Chapter 1: When Theory Walks With Praxis: Critical Pedagogy and the Life of Transnational and Postcolonial Subjects of Color

For the last 4 decades or so, critical pedagogy has been the theoretical framework educators and critical theorists have drawn on to analyze complex educational, political, and socioeconomic problems and issues, such as the apartheid form of schooling in the United States, the sex-digital divide, and the school-to-prison in North America, to name a few. Like critical theory, critical pedagogy pipline provides us the ideological tool to question commonsensical knowledge, to interrogate what appears to be normal, to challenge the status quo, and to name and change the world, rather than merely interpreting it (Marx, 1969). Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and with different foci (i.e., sociology, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, education, women studies, and multicultural education) have drawn on critical pedagogy to analyze pertinent racial, social class, gender, cultural, and language issues in their respective fields and beyond (Aronowitz, 2001; Darder, 2002; Giroux, 2003; hooks, 1994; Macedo, 1994).