Ana Cruz was born in Manaus, the heart of Amazonas, Brazil and, thanks to a committed teacher/sociologist/activist, was exposed to the work of Paulo Freire already in high school. Proud of her multiracial identity, Cruz embraces her black/native Indian/white heritage. She was raised in a middle-class family, but was not isolated from the unique environment of Manaus, with its distinctive ecological setting, conspicuous cultural diversity, oppression, and instances of utter poverty. Cruz has taught elementary school, high school, adult education, and College/University in Brazil and in the U.S. In her current position preparing two-year college students to become teachers, she is a fervent exponent of critical pedagogy.
.png)
Philip Wexler has written extensively about his “kinship” to the critical pedagogy movement. He is a critical social analyst, with a long-standing specialization in education. He was educated in “classical” sociological theory, anthropology, social statistics and cognitive psychology. Despite his “establishment” education and involvement in the mainstream of sociology of education (as editor of the American Sociological Association journal in education, Sociology of Education), he was early drawn to critical social theory, in the work of the Frankfurt School, and in so-called “Western Marxism,” generally.
.jpg)
Antonia Darder is internationally recognized for her contributions as a radical educator in the critical pedagogy tradition. Her work has focused on comparative studies of racism, class, gender, and society. Her teaching examines cultural and global issues in education with an emphasis on identity, language, and popular culture, as well as the philosophical foundations of critical pedagogy, Latino and Latina studies, and social justice theory. Her strong commitment and identity as a working class Puerto Rican woman of color is rooted in her personal history of survival. During the first twenty-six years of her life, she lived in poverty. As a young single mother with three children and on welfare, she began her studies at a community college in 1972. She became first a pediatric nurse and then a licensed psychotherapist, working with poor and working class Spanish-speaking families.
The basic operating principle of John Willinsky’s approach to critical pedagogy has been to help students become better students of their own education. This is the point, after all, of their principal contact with the institutional forces and ideologies that govern their lives. This former school teacher and now professor of education at Stanford, after a long career at Canadian universities, has examined this educational process in terms of a number of educational traditions with an eye to equipping teachers with a better understanding of how education has been shaped to reflect governing ideas. The primary focus of his curriculum work has been on literacy and literature teaching, gradually broadening out to include curriculum studies and more recently, basic questions of access to knowledge.
Norman Denzin’s critical performance pedagogy project builds on the performance turn in the human disciplines. For at least a decade interpretive ethnographers have been staging reflexive ethnographic performances, using their fieldnotes and autoethnographic observations to shape performance narratives, an anthropology and sociology of performance. We perform culture as we write it. Denzin’s work is about rethinking performance [auto] ethnography, about the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity and performance disappears. Denzin’s work reflects a desire to contribute to a critical discourse that addresses central issues confronting democracy and racism in a postmodern America.
Paul R. Carr has been interested in development studies, educational policymaking, anti-racism education, and social justice during his education for a number of years. His doctoral experience was a pivotal one in which Paul benefitted from contact with a broad range of international students as well as the support and influential guidance of scholars such as George Sefa Dei (anti-racism). His doctoral dissertation examined anti-racism education and institutional culture in the Toronto Board of Education. Through dozens of interviews for his thesis with teachers, principals and key decisionmakers in the Toronto Board of Education, Paul developed a clearer understanding of how power works in a nuanced, complex environment, one that ostensibly blankets society with the mythology of color-blindness, merit and individualism. This theme would ultimately culminate in further research on the subject.
Having completed graduate degrees in English, American Studies, and Speech Communication, Greg Dimitriadis’s work has been firmly inter-disciplinary from the beginning. Throughout, he has been centrally concerned with the critical role and importance of alternative pedagogical sites (e.g., community centers), texts (e.g., popular culture) and programs (e.g., in-school arts-based initiatives) in the lives of young people. Dimitriadis’s earliest research dealt with the complexities of hip hop music and culture, looking at the (then) burgeoning phenomena in textual and historical terms before completing the first, book-length ethnography of young people’s uses of hip hop music and culture—Performing Identity / Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice (2001).