Chapter 2: Why Teaching Critical Social Theory as “Theory” Might not be Enough¹

Critical social theory’s primary contribution to education is the crisis it helps create in disrupting education’s discourses of the obvious and investigating education as a humanly constructed political and cultural practice. As such, critical social theory questions the given and the taken for granted in education by examining the relationship among culture, knowledge, power, discourse, and subject-formation, exploring how knowledge, texts, cultural practices and products are produced, circulated, and used, as well as what (and who) they produce, circulate and use in that process. That is, critical social theory disrupts the current organization of knowledge and creates procedures by which traditions, discourses, and practices are analyzed for how they function to include or exclude certain meanings, produce or prevent particular ways of being, behaving, and imagining (Giroux, 1996). Still, while critical theory—as a body of literature that examines the world in critical ways—is able to do the above, my experience, as a teacher educator, has pointed out that as a body of literature in and of itself it is not always able to help student teachers do the same.