Unit 7 Introduction to critical theory

Critical theory, society, community and commitment

Goal of these lectures

• Understanding of critical theory • The relationship between critical theory and

community thinkers

• Critical theory and Paulo Freire• Critical theory and Kwame Appiah• Critical theory and Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill-

Collins and Martha Nussbaum• Postmodernism and Giddens• Gender and postmodernism

Critical theory

The history of critical theory

• The political and ideological dimension• Crititical theory and the frankfurter

school:Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse

Frankfurter Schule

• Crititical theory and the frankfurter school:Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse

Jürgen Habermas

• Habermas and communicative action• Habermas and critical theory

Critical theory and epistomology

Critical theory and methodology

Critical theory and hermeneutics

Paulo Freire (1921-1971)

Paulo Freire from a critical theoretical perspective

• Who is Paulo Freire?

• Why use his educational philosophy as an example for critical theory

Cycle of action-learning (Freire, 1970)

analyses

reflectionaction

awareness

Dialogue, awarenessraising (conscientização)

The main concepts of his transformational pedagogy

• Pedagogy of the oppressed; a philosophical and revolutionary pedagogical proposal.

Critical theory, Freire and Galeano

Why choose for Freire and Galeano? Latin America:

Isabel Allende, Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda

• Contextual similarities? Frantz Fanon, Frank Martinus Arion, V.S. Naipaul, stuart Hall and or Edward Said.

• The culture of Silence, the culture of shame; out of the culture of domination.

• Contextual differences? Freire is a educational philospoher and Galeano is a writer, who rewrites the history of Latin America.

Freire and Aruba

• Dialoque as an instrument to raise consciousness=>

• Selfawareness, naming your own reality, the politics and therefore the interest of eduction of words of philosophy

• Freires legacy in Aruba (examples; innovation in Aruban elementary education, papiamento as an instruction language

• Consciouness, critical attitude, vision of a liberated humanity.

• …ongoing forms of critique and a struggle against objective forces of oppression

• Understanding and deconstructing power dimensions within social relations

• Humanizing liberation processes• Transforming social and political realities