ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogy—and critical educational studies in general—broadly seeks to expose how relations of power and inequality, (social, cultural, economic), in their myriad forms combinations, and complexities, are manifest and are challenged in the formal and informal education of children and adults (Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2003; Giroux, 1997; McCarthy & Apple, 1988). However, this may actually be too general a statement, for the term “critical pedagogy” is very much like the concept of democracy. It is something of a sliding signifier (Foner, 1998) that has been used in multiple ways to describe multiple things. Indeed, at times critical pedagogy seems to have been used in such broad ways that it can mean almost anything from cooperative classrooms with somewhat more political content, to a more robust definition that involves a thorough-going reconstruction of what education is for, how it should be carried out, what we should teach, and who should be empowered to engage in it.
