Tag Archives: critical pedagogy

New article in Critical Education: Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine

Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine: A Dialogue

Linda Herrera
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v16i4.187433 

Keywords: Palestine in Critical Pedagogy, Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy, popular education, empowerment, grassroots, global citizenship, genocide, Anti-colonial pedagogy

Abstract

Global pedagogy refers to a broad, ethically grounded approach to education that extends beyond national boundaries and emphasizes the collective responsibility to teach and learn about interconnected global crises and historical injustices. The question of Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza serve as the “canary in the coalmine”. Its suppression is not an isolated phenomenon but a diagnostic for a wider authoritarian turn that seeks to foreclose the very possibility of critical, transnational solidarity. In this dialogue, Michel Peters, a philosopher of education, and Linda Herrera, a critical anthropologist of education in the Middle East, engage in a dialogue about how educators can keep critical thought and solidarity alive by partaking in practices that are resilient, resourceful, and relentlessly focused on building counter-publics. These requires embracing a “fugitive” pedagogy, curating and archiving counter-memories, and building transnational literacies of solidarity.

Author Biographies

Linda Herrera, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has researched, written about, and taught courses on education and power in the MENA region, qualitative research methods (with a focus on critical ethnography and oral history), international development policy, youth and generations, childhood in global context, the social effects of technological change, and critical democracy and citizenship education. Her books include, Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt (OUP, 2025), Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-first Century (University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (State University of New York Press, 2006).

Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University Faculty of Education PRC, and Emeritus Professor in Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and founding editor of five international journals, Policy Futures in Education, E-Learning and Digital Media (SAGE), and Knowledge Cultures (Addleton), The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Springer), Open Review of Education Research (T&F). His interests are in philosophy, education and social policy and he has written over eighty books, including most recently: Wittgenstein and Education: Pedagogical Investigations, (2017) with Jeff Stickney, The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of Education (2015), Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy (2015) both with Tina Besley, Education Philosophy and Politics: Selected Works (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; and Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism (2011). He has acted as an advisor to governments and UNESCO on these and related matters in the USA, Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa and the European Union. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010, a Fellow in 2018, and awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.

New Issue of Critical Education: IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM AGAINST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, CAPITALISM, AND TRUMP

Abstract
In this essay I challenge the anticommunism that has dominated critical pedagogy since its emergence in 1980, which coincided with imperialism’s somewhat successful counter-offensive against the global communist movement. It is within the context of the absence of communism and the communist movement that paved the way for the rise of Trump and the far right more generally. The anticommunism central to progressive forms of education, from a non-capitalist perspective, represents nothing less than the crossing of class lines. After outlining the major premises this work is grounded in, situated within a common debate between Marxism and Native studies, I review key responses to anticommunist propaganda. I then provide a brief history of the Soviet Union offering concrete responses to the anticommunism that has infected those of us on the educational left, especially in North America. I then offer a short discussion of the Black Panther Party as another example of the current relevance of the communist legacy in the United States and how this legacy has been systematically under attack. The text concludes with a brief summary of some of the core principles of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) as an example of a contemporary U.S.-based Marxist-Leninist communist party endowed with the necessary analysis and organizational structure to challenge capitalism and imperialism under a Trump presidency.

Keywords
Marxism; Marx; History; Critical Pedagogy; Communism; Anti-Communism; Social Class; Class War; Donald Trump

Special co-published issues of Cultural Logic, Works & Days focus on “Education for Revolution”

The journals Cultural Logic and Works & Days are collaborating to co-publish special issues on “Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution.”

The issue will be published this fall, in print, by Works & Days. Cultural Logic will then publish an expanded online version—including several additional articles, including pieces on Greece, India, and Turkey—in 2014.

Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross, co-editors of the special issue, describe the context and focus of the issue as:

The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating color-coded inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class-conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself. In this context, schools in the empires of the world are the centripetal organizing points of much of life. While the claim of capitalist schooling is, in the classics, education, “leading out,” the reality is that schools are segregated illusion factories, in some cases human munition factories. Rather than leading out, they encapsulate.

Mainstream educational and social research typically ignores, disconnects, the ineluctable relationships of what is in fact capitalist schooling, class war, imperialist war, and the development of varying forms of corporate states around the world.

At issue, of course, is: What to do?

The long view, either in philosophy or social practice is revolution as things must change, and they will.

Connecting the long view to what must also be a long slog necessarily involves a careful look at existing local, national, and international conditions; working out tactics and strategies that all can understand, none taken apart from a grand strategy of equality and justice.

“Marxism and Education: Education for Revolution” will be the second collaborative publishing project between Cultural Logic and Works & Days. In 2012, the journals co-published the special issue “Culture and Crisis,” edited by Cultural Logic co-editor Joseph G. Ramsey) in print and online versions.

Table of Contents for Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution

Marxist Sociology of Education and the Problem of Naturalism: An Historical Sketch
Grant Banfield, Flinders University of South Australia

The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
David J. Blacker, University of Delaware

A Tale of Two Cities – and States
Richard A. Brosio, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Schooling For Capitalism or Education for Twenty-First Century Socialism?
Mike Cole, University of East London

Barbarism Rising: Detroit, Michigan, and the International War of the Rich on the Poor
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University

Reimagining Solidarity: Hip-Hop as Revolutionary Pedagogy
Julie A. Gorlewski, State University of New York, New Paltz
Brad J. Porfilio, Lewis University

The Pedagogy of Excess
Deborah P. Kelsh, The College of Saint Rose

Contesting Production: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Struggle to Produce Knowledge
Brian D. Lozenski, University of Minnesota
Zachary A. Casey, University of Minnesota
Shannon K. McManimon, University of Minnesota

Undermining Capitalist Pedagogy: Takiji Kobayashi’s Tōseikatsusha and the Ideology of the World Literature Paradigm
John Maerhofer, Roger Williams University

Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context
Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Insurgent Pedagogies and Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, The University of British Columbia

Learning to be Fast Capitalists on a Flat World
Timothy Patrick Shannon, The Ohio State University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University

Hacking Away at the Corporate Octopus
Alan J. Singer, Hofstra University

SDS, The 1960s, and Educating for Revolution
Alan J. Spector, Purdue University, Calumet

About the Co-editors:
Rich Gibson is emeritis professor of social studies in the College of Education at San Diego State University. He worked as a foundry worker, an ambulance driver, a pot and pan washer, fence painter, soda jerk, bank teller, surveyor’s assistant, assembly line chaser, a teacher, a social worker, organizer and bargaining agent for National Education Association, TA, and as a professor at Wayne State University. With about ten other people, he helped to found what is now the largest local in the UAW, local 6000, not auto-workers, but state employees.

E. Wayne Ross is professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and a former secondary social studies (Grades 8 to 12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia. He has taught at Ohio State University, State University of New York, and the University of Louisville. Ross is a member of the Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC and co-editor of Critical Education and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.

Gibson and Ross are co-editors of Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Hampton Press) and are co-founders of The Rouge Forum, a group of K-12 and university education workers, parents, community people, and students, engaged in fighting for a democratic and egalitarian society. Find out more about The Rouge Forum conferences here and here.

About Cultural Logic:
Cultural Logic—which has been on-line since 1997—is an open access, non-profit, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes essays, interviews, poetry, reviews (books, films, other media), etc. by writers working within the Marxist tradition.

CL co-editors are: David Siar (Winston-Salem State University), Gregory Meyerson (North Carolina A & T University), James Neilson (North Carolina A & T University), Martha Gimenez, (University of Colorado), Rich Gibson (San Diego State University), E. Wayne Ross, (University of British Columbia), Joe Ramsey (Quincy College)

About Works & Days:
Works & Days provides a scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, especially as they are impacted by the global economic crisis of late capitalism. Whereas most scholarly journals publish groups of relatively unrelated essays, each volume of Works & Days focuses on a specific issue, and contributors are encouraged to share their work with each other.

Recent special issues of the Works & Days journal have focused on the effect of globalization on women and the environment, the attacks on academic freedom, the privatization of higher education under neoliberal capitalism, the increasing exploitation of part-time, temporary faculty, the shift from print to electronic media, and the politics of knowledge.

Works & Days is edited by David B. Downing (Indiana University of Pennsylvania).