framing of education in a post-critical climate. It addresses the question of educational transformation by exploring the potential in Freire's work for liberation through radical pedagogy and praxis that takes relationality and the affective domain of life seriously. During his life-time, no voice in education was more powerful or distinctive than that of Paulo Freire. Why is this voice still so alive in contemporary education? How does it still speak to economic, political and cultural realities very different from those that Freire himself addressed? And how does his philosophy – with its peculiar synthesis of Marxist, existentialist and Christian influences, and its unabashed avowal of "humanisation" – withstand the post-structuralist revolution in contemporary theory and the ‘post-humanism’ that it announces? To recycle the catch-phrases of his writings was never to be Freirean. But, in this new climate, can any voice be truly Freirean? Anyone interested in these questions, and their heavy implications for how we practice and think about education, can do no better than to read this book.