Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy examines how power and inequality shape education and develops learners’ capacity to question and act on unjust conditions.
Paulo Freire: Brazilian educator and philosopher whose work developed influential ideas about dialogue, oppression, and education. His work established critical pedagogy’s account of education as a practice of freedom.
Problem-posing education: A dialogical approach in which teachers and students investigate problems rather than passively receive information. It is Freire’s practical alternative to the banking model of education.
Henry Giroux: An American educational theorist who developed critical pedagogy’s account of teachers as transformative intellectuals. His work connected classroom practice to democracy, culture, and public life.
Traditional education: An educational model emphasizing established knowledge, teacher authority, and structured instruction. Critical pedagogy questions how its authority and curriculum can reproduce social hierarchies.
Critical literacy: An approach to reading and writing that examines how texts construct power, identity, and social relations. It makes critical pedagogy’s analysis of power concrete in work with texts.
Banking model of education: Paulo Freire’s metaphor for teaching that treats students as passive containers for information deposited by teachers. Critical pedagogy rejects this model in favor of dialogue and active inquiry.
Critical consciousness: The ability to recognize and question social forces that shape people’s lives and opportunities. Critical pedagogy cultivates this ability through reflection on lived experience and institutions.
bell hooks: An American writer and educator whose work examined race, gender, class, and liberatory teaching. Her engaged pedagogy brought feminist and anti-racist analysis into critical education.
Progressive education: An educational movement emphasizing active learning, experience, and the development of the whole learner. Both value learner participation, but critical pedagogy foregrounds power and inequality.
Multicultural education: Educational practice and policy that address cultural diversity, representation, and unequal participation. Critical pedagogy examines whether multicultural curricula challenge structural inequality or merely represent difference.