Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a 'Post-Critical' Climate

Reviews / Votes

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. -- Gert Biesta, Professor of Education, University of Stirling, UK 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. -- Ciaran Sugrue, Professor of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland 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. -- Diane Reay, Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, UK 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. -- Joseph Dunne, Cregan Professor, Principal Lecturer in Education and Head of Human Development, St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University, Ireland