Diversity and Equity In A Global Era

1
Diversity and Equity In A Global Era

• A Postmodern Critical Pedagogy Perspective

2
Schooling

• The current situation Consumer pedagogy (freedom
  to consume)
• contingency as an enemy and order as a task
• fear of difference and indeterminacy
• instrumental rationality (critical thinking
  limited to specific skills)
• standardized curriculum
• the technology and culture of the book
• The desired situation Radical democracy pedagogy
  (freedom from oppression)
• A shared conception of citizenship that
  simultaneously challenges growing regimes of
  oppression and struggles for the conditions
  needed to construct a multiracial and
  multicultural democracy.

3
The Global Era Ideology

• Modernism faith in reason, progress, individual
• See Functionalism Conflict theory
• Postmodernism indeterminacy and hybridity as the
  basic conditions of society
• identity constructed in a multiplicity of social
  relations and discourses

4
Political Economy

• New waves and types of immigration
• Unemployment and despair among youth
• The mass media plays a decisive if not
  unparalleled role in constructing multiple and
  diverse social identities
• Time and space becomes compressed and fragmented
  within a world of images (see cyberspace
  networks, promoted identities through
  advertisement, virtual reality, etc.) that
  increasingly undermine the dialectic of
  authenticity and universalism (see Platos
  Allegory of the Cave)
• loss of faith in the modernist ideals
• the indeterminacy of the future warrants
  confronting and living in the immediacy of
  experience
• homelessness as a condition of randomness has
  replaced the security, if not misrepresentation,
  of home as a source of comfort and security

5
Border Identities

• As the patterns of contemporary cultural and
  economic life relentlessly frustrate the desire
  and need to live in communities, these become
  imagined only in the bad sense, that is,
  disconnected from any sense of social reality,
  civic commitment and the possibility of
  transformative collective agency. No longer based
  on any substantial experiences of a shared
  political destiny, the longing for national
  identity becomes a taste for a pseudo-archaic
  ethnicity cranked out in made-to-order forms by
  the heritage industry.

6
School Mission Reexamined

• Give up the long held idea of schooling as the
  way to social mobility and success (broader
  social reforms are necessary)
• Make indeterminacy rather than order the guiding
  principle of pedagogy
• Multiple views, possibilities, and differences
  are opened up as part of an attempt to read the
  future contingently rather than from the
  perspective of the dominant ideology/culture that
  assumes rather than problematizes specific
  notions of work, progress, and individual
• Teach for radical democratic citizenship