I rank high, among the benefits of participating in virtual conversation, the provision of ideas for lessons and ideas to share with my primarily ESL students.  At times, an online essay seems perfectly formed for some pertinent point about understanding or creating a narrative.  Much more frequently, some tart exchange, either here or elsewhere, offers a snippet of dialog or aspect of prose that helps to inform a class, generally by making concepts that I want to share more tangible or interesting. 

Hi everyone,

I have been pulling my hair to get a better picture of Habermas. I have difficulty especially with his concept of consensus. According to Habermas practical knowledge (social sciences and/or hermeneutical sciences) is interpretive, socially constructed and usually validated by the ideal consensus reached by competent practitioners of those subject matters. This notion of consensus does not fit in the schema in my mind related to Frankfurt School and critical theory.

To me this “ideal consensus” is too vague and problematic when we think about it in relation to evolution of scientific knowledge. For example, what happens when consensus could be totally wrong, dogmatic, and metaphysical? I think we need more universally valid criteria to validate any knowledge claim.

Hello;

Brock colleague and life partner Dr. Shannon Moore and I have published an edited text entitled "Power, Pedagogy and Praxis: Social Justice in the Globalized Classroom". With a final contribution from the late Katarina Tomasevski (former UN Rapporteur for Education and to whom the text is dedicated), and chapters from Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren the overall theme is critical pedagogy and the human right to education with a transdisciplinary approach to understanding those still being excluded on the basis of gender, poverty, ability, ethnicity or sexual indentities. Desk copies may be requested from Sense Publishers and we would appreciate a review from anyone listening in here. In solidarity - Richard Mitchell, Brock University. 

Critical Pedagogy in the age of Obama

For the past ten years I have practiced a form of critical pedagogy in all of my undergraduate and graduate classes.  Regardless of the content of the course, I have tried to encourage my students to think more critically about the political nature of schooling and education; to examine the relationship between knowledge and power; to address subtleties of ideology in the teaching and learning process; to think through the notion of authority; to analyze the formation of social identities; to critique social norms and take an accounting of the affects of these norms in terms of exclusion and inclusion; to think about the relationship between institutional and individual needs; to analyze what are often contradictory values in capitalist and democratic discourses; and to become aware of how dominant epistemological frameworks position our understanding of what is possible.