ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Kierkegaard’s notion of passionate inwardness is crucial to critical pedagogy and curriculum studies. The author discusses the key principles and corresponding problematic assumptions of critical pedagogy. Noting the emphasis on the critical pedagogue to facilitate awareness among students on the ways knowledge and schooling is used to sustain power and privilege, the author notes such scholarship does not translate well within colleges and universities that prepare teachers and teacher educators. Instead, critical awareness sometimes produces paralysis and despair when the precepts cannot be used within contemporary classroom settings focused on accountability and assessment. The author then turns toward Kierkegaard’s exploration of the ways institutional discourse, with its emphasis on predetermined ends, dislocates individual’s interiority from their existential becoming. Next, the author explains that within Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence (aesthetic, ethical, and religious) there is the possibility for realizing a proper relation between the infinite and finite conditions that constitute the human self. The author closes with the suggestion that passionate inwardness provides the existential turn necessary to cope with the despair that critical pedagogy illuminates and also might provide the tools to act in the world.
