“Democratic” for Whom?

In this chapter, the author addresses Critical Pedagogy and its Internal Contradictions by exploring his experiences as a queer Asian American activist-educator using critical pedagogy to teach racial justice in a classroom comprised mostly of White and Asian American teacher education students at an elite public university. Drawing from Paulo Freire's theory of critical pedagogy, ED280: Democratic Learning and Critical Education seeks to foster "the awakening of critical awareness" and "the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it". In so doing, the author argues that educators' ability to create "democratic" classroom spaces is always mediated by relations of power within the larger socio-political context. Through his teaching, the author have found that it is in the negotiation of positionality – of both students and teacher – that the tension between democratic learning and antiracist education is most clearly illuminated.