ABSTRACT
It is important for critical educators to take up culture as a vital source for developing a politics of identity, community and pedagogy. It is important to note that critical educators cannot be content merely to map how ideologies are inscribed in the various relations of schooling, whether they be the curriculum, forms of school organization, or in teacher–student relations. While these should be important concerns for critical educators, a more viable critical pedagogy needs to go beyond them by analyzing how ideologies are actually taken up in the voices and lived experiences of students as they give meaning to dreams, desires, and subject positions that they inhabit. On the one hand, liberals embrace the issue of difference through a notion of cultural diversity in which it is argued that race is simply one more form of cultural difference among many that make up the population like the United States.
