Practicing Critical Pedagogy

This co-edited volume addresses the professional and personal influences of Joe L. Kincheloe's scholarship to the teacher and curriculum educator. Scholars from the various areas in the social foundations discuss the impact that Kincheloe's work had on their thinking and consequently the possibilities for the critical nature of their critical classroom pedagogy and critical research in social foundations of education geared toward social praxis. The volume provides a lens into the crevices and corners of the field where practitioners labor to provide their students the inspiration to believe in democratic educational practices, to know that the personal is political, and that finding voice through written and spoken discourses are the ways in which we enact democracy. It attends to the implications of Kincheloe's scholarship for the curriculum overburdened with value added and testing measures and contrasts Kincheloe's high intellectual spirit and his populist and democratic approach to working with young and aspiring scholars in the field as critical educators informed by foundational disciplines.

This edited text recaptures many of Joe L. Kincheloe's national and international influences. An advocate and a scholar in the social, historical, and philosophical foundations of education, he dedicated his professional life to his vision of critical pedagogy.  The authors in this volume found mentorship, as well as kinship, in Joe and express the many ways in which he and his work made profound differences in their work and lives. Joe's research always pushed the limits of what critically reflective and informed teaching entailed, never diluting the import of comprehending the complexity of sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and educational discourses and practices. Dedicated to a praxis of social and political activism rooted in students' development as citizens and workers, the labor of teachers as action researchers, cultural workers, and social mediators is always at the heart of all he achieved. We who were so influenced directly and indirectly by him knew his genius and relished the generosity with which he shared his ideas, advice, encouragement, and art. The world is better because of Joe L. Kincheloe scholarship-inextricably related to "critical" critical thinking and enactment of education that tenaciously interrupts complacency, mediocrity, always responding thoughtfully to particular educational contexts.