ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore possibilities for engaging in a counter-politics in education in relation to school knowledges. I consider the nature and place of knowledges in education and the ways these knowledges are implicated in demarcating not just ‘what’ is knowable, but also ‘who’ is knowable. As I do this I examine the possibilities and limits for troubling approved knowledges and enabling knowledges that have been barred from education to be meaningful and legitimate in these spaces. Thinking about a political pedagogy means engaging with the multiple traditions of critical pedagogies that have been developed through a range of lenses and undergone notable revisions over the last 30 to 40 years. If we take Paulo Freire’s (1970) neo-Marxist critical pedagogy of class conscientization and social transformation as a starting point, we can trace moves through feminist and critical race concerns with gender and race empowerment, emancipation and cultural politics, to post-structurally informed approaches to critical and deconstructive reading, queer politics and resignification. I explore these in more detail in Chapter 6. For the purposes of this chapter it is useful to note the key concerns shared across these divergent pedagogies. One is the recognition and interrogation of inequalities with a view to interrupting these. A second is the critique of the status of prevailing knowledge, the interrogation of its effects, and the introduction of alternative ways of knowing. Underpinned by differing conceptual and political frameworks, all invite scrutiny of privilege and its reproduction and problematize knowledge and its connection to social relations and subjectivities. These pedagogies hope to change the way students, educators and others think about and see themselves as well as wider social structures, relations, practices and meanings.
