What Is Critical Pedagogy Good For? An Interview with Ira Shor

Abstract

In this chapter, Ira Shor discusses critical literacy as it takes shape inside critical pedagogy, where teachers invite students to explicitly question the status quo in the name of social justice, democratic rights, and equality. According to Shor, this approach is a "situated pedagogy" shaped by and for specific themes, locations, and constituencies-from multicultural to feminist to socialist to queer to environmental, from K-12 to college to labor and community education, from urban to rural. He adds that Freirean critical pedagogy, of course, involves practices and frameworks derived from the foundational work of Paulo Freire, whose "pedagogy of the oppressed" was a class-based practice, offering dialogic literacy programs to Brazilian peasants and workers through a problem-posing process. The challenge has always been to diversify the singular focus on social class and to reinvent the approach for other times and places outside Brazil.