CHAPTER 11: Evolving Critical Pedagogy: Contributions From Joe Kincheloe

Joe Kincheloe is a significant voice in the field of critical pedagogy in education. His work transcends traditional research boundaries and forges interdisciplinary approaches to conducting research. Herein, a brief summary of Kincheole’s life is presented, followed by a discussion of some of the major themes that cut across his work. An annotated bibliography, which concludes the chapter, highlights some of his most cited works.

Scholars around the globe have been captivated by Kincheloe as a writer, a speaker, and a human being who routinely pushed the boundaries of academic thought (Smyth & Brown, 2010). A number of tributes to Kincheloe, who died in 2008, are available online and in print. Many of which include personal anecdotes and biographic information about him, as it seems to have been difficult for those who knew him well to separate the remarkable man from his remarkable writing. As a leader in several fields of inquiry, his body of work is itself an example of the “bricolage” he advocated for within qualitative research. In this way, he provided an important example of the integration of life, inquiry, and scholarship. Biographical sketches that appear on his own Freire Center webpage (http://www.freireproject.org/content/joe-kincheloe-0), as well as a website designed in his honor by his longtime partner, Shirley Steinberg (http://joekincheloe.com/about), are summarized here in an attempt to outline the roots and inspirations of his work.