Do We Look Back to Move Forward? A Discursive Look at Back to Normal

This short narrative is taken from my current research using a critical discourse analysis; a methodology used since the 1970s, largely attributed to Normal Fairclough and Michel Foucault. These critical notions relate to critical theory, and in education, certainly to critical pedagogy. In the spirit of this research, I note that the purpose of my narrative is to lead us to question and continue to question our capitalized world, which continually requires answers. In this instance, to examine what I see as a gestalt for our times, to ask more questions, to seek more dialogue, and to understand how privilege forms our discourses and ways of seeing

On-the-Ground Literacies: Moderating with Media and Theatre to Embody Critical Pedagogy

My work is based on the work of Paulo Freire, and my current tasks come from the endeavors that Freire, Jesús Gomez, Joe Kincheloe and I did on Radical Love in the early part of the new century. Both Radical Love and Critical Pedagogy create my theoretical framework for critical activist pedagogy

Contextualizing Corporate Kids: Kinderculture as Cultural Pedagogy

Consumer culture has an overwhelming impact on the young consumer generation. International corporations often focus on children and youth for a major part of their income generation. This focus is a component of the changing nature of society. Instead of consumers discovering their own wants and needs, corporations create and dictate exactly what people want. This article discusses how media and corporation-generated consumption have helped to form what I call the new childhood. My analysis investigates the footprints of power created by the corporate producers of kinderculture and the effects on the psyches of our children and youth. The understanding of kinderculture can create democratic pedagogies for cultural, personal, and school levels of society

The In-process collective as a form of inquiry through performance

The concept of a theatre collective originated about twenty years ago in Quebec as a form of social theatre. The medium included a group of actors improvising and then scripting scenes that pertained to certain topics chosen for performance. Noted collectives include ones produced on William Lyon McKenzie King and "The Farm Show", both dealing with social and political issues in Canada. The performances were scripted and the collectives, now published, remain basically the same each time they are produced. The idea of a collective intrigued me, consequently I decided to apply the concept with students and to create a collection of personally written material with dialogue and improvisation to produce a performance. After several collectives on gender and giftedness, I realized that the medium was not restricted to any topic, and that the collective would be an excellent method of democratic teaching within the regular classroom with regular classroom curricula. For my one-credit project, I decided to facilitate the production of a collective within a Grade Nine Social Studies class that I was teaching. I wanted to employ the ideas presented within feminist pedagogy, that of allowing empowerment to take place and to become a "midwife" to the students instead of the teacher-director expected in many productions. Including the concepts that Freire discusses in his ideas of students being able to name their world and have a concept of place and understanding of the world through their own experience, I developed a model of presenting the drama collective

Contextualizing Corporate Kids: Kinderculture as Cultural Pedagogy

Consumer culture has an overwhelming impact on the young consumer generation. International corporations often focus on children and youth for a major part of their income generation. This focus is a component of the changing nature of society. Instead of consumers discovering their own wants and needs, corporations create and dictate exactly what people want. This article discusses how media and corporation-generated consumption have helped to form what I call the new childhood. My analysis investigates the footprints of power created by the corporate producers of kinderculture and the effects on the psyches of our children and youth. The understanding of kinderculture can create democratic pedagogies for cultural, personal, and school levels of society