Deborah Britzman began working in critical pedagogy in the early 1980s. In 1986, in collaboration with Catherine Walsh and Juan Aulestea, she organized the First Working Conference on Critical Pedagogy at the University of Massachusetts. The conference supported three strands of educational practice not often in discussion with one another: adult education, bilingual education, and teacher education. Although teacher education did have a critical strand of research, it was typically isolated from social theory, other branches of education, and larger political and philosophical discussions. To address this isolation, Britzman invited Maxine Greene to speak to the teacher education strand of the conference. In this context, she engaged in conversations with some of the main proponents of critical pedagogy at the time: Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Madeleine Grumet, Roger Simon, Elizabeth Spellman, and John Bracey. It was in this context that Britzman made presentations that would evolve into one of her best-known works: “Cultural Myths in the Making of a Teacher: Biography and Social Structure in Teacher Education”(1986). In this piece, Britzman applied to education some of the basic concerns of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, arguing that there was a way out of the technocratic, individualistic manner in which mainstream teacher education operated.This work would be expanded into Britzman’s influential first book, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Along with engaging the research discussions of critical pedagogy, Practice Makes Practice became an influential work in critical pedagogy because of its consideration of the inner world of the teacher. With this concern in mind, Britzman connected the problem of self-knowledge with social structural constraints, in the process highlighting some of the main issues of critical pedagogy. Focusing on the ways secondary education abstracts knowledge from its social context, extends the perpetuation of marginalization through the construction of canons, and harbors implicit values in the curriculum that constrain teacher voice, Britzman pushed the boundaries of critical pedagogy. The concept of voice in Britzman’s conception was not merely a personal phenomenon but a social struggle with authority, knowledge, and power. The key dynamic at work in Britzman’s scholarship in this era involved addressing the existential dilemmas that all teachers must confront as they learn to teach. Another dimension of Britzman’s work in critical pedagogy has involved integrating the epistemological and ontological dilemmas of race, sexuality, class, and gender into the problem of teaching and learning. Here Britzman explored the role of critical pedagogy in encouraging teachers and students to critique their everyday world and the resistance this often elicited. In this context she focused on the psychology of denial, the refusal of many privileged individuals to believe that social inequality matters in their world or the world of others. Britzman asked how this affects critical pedagogy. Pushing the psychological dimension of critical pedagogy, Britzman explored questions of sexuality in relation to teachers, students, and the curriculum. Employing psychoanalysis and queer theory, she explored what she labeled “difficult knowledge”in teaching and learning as a part of a larger process of dealing with traumatic history. This work continues to play an important role in the field, as younger scholars engage it in many diverse contexts. Britzman’s study of difficult knowledge led her to yet another major contribution to critical pedagogy—the use of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory in liberatory work. In this context, Britzman has worked to radically extend what counts as education, contending that pedagogical study should always have second thoughts on questions of interiority, self-other relations, and the production of subjectivity. Critical pedagogy, she posits, has often left the psychology of teaching to others, incorrectly assuming that psychology is too grounded in programs of subjection and normalization to be of any use. While clearly the history of psychology in education has been devastating to large populations through its categorizations of emotional disorders, IQ testing, and behaviorist orientations to learning theory, psychoanalysis, Britzman maintains, is of a different order and well worth a second look. Britzman has consistently reminded critical pedagogy of the power, beauty, and controversies of psychoanalysis, the need to study its discarded content, its dreams, and its breakdowns, and the necessity of the attempt to understand the unconscious in education and in critical pedagogy itself (Britzman, 1991, 2003). Reference: Kincheloe, J. Critical Pedagogy, Peter Lang Primer Link