CHAPTER 10: Transformative Praxis: Barry Kanpol and the Quest for a Public Identity

Through the course of his extensive career as an educator and a university administrator, Barry Kanpol has been a strong advocate of critical pedagogy as a form of intellectual and cultural resistance, posited as a reaction against the savage inequalities (Kozol, 1991) of mainstream ideology and schooling. In his quest to democratize the reproduction of social and cultural capital within educational contexts, Kanpol has been adamant about using accessible, transparent language to redefine a collective, inclusive conceptualization of educational structures. In order to speak to the multiplicity of societal voices and to promote the possibility of hope as a foil to the existing postmodern cynicism, Kanpol has striven to develop a critical pedagogy for the Other. He has decried the fact that the de-contextualized, liberatory, dense pedagogies of critical theory do not often translate back to the rough ground (Dunne, 1993) of public schools. In order to address this paradox, his nascent productivity early in his career focused on Altenbaugh (1987) and Carlson’s (1987) conceptualization of the distinction between institutional and cultural politics of resistance. Coupled with Aronowitz and Giroux’s (1985) vision of a transformative intellectual, these seminal epistemologies provided a foundation for discussions that promoted an applied resistance to the mainstream ideologies in contemporary educational practice. Based on Mead’s (1934) concept of self and community, which negates the inherent individualism and negative competitive educational practices, Kanpol’s writing has promoted the emergence and the development of counter-hegemonic frameworks, which mobilize the self, the community, and complex issues related to race, religion, culture, gender, and class. In keeping with this engaged and committed approach to teaching and learning, Kanpol has emphasized that curriculum must be reconceptualized as a platform for active negotiation and for knowledge mobilization and knowledge construction.