Who does critical pedagogy think you are? Investigating how teachers are produced in critical pedagogy scholarship to inform teacher education

Abstract

In this post-structural feminist analysis, I review recent literature focusing on critical pedagogy to analyse the ways teachers are discursively produced within the sampled literature to ask: who does critical pedagogy think you are? Additionally, I extend earlier post-structural feminist critiques of critical pedagogy and underlying assumptions about power and subjectivity. In this sample of articles, teachers were more likely to be positioned as unable to engage in critical pedagogy than they were to be positioned as able to engage critical pedagogy. Given these findings, I argue that critical pedagogues reconsider how teachers are discursively produced in research articles and insist on a more nuanced understanding of teacher education students.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• teacher education
• feminism
• post-structural theory

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mardi Schmeichel and Stephanie Jones for their feedback on early drafts of this manuscript. Additionally, she thanks her writing group, Erin Adams and Stacey Kerr, for their feedback during later revisions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. See Appendix for a complete list of articles and groups in which they were sorted.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Pittard

Elizabeth Pittard is currently a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. She draws from post-structural and feminist theories to examine the working lives of women elementary school teachers, teacher education, and the manifestations of neo-liberalism in education. At the time of the research presented here, she was a PhD candidate and graduate assistant in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, USA.