ABSTRACT
Scratch critical pedagogy hard enough, and under its dry, leathery skin you’ll fi nd an antechamber fi lled with biographies. In the mid-1970s, aft er a brief stint as a $50-a-week copy boy at a national news service, I took a job as an elementary school teacher in a district that contains Canada’s largest public housing complex. An orphan of the sixties (Timothy Leary wrote me a diploma that said, “You Are Now Free” aft er an acid trip in San Francisco in 1968), I briefl y studied to become a sculptor, and later switched to Elizabethan drama. I was fi lled with the revolutionary writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Jean Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Amilcar Cabral, Ernesto Che Guevara, Stokely Carmichael, the Beat Poets, and those of pretty much every left ist author whose books I could get my hands on. Aft er fi ve years of teaching what came to be known as “Canada’s toughest kids,” I entered graduate school, having published a controversial best-selling book on my teaching experiences.
