neumann (2011) - critical pedagogy and faith

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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND FAITH

Jacob W. Neumann

Department of Curriculum and InstructionThe University of TexasPan American

Abstract. Critical pedagogy has often been linked in the literature to faith traditions such as liberationtheology, usually with the intent of improving or redirecting it. While recognizing and drawing fromthose previous linkages, Jacob Neumann goes further in this essay and develops the thesis that criticalpedagogy can not just benefit from a connection with faith traditions, but is actually, in and of itself,a practice of faith. In this analysis, he juxtaposes critical pedagogy against three conceptualizations offaith: John Caputos blurring of the modernist division between faith and reason, Paul Tillichs argumentthat faith is ultimate concern, and Paulo Freires theology and early Christian influences. Using this

three-pronged approach, Neumann argues that regardless of how it is seen, critical pedagogy manifestsas a practice of faith all the way down.

Introduction

In 1996, Barry Kanpol called the educational left to come to terms with the

profound theological possibilities and implications of its work.1 In analyzing the

relation between critical pedagogy and faith, I seek not only to address this call

but to tackle what I see as a more fundamental issue: the essential nature of

critical pedagogy as a practice of faith. While I draw from Kanpols work in linking

critical pedagogy and liberation theology, I push further and find that critical

pedagogy, whether it is seen as a reflection of Christian beliefs or as a purelysecular enterprise, is in fact, in all of its guises, a manifestation of faith.

This understanding of the fundamental nature of critical pedagogy is important

because it opens new contexts and new opportunities for critical work. Kanpol

and Fred Yeo argue that a spiritually driven vision is missing from the literature of

educational critique.2 I disagree. I find that much, if not most, educational critique

is spiritually driven or at least driven by faith. But, and this is the essential

point, it all depends on how we think about faith. It is my purpose in this essay

to collide marginalized conceptualizations of faith with a new analysis of critical

pedagogy, not in an effort to reinvest critical work with a spiritual vision, but in

order to help reinvest critical work with meaning and efficacy in our schools.

A Brief Outline

Critical pedagogy has a complex relation with faith and has been repeatedly

linked to it in the literature.3 Such linkages fit our commonsense understanding. It

1. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology: Borders for a Transformative Agenda,Educational Theory 46, no. 1 (1996): 105.

2. Barry Kanpol and Fred Yeo, Foreword, in The Academy and the Possibility of Belief, ed. Mary

Buley-Meissner, Mary Thompson, and Elizabeth Tan (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000), xii.3. See Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press,

1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gavenda,


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602 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 61 Number 5 2011

takes faith to challenge the status quo. It takes faith to challenge school practices,

especially as a teacher within the school. Critical pedagogy certainly places faith

in dialogue.4 For Paulo Freire, faith in dialogue requires an intense faith in

humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faithin their vocation to be more fully human.5 And critical pedagogy holds faith in

students, faith that they will take the critical path or will at least adopt some

measure of criticality into their daily lives even after they have left the educator.

Often, however, linkages between critical pedagogy and faith traditions seem

to serve as measures to improve critical pedagogy: to reframe, rethink, or redirect it.

For example, Joe Kincheloe draws upon Buddhist insights that involve isolating

and letting go of an egocentrism that blinds us to the virtual and relational nature

of our selfhood in order for critical pedagogy to avoid those definitions of critical

work that position it as an egocentric manifestation of the combative proponentof rationality.6 In another example, Amy Goodburn compares her faith in critical

pedagogy with some of her students personal religious faith; for Goodburn, each

is a belief system that provides structure for interpreting the world, offering both

context and meaning. Where Goodburn initially saw disconnection between her

critical aspirations and her students fundamentalist religious beliefs, reflection

led her to see more connections than differences between the discourses of

fundamentalism and critical pedagogy.7 These connections led Goodburn to claim

that perhaps faith is what is needed most for a successful critical pedagogy faith

in the value of initiating dialogue in the face of conflicts over discourses and faith

in students and teachers ability to value and negotiate each others differences.8And in yet another reference to the value of linking critical pedagogy with

faith traditions, Shari Stenberg claims that the prophetic tradition of Liberation

Theology offers us visions that may not only enrich our understanding of critical

pedagogy, but may also help us to enact it more fully. 9

and John Peters (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1990); Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy

and Liberation Theology; Amy Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith: Discourses of Fundamentalism and

Critical Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18, no. 2 (1998):333352; and Shari Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing the Dialogue,

College English 68, no. 1 (2006): 271290.

4. Nicholas Burbules, Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy, in Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy

Today, ed. Ilan Gur-Zeev (Haifa, Israel: Studies in Education, University of Haifa, 2005), 193207.

5. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993), 71.

6. Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 134.

7. Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith, 348.

8. Ibid., 352.

9. Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies, 288.

JACOB W. NEUMANN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction

at the University of TexasPan American, 1201 W. University Dr., Edinburg, TX 78539; e-mail. His primary areas of scholarship are critical pedagogy, social education,

and educational foundations.


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Neumann Critical Pedagogy and Faith 603

Like these other scholars, I also develop connections in this essay between

critical pedagogy and faith traditions. But I go further and work to develop a thesis

usually missed in the literature: that critical pedagogy does not just have religious

roots10 and strong connections to liberation theology,11 but is in and of itself apractice of faith. I work here to advance the point that to do critical pedagogy is to

practice critical faith in other words, critical pedagogy is not simply influenced

by faith traditions; it is faith all the way down.

In arguing this point, I approach the faith of critical pedagogy from three

directions, arguing, in turn, its three elements. First, I look at critical faith from

the standpoint of the alleged split between reason and belief, drawing primarily

from John Caputos argument that reason and belief, contrary to commonplace

thinking, are actually not that far apart: reason is not being able to see all the way

down and belief is to see only through a glass darkly, but both rest on underlying,taken-for-granted assumptions, so that reason and belief are actually two different

kinds of faith.12 Second, I approach critical faith from the standpoint of ultimate

concern. Here I lean on Paul Tillichs argument that overturns commonplace

understandings of faith as the belief in the unseen or the unseeable, or even as

the religious belief in a Creator, and replaces them with an understanding of

faith as the quality of having an ultimate concern, something about which one

is concerned ultimately.13 Third, I look at it from the standpoint of religious

faith, specifically drawing from Paulo Freires early religious influences and from

connections to liberation theology.

I should note at the outset that I recognize that the three analytical positions

I take will at times contradict each other. For example, Caputo seems to imply

that faith is, at least in part, the belief in what is not seen. Yet Tillich exploded

this distinction by arguing that faith applies not to trust in things not seen,

but to an individuals ultimate concern. And neither scholar focuses explicitly

on faith as a purely religious affair. My hope, then, in taking this three-pronged

approach, is to show that regardless of how it is viewed, critical pedagogy is

always an embodiment of faith, a practice of faith. In other words, it is these three

elements that comprise critical faith. Critical faith is not sometimes religious or

sometimes ultimate concern; it is not merely one element and not the others.Rather, critical pedagogy is faith because it looks through a glass darkly, because

10. See Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education, trans. Donaldo Macedo (South Hadley, Massachusetts:

Bergin and Garvey, 1985); and Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking. Freires The Politics

of Education will be cited in the text as PE for all subsequent references.

11. See Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology; Berryman, Liberation Theology; and

Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theory of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, New York:

Orbis Books, 1988).

12. John Caputo, Philosophy and Theology (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2006). This work

will be cited in the text as PT for all subsequent references.13. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Perennial Classics, 1957). This work will be cited in the

text as DF for all subsequent references.


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it holds an ultimate concern, and because it draws from the religious warrants of

emancipation and transformation.

Through a Glass Darkly

Critical pedagogy is often a cognitive, rational activity: inquiry, analysis,

discourse, action, and the like. But this activity rests on a foundation of

belief beliefs about causes and effects, about desires and motivations, even

about notions of right and wrong. In other words, critical pedagogy is a rational

activity that trusts in a variety of anticipatory assumptions that ground its

material potential. Or, as William James observed, there are, then, cases where

a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.14 Thus,

from one perspective, critical pedagogy is an act of faith simply because of these

underlying assumptions.

For this analysis I draw heavily from Caputos concise discussion of the

weakening modernist distinction between faith and reason. To introduce this

discussion, I quote a section from Caputo at length:

To understand is not a kind of pure staring at an object. True, we are constantly receivinginput from the world, but whatever we receive is received in a manner that is suitable forthe receiver who must make ready for the reception. Even the most elemental perception isstructured around a moment of expectation that is confirmed or not. When we open thedoor, we expect to find a house inside, not a wind-swept prairie; when we lift the telephonebook, we expect to feel its weight; when we sink into a chair, we expect it to hold us up. Theperceptual world is to an important extent a coherent set of expectations, what Heideggercalled an ensemble of interpretive for-structures, by means of which we make our way

around the world via felicitous assumptions, ways of taking things as such-and-such,where if we move it, lift it, use it, eat or drink it, greet it with a friendly hello, our expectationsare confirmed or not. (PT, 55)

Besides these nuanced for-structures that apply to everyday life, critical pedagogy

holds its own range of assumptions: that society can be changed through critical

action, dialogue, and education; that people want to learn and to use its language

and analytical structures; that people want to challenge existing structural

power dynamics. Thus, critical pedagogy relies on both the micro structures of

anticipation, without which we would have to reinvent the wheel several times

a day, and larger macro assumptions related specifically to critical pedagogys

purpose (PT, 55). These assumptions are the foundation and underpinning ofreason, that which provides it roots and substance.15

This analysis of the faith16 underpinning reason blurs the modernist division

between faith and reason. For Caputo, both faith and reason turn on a seeing as.

Knowing rests on an ongoing faith and trust in an ensemble of assumptions and

presuppositions . . . that enable us to make our way around a lab or an archive,

14. William James, The Will to Believe, in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York:

Vintage Books, 1997), 87.

15. David Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1989), 59.16. Here I mean faith as trust in something neither seen nor empirically proven. Later in the essay, when

I discuss Tillich, I will contradict this position by problematizing the correlation of faith and trust.


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a poem or an ancient language, an economic system or a foreign culture ( PT,

56). But

by the same token, to have faith in something is not darkness and not-seeing all the way

down. On the contrary, one will not be able to see at all without a certain faith, if we donot have a take, an as, an angle, a perspective, a vocabulary that we believe and trust. Tobelieve is to take something as, and to proceed with some confidence in our perspective, inorder that we may see and understand. So believing is starting to look a lot like seeing. (PT,57, emphasis in original)

Michael Polanyi calls this tacit knowledge and claims that to hold such

knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something

there to be discovered [even if] . . . the anticipation of discovery, like discovery itself,

may turn out to be a delusion.17 This trusted knowledge might be considered

to be a form of faith because even though we may believe unreservedly in a

certain set of truths, there is always the possibility that some other set of truthsmight be the case.18 In terms of critical pedagogy, people might not be interested

in critical social change; dialogue might not be most effective in fostering such

change; and schools mightnot actually be productive, or even appropriate, sites for

social critique. But to a critical pedagogue, assumptions such as these often form

the bedrock of ones entire praxis. Caputo and Polanyi, however, push further,

past larger belief/knowledge systems and toward the micro-structures that support

macro knowledge/belief.

Regarding the alleged divide between reason and faith, Caputo, for his part,

does not distinguish between reason and faith as seeing, on the one hand, and

not-quite-seeing, on the other. Instead, the distinction between philosophy and

theology is between two kinds of interpretive slants, two kinds of interpretations

that are inwardly structured by the sort of faith at work in each (PT, 57). James

Fowler calls this faithing and argues that people differ not so much on the

basis of having faith or not having faith, but in the nature and quality of the

faithing process.19 For David Purpel, faith resembles trust, and to reason is to

reason from a faith.20 This trust, as Polanyi might put it, lies in the inti-

mation of something hidden, [something] which we may yet discover.21 This

tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge.22 Tacit knowl-

edge that knowing that cannot quite be articulated, that even escapes clearrecognition informs Polanyis well-known phrase, we know more than we can

tell.23

17. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 25.

18. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 440.

19. James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 33, quoted in Purpel, The

Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59.

20. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59.

21. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 23.

22. Ibid., 20.

23. Ibid., 4.


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Because we cannot necessarily recognize these assumptions, because we

cannot clearly reason all the way down without these structures of anticipation,

reason and faith begin to resemble each other. As Caputo puts it,

seeing as weakens the idea of pure seeing defended in the camp of reason and strengthensthe idea of seeing in part defended in the camp of faith. Seeing as gives faith a larger roleto play in what was hitherto called reason and sends negotiators on both sides of this classicaldebate back to the drawing board. (PT, 56)

Because both reason and faith see as, seeing begins to look like believing and

believing begins to look like seeing (PT, 57). To act, then, from a critical perspective

based on critical reasoning is a form of practicing or manifesting faith because it

is to act while looking through a glass darkly.

Ultimate Concern

The second standpoint from which to view critical pedagogy as faith is from the

standpoint of ultimate concern. For this part of the discussion, I draw extensively

from Paul Tillichs book Dynamics of Faith. Tillich held that the most ordinary

misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low

degree of evidence (DF, 36). For Tillich, faith is not trust in the truth or existence

of something not seen, such as trust that God exists or belief in the truth of

God. If this is meant, Tillich told us, one is speaking of belief rather than

faith (DF, 36, emphasis in original). In distinguishing faith from belief, Tillich

did not discriminate against belief. Indeed, he claimed that without such trust

we could not believe anything except the objects of our immediate experience(DF, 37). Instead, Tillich made the case that faith is more than just belief, more

than just trust: For faith is more than trust in even the most sacred authority. It

is participation in the subject of ones ultimate concern with ones whole being

(DF, 37):

Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those whichcondition its existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other living beings,has spiritual concerns cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, oftenextremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for ahuman life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender ofhim who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to

be subjected to it or rejected in its name. (DF, 1)

From this perspective, faith and reason are not two different ways of knowing:

while Caputo blurs the modernist division between faith and reason, calling both

faith and reason looking through a glass darkly, Tillich insisted that the two

belong to separate realms. Reason involves knowing; faith involves concern. For

Tillich, then, faith, properly understood, holds no quarrel with reason:

Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of ourworld, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. Theknowledge of our world (including ourselves as a part of the world) is a matter of inquiry byourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith. (DF, 38)

Critical pedagogy, of course, carries an ultimate concern. According to Kanpol,

critical pedagogy refers to the means and methods that test and hope to change


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the structures of schools that allow inequalities and social injustices.24 It is

a praxis that sees education as a tool for eliminating oppressive relationships

and conditions.25 Its literature carries the rhetoric of emancipatory education,

liberatory education, and revolutionary education.26

But by no means does critical pedagogy have a single ultimate concern, because,

as Joan Wink reminds us, critical pedagogy is not easily defined and understood

in a neat little package.27 For Peter McLaren, critical pedagogy is as diverse as

its many adherents.28 And for Kanpol, its areas of concern can involve anything

to do with schooling and the wider culture.29 Patti Lather and Ilan Gur-Zeev

even refer to critical pedagogies instead of a singular critical pedagogy.30 But even

if critical pedagogy is not narrowly defined, it nonetheless holds ultimate concern.

From this perspective, critical pedagogy is faith not because of the blurring between

faith and reason or because of critical pedagogys heritage in the Catholic Church,but because of its overriding principles and purposes, even if those principles

and purposes might sometimes be expressed differently by different criticalists.

Critical pedagogy is faith simply because of the presence of an ultimate concern.

For Tillich, the content of an ultimate concern, though important to an

individual or group, does not affect its definition as faith. While there is not faith

without a content toward which it is directed, the nature of that content does not

determine whether or not faith exists (DF, 12). Tillich offered numerous examples

of ultimate concern that are directed toward a variety of different content. For

instance, if a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate

concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life,family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed (DF,

2). In another example, what he called more than an example, Tillich wrote

that faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately and

unconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand,

threat and promise (DF, 3). And in what he called almost a counter-example,

Tillich discussed

the ultimate concern with success and with social standing and economic power. It is thegod of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate

24. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey,1999), 27.

25. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving

from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 14.

26. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, andRodolfo Torres, eds., The Critical Pedagogy Reader (New York:

Routledge Falmer, 2003); Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy: A

Look at the Major Concepts, in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, ed. Darder, Baltodano, and Torres.

27. Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 1.

28. McLaren, Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts, 69.

29. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 185.

30. Patti Lather, Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places, Educational Theory48, no. 4 (1998): 487497; and Ilan Gur-Zeev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, Educational

Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 463486.


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concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is thesacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. (DF, 4)

Ones ultimate concern transcends fleeting, temporal, or transitory concerns; it

reaches to the core of our being. Even a skeptic or an atheist can have faith, becausethe despair about truth by the skeptic shows that truth is still his infinite passion.

The skeptic, so long as he is a serious skeptic, is not without faith, even though

it has no concrete content (DF, 22). Thus, an ultimate concern need not be

considered religious to be ultimate; it must simply be something that concerns

one ultimately.

We are driven toward our ultimate concern by, as Tillich put it, the passion

for the infinite (DF, 11). This passion is not religious in an institutional sense, but

is driven by [an] awareness of the infinite to which [we] belong, but which [we do]

not own like a possession (DF, 10). It is religious in the sense of longing for union

with the infinite, for that which is really ultimate over against what claims to beultimate but is only preliminary, transitory, finite (DF, 11). The opposite of faith,

then, is relativism, which Tillich called an attitude in which nothing ultimate

is asked for (DF, 65). Tillichs relativism intensifies commonplace notions of

relativism, in which things are equal and substitutable, as he seemed to speak to

a larger spiritual inertia. If relativism is the opposite of faith, it would seem that

Tillich established a continuum of personality: from faith-ful to faith-less. Yet he

made no such argument; indeed, he claimed that people cannot be wholly without

faith. Tillich considered faith to be an act of the total personality. It happens in

the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. . . . They are all united

in the act of faith (DF, 4). As such, he went on to argue,

ultimate concern is the integrating center of the personal life. Being without it is beingwithout a center. Such a state, however, can only be approached but never fully reached,because a human being deprived completely of a center would cease to be a human being. Forthis reason one cannot admit that there is any man without an ultimate concern or withoutfaith. (DF, 123)

Because we are human, Tillich seemed to say, we must have an ultimate concern.

And because we must have an ultimate concern, because we cannot fully embrace

relativism, we must have faith.

Tillich argued that even though the content of faith does not matter for its

definition, its content is indicative of the type of faith: ontological or moral, the

holiness of being or the holiness of what ought to be. Holiness, in this paradigm,

is not reserved for religious symbols or teaching, or for a sort of moral perfection.

Rather, what concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holy

is awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our ultimate

concern (DF, 14). The holy is the longing for a higher power, not necessarily

in terms of purpose, but certainly in terms of meaning. The feeling of being

consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of mans relation

to the holy (DF, 15). In ontological faith, the holy is first of all experienced

as present (DF, 66). In moral faith, holiness is experienced as a feeling of what

ought to be. But let us not draw too wide a distinction between these types of

faith, for there are always elements of the one type within the other ( DF, 80).


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Critical pedagogy embodies both types of faith. Tillich described a humanist

variant of ontological faith: For humanism the divine is manifest in the human;

the ultimate concern of man is man (DF, 72). This faith is secular in that it does

not try to transcend the limits of humanity, belonging to the ordinary process ofevents, not going beside it or beyond it into a sanctuary (DF, 72). Tillich explained

secular humanist faith:

Often people say that they are secular, that they live outside the doors of the temple, andconsequently that they are without faith! But if one asks them whether they are without anultimate concern, without something which they take as unconditionally serious, they wouldstrongly deny this. And in denying that they are without an ultimate concern, they affirmthat they are in a state of faith. (DF, 73)

Critical pedagogy embodies an ontological secular humanist faith in its concern for

peoples actual lived experiences. Critical pedagogy struggles with life as it is, with

manifest realities. As Kincheloe writes, critical pedagogy should never, never

lose sight of its central concern with human suffering.31 Even the sometimes

heavily theoretical emphasis of critical pedagogy bridges theory to that which is

manifest, in that critical pedagogy must always be connecting to the reality of

human suffering and the effort to eradicate it.32

Yet, critical pedagogy also emphasizes what ought to be; thus, here we can

connect it to what Tillich called an ethical moral faith. This faith, even its modern

humanist iterations, has roots in Old Testament Judaism, and it demands justice.

For this faith, the experience of the holiness of being has never overwhelmed the

experience of the holiness of ought to be (DF, 77). This faith emphasizes the

law of justice and righteousness. As Tillich put it, modern humanism, especiallysince the eighteenth century, rests on a Christian foundation and includes the

dominant emphasis on the ought to be, as elaborated by the Jewish prophets

(DF, 78). Tillich went so far as to link revolutionary proletarian movements to this

moral faith:

Their faith was humanist faith, expressing itself in secular more than in religious terms. Itwas faith and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of reasonunited with justice and truth. The dynamics of their humanist faith changed the face of theworld, first in the West, then also in the East. It is this humanist faith of the moral type whichwas taken over by the revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. (DF, 79)

Tillichs history situates this angle of faith within a broad landscape, one thathelps create a fuller context from which to analyze, and possibly enact, critical

pedagogy.

Religious Faith

From a third, and quite different, perspective, critical pedagogy can also be

seen as reflecting or manifesting as religious faith in action. Perhaps the strongest

and most well-known connection of critical pedagogy with religious faith comes

from Paulo Freire. Stenberg claims that those of us who espouse critical pedagogy

31. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 12.

32. Ibid.


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and embrace Paulo Freires visions of praxis and conscientization work out of a

tradition, often unknowingly, with deep ties to religious faith.33 And as Nicholas

Burbules writes, Many have noted the strong link between Freires theology, his

personality, and his political practice; and from his earliest writings overt religiousallusions and analogies can be found.34 Peter Jarvis, for example, locates Freire

within the prophetic tradition of the Christian church,35 and according to Gillian

Cooper, Freire not only uses theological language, but also acknowledges the

influence on his thinking of the Roman Catholic Church of his Latin American

background.36 Yet, according to Priscilla Perkins, Freires religious influences are

often overlooked or ignored by criticalists.37 Indeed, many on the educational

left are uncomfortable talking about any form of spirituality, especially regarding

schools.38 For Cooper, this results in a misuse of Freires philosophy: those

Marxist or socialist educators who adopt Freires philosophy miss one important

element of it, namely the influence of Christianity; conversely, Christian educatorsdownplay his Marxism and simplify his Christianity.39

Freires Christianity has roots in liberation theology, arising from what he

called the prophetic church. Unlike the traditional church and the modernizing

church, which, according to Freire, alienate the oppressed social classes by either

encouraging them to view the world as evil or by defending the reforms

that maintain the status quo, the prophetic church rejects do-goodism and

palliative reforms in order to commit itself to the dominated social classes

and to radical social change (PE, 136 and 137). Like critical pedagogy, the

prophetic church demands a critical analysis of the social structures in which theconflict takes place (PE, 138). Within this prophetic church, the theology of

so-called development gives way to the theology of liberation a prophetic,

utopian theology, full of hope (PE, 139). Thus, Freire roots the religious

struggle for faith and the political struggle for liberation in the same moment

and the same set of events the historical reality of conscientization for political

involvement.40

Liberation theology is an expression of a resolute process that is changing the

condition of the poor and oppressed of this world.41 It is an attempt to help the

33. Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies, 271.

34. Burbules, Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy, 206.

35. Peter Jarvis, Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement, Convergence

20, no. 2 (1987): 31.

36. Gillian Cooper, Freire and Theology, Studies in the Education of Adults 27, no. 1 (1995): 6878.

37. Priscilla Perkins, A Radical Conversion of Mind: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic

Classroom, College English 63, no. 5 (2001): 585611.

38. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 2 (emphasis in original).

39. Cooper, Freire and Theology.

40. James Fraser, Love and History in the Work of Paulo Freire, in Mentoring the Mentor: A CriticalDialogue with Paulo Freire, ed. Paulo Freire (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 194.

41. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, xxi.


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poor interpret their own faith in a new way; at the same time, it is a critique of

economic and social structures and ideologies that justify inequality.42 Growing

from the efforts of Latin American clergy to effect social change on behalf of the

poor and dispossessed, liberation theology has been called an interpretation ofChristian faith out of the experience of the poor.43 In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin

American Catholic priests, nuns, and lay activists interested in advocating for the

poor and in directly challenging structural inequalities drew a model for engaging

with the poor from Freires concept of conscientazacao: As church people became

aware of the method and spirit of concientizacion (in the Spanish), they came to see

it as fitting very neatly into the emerging sense of how the church should opt for the

poor.44 As these elements in the Church renewed and revitalized their advocacy

for the poor, bishops began calling for a liberating education, and stating that

education should be democratized. Education should not mean incorporatingpeople into existing cultural structures but giving them the means so that they

can be the agents of their own progress.45 Thus, liberation theology sought to

carry out the Churchs mission by showing the lot of the poor and engaging them

in a process of evangelization that would develop a critical consciousness.46

Some of Freires writings make explicit connections to Christianity and

Christian faith, citing his Christian background as an early powerful influence

on his thinking. Freire described an early experience that illustrates the roots

connecting his faith and his activism:

I remember that when I was 6 years old, one day I was talking with my father and mymother, and I protested strongly against the way my grandmother had treated a black womanat home not with physical violence, but with undoubtedly racial prejudice. I said to mymother and to my father that I couldnt understand that, not maybe with formal speech I amusing now, but I was underlining for me the impossibility of being a Christian and at the sametime discriminating against another person for any reason.47

He explained further, regarding his later activism, that when I went first to

meet with workers and peasants in Recifes slums, to teach them and to learn

from them, I have to confess that I did that pushed by my Christian faith. This

beginning, being pushed by faith to advocate for the poor, might be considered a

form of mission, reflected in Freires statement that I have to say that I went

first as if I had been sent.48

In fact, Freire claimed little distinction between hisChristian faith and his revolutionary ambitions:

Being a Christian, a revolutionary; these are very close. It assumes a totality of humility oftelling me that I am a man trying to become a Christian; I am a Christian trying to become

42. Berryman, Liberation Theology, 5.

43. Ibid., 4.

44. Ibid., 37.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 38.

47. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 243.

48. Ibid., 245.


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a revolutionary. I am a Christian revolutionary or a revolutionary Christian because I knowwhat I want to become.49

Yet, in other writings, he maintained a role for spirituality, but did not

necessarily emphasize those early Christian influences,50 even, as Peter Robertsclaims, feeling a certain discomfort in doing so.51 Thus, Freire did not advocate a

proselytizing faith, but rather interpreted the Gospels as a call to social action.52

He claimed that if you ask me, then, if I am a religious man, I say no, Im not a

religious man. They understand religious as religion-like. I would say that I am a

man of faith.53 Indeed, Freire wrote as a man of faith influenced by early Christian

experiences, but not interested in a static, institutional religion. Instead, his seems

to be a religion of the street and of the slum, with a prophetic investment in

the historical material reality of the poor and oppressed. As Henry Giroux writes,

Freires faith is informed by the memory of the oppressed and by suffering that

must not be allowed to continue.54

Freire could hold simultaneous conversations with both Christ and Marx,

always [speaking] to them both in a very loving way.55 Freires optimism

about human nature, and his faith in its worth, are not only Marxist but

also Christian.56 While the Marxist influence in Freires philosophy receives

considerable attention, it is important to remember these early Christian, pre-

Marxist influences. Freires use of the language of Easter and of Exodus is

telling: when we look behind the Marxist influence, we find these religious

ideas of rebirth and of leading out informing critical notions of transformation and

emancipation.

For Freire, liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one[, which] . . . brings

into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but

human in the process of achieving freedom.57 He noted further that Conversion

to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a

new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.58 This process

of transformation is based not on miraculous revelation or shallow quick fix

solutions but on a complex, difficult and often lengthy process of critical reflection,

49. Margaret Costigan, You Have the Third World Inside You: Conversation by Paulo Freire,

Convergence 16, no. 4 (1983): 37 (emphasis in original).50. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

51. Peter Roberts, Education, Death, and Awakening: Hesse, Freire and the Process of Transformation,

International Journal of Lifelong Education 28, no. 1 (2009): 7.

52. Ibid.

53. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 246.

54. Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (New York: Bergin

and Garvey, 1988), 113.

55. Ibid., 246.

56. Cooper, Freire and Theology.

57. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 31.

58. Ibid., 43.


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dialogue and social action.59 This is not simply the Easter of sacraments and

liturgy. It is the Easter that

results in the changing of consciousness, [which] must be existentially experienced. The real

Easter is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easterof rhetoric is dead with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historicalpraxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible. (PE, 123)

This Easter signifies a transformation that means a deep change in the

consciousness of teachers; a shift that goes beyond mere commemorative rhetoric

to a genuinely transformative, biophiliac (life-loving) process of educational

resurrection.60 In this Easter, Freire held, you have more and more to die

as an elitist mind in order to be born as a popular mind. 61

Yet when Freire claimed that the prophetic church invites the oppressed to

a new Exodus (PE, 139), he was, of course, not suggesting that criticalists or

even the church can or should act like a modern-day Moses leading the Jewsout of Egypt. Because as he stressed again and again, revolutionary leaders cannot

think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.62 Thus,

the faith in Freires writings is a dialectical faith, a dialectical worlding in which

the world is named in the word, which, once named, reappears to the namers

as a problem and requires of them a new naming.63 Language, here, becomes

a world-builder. In reading the word, we also read the world, because in reading

the word, we read the world in which these words exist.64 But in reading the

word-world, we are presented with the problem of renaming the world with new

words, thus building new worlds. We change the world through the conscious,

practical work of writing and rewriting the word-world.65 As Jarvis writes,

Hence, for Freire, the idea of development is grounded in a theological understanding of theworld and of humankind. Any theory, or action, that does not allow the individual humanityshould be avoided. The destiny of the person is to be involved with the Divine in the creationof a new world.66

Giroux has called this a language of possibility, one linked to forms of self

and social empowerment that embrace the struggle to develop active forms of

community life around the principles of equality and democracy.67

Freire positioned critical ethics, what he called a universal human ethic, as

a critical genesis: I speak of a universal human ethic in the same way I speak of

59. Roberts, Education, Death, and Awakening, 66.

60. Ibid.

61. Costigan, You Have the Third World Inside You, 37 (emphasis in original).


63. Ibid., 69 (emphasis in original).

64. Paulo Freire, A Response, in Mentoring the Mentor, ed. Freire, 304.

65. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley,

Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987).

66. Jarvis, Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement, 36.

67. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals, 135.


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humanitys ontological vocation, which calls us out of and beyond ourselves.68

To be world-builders is first to recognize and then to act from that recognition

as historically conditioned subjects: Insofar as I am a conscious presence in the

world, I cannot hope to escape my responsibility for my action in the world.69In this theological position, each of us is not only responsible for our actions, but

is called by our presence in the world to partner with the Divine to continually

recreate the world. But notice how Freire evinced little or no interest in exactly

quantifying what that Divine is, for, again, that would lead us into a reductionism

he abhorred. Instead, the theology of critical ethics emphasizes ontology and

development, the flux between being and becoming:

It is in our becoming that we constitute our being so. Because the condition of becoming is thecondition of being. In addition, it is not possible to imagine the human condition disconnectedfrom the ethical condition. Because to be disconnected from it or to regard it as irrelevant

constitutes for us women and men a transgression.

70

A transgression from what? From humanization, peoples historical vocation.71

Faith in Freirean praxis, though religiously influenced, seeks no liturgical

validation or mandate. It is faith from and in the ontological vocation of

human development. It is Easter and Exodus manifested as transformation and

emancipation.

Interconnectedness of Faith

The interconnectedness of critical faith lies not in finding elements of, say,

Tillich in Caputo or Freire in Tillich, although I believe these connections exist.

Rather, these elements of faith interconnect in how they inform our positions oncritical pedagogy in our deciding what critical pedagogy means. The preceding

discussion is not intended to suggest clear, independent divisions between these

three elements of faith; instead, these elements overlap and intersect. I see Caputo,

Tillich, and Freire as positioned at three points of a triangle of critical faith, each

informing and influencing the others, but each having its own gravity well. I

believe these three faith elements inform all of critical pedagogy, perhaps even

contributing to the tension found in the literature among its various positions and

instantiations.

As readers of this journal certainly know, critical pedagogy has long been

in tension with itself. In the language of the faith orientation I present here,this tension seems to exist among its ultimate concern, its religious drive, and

its inherently unstable nature. To take one example, in a previous issue of

Educational Theory devoted to the topic of critical pedagogy, Patti Lather writes,

To counter Peter McLaren and Ilan Gur-Zeevs insistence on the right story

of critical pedagogy, I propose a thinking within Jacques Derridas ordeal of the

68. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, trans. Patrick Clarke

(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 25.

69. Ibid., 26.

70. Ibid., 39.



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undecideable and its obligation to openness, passage, and non-mastery. While

Lather seeks to discipline the masculinist voice of abstraction and universalism

[in critical pedagogy] . . .with some feminist pedagogy, viewing the tension within

critical pedagogy as a boy versus girl thing, I see this more in terms of a tensionof faith.72

It is hard to say just what critical pedagogy is: more materialist? more political?

more feminist? more spiritual? more student-centered? In this essay I have also

situated it all over the map: as solidarity, as transformation, as listening, as ethics.

The tension, then, arises in articulating an essence of critical pedagogy, because, it

seems to me, we are pulled in various directions by our own particular faith, such

that perhaps any one rendering of critical pedagogy reflects the tug of ones own

critical faith. In other words, I find that instances and variations within the critical

pedagogy literature seem to voice positions grounded more in one or the other (ormultiple!) faith elements, while still containing influences from the others.

Let me momentarily engage in a bit of mind reading (albeit with admittedly

suspect clarity) and examine a few selections from that 1998 issue of Educational

Theory in which the authors present substantively different takes on critical

pedagogy. In this issue, Lather, for example, seems to draw more from Caputo,

while McLaren and Gur-Zeev seem to draw more from Freire. Although I believe

an engaging debate might be had to deconstruct the faith of various critical

positions, my intent here is instead to show how these positions might fall, to

greater and lesser degrees, within the three gravity wells of faith. In borrowing

language from Derrida, Lather speaks to exactly the kind of undecideabilitythat Caputo references,73 while McLaren and Gur-Zeev, on the other hand, speak

more to a material reworlding. Yet, this (arguable) distinction is not absolute,

because Lather too seeks a manner of reworlding and McLaren and Gur-Zeev also

acknowledge contingency.74 And each is certainly guided by a sense of ultimate

concern, even if the specific content of those concerns varies. In other words,

none of these positions solely inhabits only one of the three faith elements, but,

arguably, each draws more strongly from one than the others.

This interconnectedness makes critical pedagogy a risky business. For while

we might feel the surety and righteousness of our ultimate concerns, Caputodestabilizes our footing, reminding us of our always tenuous stance and the faith

72. See Lather, Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities, 488 489; Peter McLaren, Revolutionary

Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 431462; and Gur-Zeev,

Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy.

73. For more on Caputos extensive scholarship on Derridean deconstruction, see John Caputo, The

Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1997); and John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic

Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

74. I recognize here that Gur-Zeev critiques Freire as nave. However, from a faith orientation,

Gur-Zeevs argument for counter education, in my reading, nonetheless emphasizes the religiousdesire for autonomy and worlding, even as he also pulls from Caputo in intending to demystify and

negate any self-evident knowledge. See Gur-Zeev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, 486.


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implicit in our assertions. And while, following Freire, we might feel a passion

for critical proselytizing, Tillich reminds us of the shared nature, and individual

value, of our ultimate concerns.

Implications and Possibilities

What does this argument mean for critical pedagogy? These elements of critical

faith the inbreath of hope, ones ultimate concern, and a critical Easter and

Exodus combine both to differentiate critical pedagogy from other educational

theories and to instill in it a renewed sense of ethics and humility. This critical

faith cautions us toward hesitancy, not in our strength of insight, but in our

force of prescription: We must have the courage not only to examine how we as

individuals reflect the values and norms of the culture. As educators we often are

the system, even as we are both its cause and effect.75 Thus, one implication for

critical pedagogy is a renewed push for communion: critical pedagogy as border

crossing.76 For to make communion with students and teachers is to engage in

not merely persuasion, but collaboration. In this reading, critical faith is both an

ethics of ought to be and an ethics of listening. Perhaps by orienting from critical

faith, critical pedagogues can find ways to situate theory closer to lived praxis in

schools and to the immediate values and concerns of teachers and students.

Here I think not in terms of criticalist with criticalist, but of criticalist

with parent or criticalist with uncertain colleague. For parents who might

balk at criticalese still hold ultimate concerns, as do colleagues who care

about educating for democracy but reject Marxist or postmodern or feministcritical analysis. I believe it is at this juncture of faith and communion that

new possibilities open up for critical pedagogy. This is critical pedagogy as

transformation, one that starts with the postmodern rupture of difference, but

within that rupture a vision of faith can transcend theoretical discourses without

denying their value. This may lead us toward a higher belief in a spirit that helps

to form a community of faith.77

My experience in schools tells me that teachers care about their students. And

they often value critical analysis. But that analysis must be tangible, even in a

sense organic. Thus, to begin at a place of faith is to esteem ones positionality

and ones a priori values. This is also critical pedagogy as solidarity and a counterto the limitations and excesses of a detached critical perspective.78 To form

communion, then, is to meet on a common ground of faith, exploring how our

faiths converge. As Tillich put it, faith is real only in the community of faith,

or more precisely, in the communion of a language of faith (DF, 135). If critical

75. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 63.

76. Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York:

Routledge, 2005).

77. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology, 116.78. William Ayers, Gregory Michie, and Amy Rome, Embers of Hope: In Search of Meaningful Critical

Pedagogy, Teacher Education Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2004): 128.


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pedagogy is to be an effective exploder of myths,79 it must begin from this place of

shared faith.

However, orienting critical pedagogy as faith also presents conceptual

obstacles. If, as Tillich held, the content of ones ultimate concern does not

determine whether or not one has faith, but that simply holding an ultimate

concern is itself indicative of having faith, then, one might reasonably ask, how

does critical faith differ from, say, the faith implicit within the No Child Left

Behind Act or within the standards movement? The answer lies in the totality

of critical faith. Critical faith is not faith only because it holds an ultimate

concern; it is also faith because of the content of that ultimate concern and,

just as importantly, because conceptualizing a critical pedagogy is inherently

unstable. Thus, while perspectives on education as diametrically opposed as

critical pedagogy and the standards movement both hold an implicit faith, thecontent of those faiths radically diverge. Unlike the standards movement, critical

faith urges toward transcendence, driven by that spiritual calling to recreate the

world through a critical Easter and Exodus. In this faith, however, is also a

humility, acknowledging that we look through a glass darkly and thus reason

from a faith, reasoning as much from hope as from critical analysis. This quality

differentiates critical pedagogy from other educational discourses, and especially

from essentialist discourses such as the standards movement, for criticalism

acknowledges radical contingency: of presence, of interpretation, of context.

Therefore, while the religiousness of critical pedagogy reaches toward rebirth

and renewal an evocative reworlding Caputo pulls it back from, and indeedpast, mere instrumentalism. Kincheloe seems to espouse both this communion

and this troubling of outcomes in arguing that unless such a position induces

a letting go that moves us to new forms of interconnection and compassion,

then critical pedagogy is a sham.80 In other words, even as critical faith moves

forward, in terms of concern and worlding, it must also turn back on itself, to

always interrogate its own assumptions.

Another obstacle of a faith orientation lies within the idea of faith as

transcendence, presenting transcendence as a problem. For many, perhaps most

people, faith specifically means religious faith, with all of its accompanying

baggage. For the religious person, identifying critical pedagogy as faith mightclash with his or her own beliefs about what faith means, perhaps signaling

something insufficient or even offensive to religious faith. For those who are

suspicious of organized religion and associate faith with those suspicions, a faith

orientation might present obstacles of perceived dogmatism and evangelism. My

hope, and a challenge I lay down here, is that fundamentalism on all sides can be

overcome, perhaps through listening and patient, respectful engagement. We saw

this possibility in Amy Goodburns account: while initially at odds and opposed,

79. Sonia Nieto, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (WhitePlains, New York: Longman, 1996).

80. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 136.


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even affronted, by the beliefs expressed by her Christian fundamentalist students,

she saw through critical reflection more connections than differences between

the discourses of fundamentalism and critical pedagogy.81 I do not suggest that

criticalists set aside transformative and emancipatory questions; however, wecan initiate dialogue and action, not in the language of abstract and oftentimes

impositional analysis, but from what we hold most dear.

The problem of communion leads us to yet another implication, and one

that speaks to the question of what constitutes critical pedagogy: the problem

of effect. Back in 1996, Kanpol argued that a sovereign of possibility must be

held if we are to make serious inroads into the dominant culture. 82 This is

a point worth exploring, because as I believe any examination of schools and

schooling will show, and as Tony Knight and Art Pearl have argued, apart from

isolated instances, critical pedagogy is essentially invisible in schools.83

As farback as 1987, scholars struggled to theorize a meaningful critical pedagogy that

might breathe life in schools.84 Perhaps the persistence of this struggle stems in

part from emphasizing critical pedagogy as something almost entirely other than

the dominant culture, and thus from the culture (even of the teachers) already

present in schools. Put differently, while people may hold different levels of

awareness, there is no critical self completely separate from the structures and

values criticalism critiques, no repressed or truer self for educators from which

to panoptically diagnose the educational landscape below.85 So while productive

critiques can be made of the forces affecting schools and society, critical pedagogy

too often seems to be articulated as merely another force to affect schools andsociety. My reading of the critical pedagogy literature suggests that there is more

distance than community with the teachers and administrators who run our

schools. Yet, the school reform literature clearly tells us that for any reform of

school culture to be successful and lasting, teachers must hold it close.86 As

81. Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith, 348.

82. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology, 116.

83. Tony Knight and Art Pearl, Democratic Education and Critical Pedagogy, Urban Review 32, no.

3 (2000): 197226.

84. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Why Doesnt This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Mythsof Critical Pedagogy, Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297324.

85. Noah de Lissovoy, Staging the Crisis: Teaching, Capital, and the Politics of the Subject, Curriculum

Inquiry40, no. 3 (2010): 427.

86. Cheryl Craig, The Relationships Between and Among Teachers Narrative Knowledge,

Communities of Knowing, and School Reform: A Case of The Monkeys Paw, Curriculum Inquiry

31, no. 3 (2001): 303331; Cheryl Craig, Why Is Dissemination So Difficult? The Nature of Teacher

Knowledge and the Spread of Curriculum Reform, American Educational Research Journal 43, no.

2 (2006): 257293; Mary Metz, Real School: A Universal Drama Amid Disparate Experience, inEducation Politics for a New Century, ed. Douglas Mitchell and Margaret Goertz (Bristol, Pennsylvania:The Falmer Press, 1989), 7591; Jonathon Silin and Fran Schwartz, Staying Close to the Teacher,

Teachers College Record 105, no. 8 (2003): 15861605; and David Tyack and Larry Cuban, TinkeringToward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1995).


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Michael Fullan has observed, Educational change depends on what teachers do

and think its as simple and as complex as that.87 The question for critical

pedagogy, then, is how can it speak to the teacher in the school down the street?

If we take a broad look at education, a heavily Marxist critical pedagogy

clearly has little, at best a marginal, influence on schools. Perhaps this results

from the fact that it is often couched in language that only educational scholars

can read. But more likely, I submit, it is because most people, at least in the

United States, just are not Marxists. Most Americans, it seems to me, believe the

story of progress and perseverance, whether this is mythology or not, and are, even

if they are without capital themselves, capitalists nonetheless. This question of

effect problematizes reconstructionist, and especially Marxist, end zones and goal

lines. In other words, is the possibility of critical pedagogy some better future

toward which critical analysis is bent? Or does its possibility lie in the exhausting

of outcomes? Before we ask the instrumental and material question, where do

we go from here? we must examine a more foundational question: Is the content

of critical pedagogy a promised land, or is it merciless criticality, methods of

inquiry, and a process of critique that return us, again and again, toward grasping

at how we know we know that we know? Put differently, and perhaps too simply,

the question of effect asks us whether critical pedagogy is a period or a question

mark. Or can critical pedagogy escape this seemingly fundamental, yet essentially

arbitrary dichotomy in recreating itself? The possibility for the continued growth

and influence of critical pedagogy lies in how this question is answered. It is my

belief that a faith orientation presents new avenues from which to conceptualize a

critical pedagogy that escapes this either/or thinking and serves as a foundation for

both communion and transformation while balancing the tension inherent within

critical faith.

87. Michael Fullan, The Meaning of Educational Change (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 115.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Nicholas Burbules, Neil Liss, and the three anonymous reviewers for their

keen insight in helping me develop this essay.


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neumann (2011) - critical pedagogy and faith

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