ABSTRACT
This chapter explores critical views of language education that attempt to deal with the challenges of domination (contextual effects of power in classrooms), disparity (inequitable educational access), discrimination (sexist, racist, and other forms of exclusion), difference (diverse cultures and ways of being that students bring to the classroom), and desire (hopes for alternative futures). To understand language classrooms within a wider context, this chapter discusses questions of reproduction and resistance in education. In contrast to an optimistic (neo)liberal view of education that it provides opportunity for all (anyone can go to school, receive equal treatment, and come out at the end as whatever they want), more critical analyses have pointed out that schools are far greater agents of social reproduction than of social change. We then examine in more detail the processes by which social inequalities are reproduced, particularly theories of restricted and elaborated codes, and cultural capital. Looking at the complexity of language classrooms (teaching style, textbooks, language, and cultural background), it is important to steer a careful path between an overdetermined notion of the classroom as a mere reflection of the outside world and an underdetermined vision of classrooms as autonomous islands unto themselves. Our classrooms have permeable walls: They are affected by and have effects on the wider social, cultural, economic, and political world. Various approaches to critical language and culturally sustaining pedagogies are then discussed before the chapter concludes with a discussion of ethics and language pedagogy.
