Reading Recent Efforts to Introduce a Social Justice Agenda into the Classroom

Author:

*  C. M. Contestable (University of Utah)

Abstract:

In 1989, Harvard Educational Review published what has become a classic critique of critical pedagogy, Elizabeth Ellsworth's "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering?" At the heart of Ellsworth's criticism was critical pedagogy's failure to locate its theoretical constructs in specific historical socially and politically positioned classrooms and classroom practices. Through analysis of recent scholarly articles, this paper asks what has been learned about classroom practice in the years since and to what extent the concerns raised by Ellsworth are being addressed.