ABSTRACT
In contrast to traditional liberal curricula and pedagogies, critical, femi nist, and antiracist pedagogies are designed to disrupt the canon of the academy in order to bring about social change. Such pedagogies highlight knowledge and ways of knowing that have traditionally been subjugated or invalidated, and they foster emancipatory aims. In particular, feminist and antiracist pedagogies place a high value on subjective experience as a route to understanding our lives and the lives of others and emphasize the legitimacy of knowledge that arises from socially marginalized positions. Critical pedagogy involves a similar idea. According to Henry Giroux, a “liberatory border pedagogy” involves a fundamental “decentering” of “dominant configurations of power and knowledge” (Border Crossings 246). Roger Simon adds that a “pedagogy of possibility” must include the ability to “interrogate both social forms and their possible transformations as to their compatibility with three additional basic principles: (1) securing human diversity, (2) securing compassionate justice, and (3) securing the renewal of life” (23).
