ABSTRACT
To make sense of what is happening to teachers’ work with practical and emancipatory intent requires a critical theory capable of connecting globalization to the everyday life of the classroom. In the last chapter we began to draw our conceptual threads together and started to sketch out a critical theory of teachers’ work that emphasized a labour process of teachers’ work capable of making sense of technologies of power with a global reach. But the last chapter is only half of the story A critical theory of teachers’ work should be thought of as social theory ‘combining the discourses of both critique and possibility’ (Giroux, 1985a, p. xviii), involving a ‘critique of domination and a theory of liberation’ (Kellner, 1989, p. 1). Critical theory can be understood to involve a ‘dialectical sensibility’ (Agger, 1977a; Agger, 1977b), or a ‘dialectical imagination which refuses to separate thought and action’ (Agger, 1977a, p. 2). Foucault captures the spirit of such a sensibility in his meditation on Kant’s ‘way of philosophizing’ when he asserts that:
it has to be considered as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
