critical pedagogy and faith

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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND FAITH

Jacob W. Neumann

Department of Curriculum and InstructionThe University of Texas–Pan American

Abstract. Critical pedagogy has often been linked in the literature to faith traditions such as liberationtheology, usually with the intent of improving or redirecting it. While recognizing and drawing fromthose previous linkages, Jacob Neumann goes further in this essay and develops the thesis that criticalpedagogy can not just benefit from a connection with faith traditions, but is actually, in and of itself,a practice of faith. In this analysis, he juxtaposes critical pedagogy against three conceptualizations offaith: John Caputo’s blurring of the modernist division between faith and reason, Paul Tillich’s argumentthat faith is ‘‘ultimate concern,’’ and Paulo Freire’s theology and early Christian influences. Using thisthree-pronged approach, Neumann argues that regardless of how it is seen, critical pedagogy manifestsas a practice of faith ‘‘all the way down.’’

Introduction

In 1996, Barry Kanpol called the educational left ‘‘to come to terms with theprofound theological possibilities and implications of its work.’’1 In analyzing therelation between critical pedagogy and faith, I seek not only to address this callbut to tackle what I see as a more fundamental issue: the essential nature ofcritical pedagogy as a practice of faith. While I draw from Kanpol’s work in linkingcritical pedagogy and liberation theology, I push further and find that criticalpedagogy, whether it is seen as a reflection of Christian beliefs or as a purelysecular enterprise, is in fact, in all of its guises, a manifestation of faith.

This understanding of the fundamental nature of critical pedagogy is importantbecause it opens new contexts and new opportunities for critical work. Kanpoland Fred Yeo argue that a spiritually driven vision is missing from the literature ofeducational critique.2 I disagree. I find that much, if not most, educational critiqueis spiritually driven — or at least driven by faith. But, and this is the essentialpoint, it all depends on how we think about faith. It is my purpose in this essayto collide marginalized conceptualizations of faith with a new analysis of criticalpedagogy, not in an effort to reinvest critical work with a spiritual vision, but inorder to help reinvest critical work with meaning and efficacy in our schools.

A Brief Outline

Critical pedagogy has a complex relation with faith and has been repeatedlylinked to it in the literature.3 Such linkages fit our commonsense understanding. It

1. Barry Kanpol, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology: Borders for a Transformative Agenda,’’Educational Theory 46, no. 1 (1996): 105.

2. Barry Kanpol and Fred Yeo, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in The Academy and the Possibility of Belief, ed. MaryBuley-Meissner, Mary Thompson, and Elizabeth Tan (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000), xii.

3. See Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press,1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gavenda,

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takes faith to challenge the status quo. It takes faith to challenge school practices,especially as a teacher within the school. Critical pedagogy certainly places faithin dialogue.4 For Paulo Freire, faith in dialogue ‘‘requires an intense faith inhumankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faithin their vocation to be more fully human.’’5 And critical pedagogy holds faith instudents, faith that they will take the critical path or will at least adopt somemeasure of criticality into their daily lives even after they have left the educator.

Often, however, linkages between critical pedagogy and faith traditions seemto serve as measures to improve critical pedagogy: to reframe, rethink, or redirect it.For example, Joe Kincheloe draws upon ‘‘Buddhist insights’’ that involve ‘‘isolatingand letting go of an egocentrism that blinds us to the virtual and relational natureof our selfhood’’ in order for critical pedagogy to avoid ‘‘those definitions of criticalwork that position it as an egocentric manifestation of the combative proponentof rationality.’’6 In another example, Amy Goodburn compares her faith in criticalpedagogy with some of her students’ personal religious faith; for Goodburn, eachis a belief system that provides structure for interpreting the world, offering bothcontext and meaning. Where Goodburn initially saw disconnection between hercritical aspirations and her students’ fundamentalist religious beliefs, reflectionled her to ‘‘see more connections than differences between the discourses offundamentalism and critical pedagogy.’’7 These connections led Goodburn to claimthat ‘‘perhaps faith is what is needed most for a successful critical pedagogy — faithin the value of initiating dialogue in the face of conflicts over discourses and faithin students’ and teachers’ ability to value and negotiate each other’s differences.’’8

And in yet another reference to the value of linking critical pedagogy withfaith traditions, Shari Stenberg claims that ‘‘the prophetic tradition of LiberationTheology offers us visions that may not only enrich our understanding of criticalpedagogy, but may also help us to enact it more fully.’’9

and John Peters (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1990); Kanpol, ‘‘Critical Pedagogyand Liberation Theology’’; Amy Goodburn, ‘‘It’s a Question of Faith: Discourses of Fundamentalism andCritical Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom,’’ JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18, no. 2 (1998):333–352; and Shari Stenberg, ‘‘Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing the Dialogue,’’College English 68, no. 1 (2006): 271–290.

4. Nicholas Burbules, ‘‘Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy,’’ in Critical Theory and Critical PedagogyToday, ed. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Haifa, Israel: Studies in Education, University of Haifa, 2005), 193–207.

5. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993), 71.

6. Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 134.

7. Goodburn, ‘‘It’s a Question of Faith,’’ 348.

8. Ibid., 352.

9. Stenberg, ‘‘Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies,’’ 288.

JACOB W. NEUMANN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instructionat the University of Texas–Pan American, 1201 W. University Dr., Edinburg, TX 78539; e-mail<[email protected]>. His primary areas of scholarship are critical pedagogy, social education,and educational foundations.

Neumann Critical Pedagogy and Faith 603

Like these other scholars, I also develop connections in this essay betweencritical pedagogy and faith traditions. But I go further and work to develop a thesisusually missed in the literature: that critical pedagogy does not just have religiousroots10 and strong connections to liberation theology,11 but is in and of itself apractice of faith. I work here to advance the point that to do critical pedagogy is topractice critical faith — in other words, critical pedagogy is not simply influencedby faith traditions; it is faith all the way down.

In arguing this point, I approach the faith of critical pedagogy from threedirections, arguing, in turn, its three elements. First, I look at critical faith fromthe standpoint of the alleged split between reason and belief, drawing primarilyfrom John Caputo’s argument that reason and belief, contrary to commonplacethinking, are actually not that far apart: reason is not being able to see all the waydown and belief is to see only through a glass darkly, but both rest on underlying,taken-for-granted assumptions, so that reason and belief are actually two differentkinds of faith.12 Second, I approach critical faith from the standpoint of ultimateconcern. Here I lean on Paul Tillich’s argument that overturns commonplaceunderstandings of faith as the belief in the unseen or the unseeable, or even asthe religious belief in a Creator, and replaces them with an understanding offaith as the quality of having an ultimate concern, something about which oneis concerned ultimately.13 Third, I look at it from the standpoint of religiousfaith, specifically drawing from Paulo Freire’s early religious influences and fromconnections to liberation theology.

I should note at the outset that I recognize that the three analytical positionsI take will at times contradict each other. For example, Caputo seems to implythat faith is, at least in part, the belief in what is not seen. Yet Tillich explodedthis distinction by arguing that faith applies not to trust in things not seen,but to an individual’s ultimate concern. And neither scholar focuses explicitlyon faith as a purely religious affair. My hope, then, in taking this three-prongedapproach, is to show that regardless of how it is viewed, critical pedagogy isalways an embodiment of faith, a practice of faith. In other words, it is these threeelements that comprise critical faith. Critical faith is not sometimes religious orsometimes ultimate concern; it is not merely one element and not the others.Rather, critical pedagogy is faith because it looks through a glass darkly, because

10. See Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education, trans. Donaldo Macedo (South Hadley, Massachusetts:Bergin and Garvey, 1985); and Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking. Freire’s The Politicsof Education will be cited in the text as PE for all subsequent references.

11. See Kanpol, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology’’; Berryman, Liberation Theology; andGustavo Gutierrez, A Theory of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, New York:Orbis Books, 1988).

12. John Caputo, Philosophy and Theology (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2006). This workwill be cited in the text as PT for all subsequent references.

13. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Perennial Classics, 1957). This work will be cited in thetext as DF for all subsequent references.


it holds an ultimate concern, and because it draws from the religious warrants ofemancipation and transformation.

Through a Glass Darkly

Critical pedagogy is often a cognitive, rational activity: inquiry, analysis,discourse, action, and the like. But this activity rests on a foundation ofbelief — beliefs about causes and effects, about desires and motivations, evenabout notions of right and wrong. In other words, critical pedagogy is a rationalactivity that trusts in a variety of anticipatory assumptions that ground itsmaterial potential. Or, as William James observed, ‘‘there are, then, cases wherea fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.’’14 Thus,from one perspective, critical pedagogy is an act of faith simply because of theseunderlying assumptions.

For this analysis I draw heavily from Caputo’s concise discussion of theweakening modernist distinction between faith and reason. To introduce thisdiscussion, I quote a section from Caputo at length:

To understand is not a kind of pure staring at an object. True, we are constantly receivinginput from the world, but whatever we receive is received in a manner that is suitable forthe receiver who must make ready for the reception. Even the most elemental perception isstructured around a moment of expectation that is confirmed — or not. When we open thedoor, we expect to find a house inside, not a wind-swept prairie; when we lift the telephonebook, we expect to feel its weight; when we sink into a chair, we expect it to hold us up. Theperceptual world is to an important extent a coherent set of expectations, what Heideggercalled an ensemble of ‘‘interpretive for-structures,’’ by means of which we make our wayaround the world via felicitous assumptions, ways of ‘‘taking’’ things ‘‘as’’ such-and-such,where if we move it, lift it, use it, eat or drink it, greet it with a friendly hello, our expectationsare confirmed — or not. (PT, 55)

Besides these nuanced ‘‘for-structures’’ that apply to everyday life, critical pedagogyholds its own range of assumptions: that society can be changed through criticalaction, dialogue, and education; that people want to learn and to use its languageand analytical structures; that people want to challenge existing structuralpower dynamics. Thus, critical pedagogy relies on both the micro ‘‘structures ofanticipation,’’ without which ‘‘we would have to reinvent the wheel several timesa day,’’ and larger macro assumptions related specifically to critical pedagogy’spurpose (PT, 55). These assumptions are ‘‘the foundation and underpinning ofreason, that which provides it roots and substance.’’15

This analysis of the faith16 underpinning reason blurs the modernist divisionbetween faith and reason. For Caputo, both faith and reason turn on a ‘‘seeing as.’’Knowing rests on ‘‘an ongoing faith and trust in an ensemble of assumptions andpresuppositions . . . that enable us to make our way around — a lab or an archive,

14. William James, ‘‘The Will to Believe,’’ in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York:Vintage Books, 1997), 87.

15. David Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1989), 59.

16. Here I mean faith as trust in something neither seen nor empirically proven. Later in the essay, whenI discuss Tillich, I will contradict this position by problematizing the correlation of faith and trust.


a poem or an ancient language, an economic system or a foreign culture’’ (PT,56). But

by the same token, to have faith in something is not darkness and not-seeing all the waydown. On the contrary, one will not be able to see at all without a certain faith, if we donot have a take, an ‘‘as,’’ an angle, a perspective, a vocabulary that we believe and trust. Tobelieve is to take something ‘‘as,’’ and to proceed with some confidence in our perspective, inorder that we may see and understand. So believing is starting to look a lot like seeing. (PT,57, emphasis in original)

Michael Polanyi calls this ‘‘tacit knowledge’’ and claims that ‘‘to hold suchknowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is somethingthere to be discovered [even if] . . . the anticipation of discovery, like discovery itself,may turn out to be a delusion.’’17 This trusted knowledge might be consideredto be a form of faith because even ‘‘though we may believe unreservedly in acertain set of truths, there is always the possibility that some other set of truthsmight be the case.’’18 In terms of critical pedagogy, people might not be interestedin critical social change; dialogue might not be most effective in fostering suchchange; and schools might not actually be productive, or even appropriate, sites forsocial critique. But to a critical pedagogue, assumptions such as these often formthe bedrock of one’s entire praxis. Caputo and Polanyi, however, push further,past larger belief/knowledge systems and toward the micro-structures that supportmacro knowledge/belief.

Regarding the alleged divide between reason and faith, Caputo, for his part,does not distinguish between reason and faith as seeing, on the one hand, andnot-quite-seeing, on the other. Instead, ‘‘the distinction between philosophy andtheology is between two kinds of interpretive slants, two kinds of interpretationsthat are inwardly structured by the sort of faith at work in each’’ (PT, 57). JamesFowler calls this ‘‘faithing’’ and argues that ‘‘people differ not so much on thebasis of having faith or not having faith, but in the nature and quality of the‘faithing’ process.’’19 For David Purpel, faith resembles trust, and to reason is toreason ‘‘from a faith.’’20 This trust, as Polanyi might put it, lies in ‘‘the inti-mation of something hidden, [something] which we may yet discover.’’21 This‘‘tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge.’’22 Tacit knowl-edge — that knowing that cannot quite be articulated, that even escapes clearrecognition — informs Polanyi’s well-known phrase, ‘‘we know more than we cantell.’’23

17. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 25.

18. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 440.

19. James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 33, quoted in Purpel, TheMoral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59.

20. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59.

21. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 23.

22. Ibid., 20.

23. Ibid., 4.


Because we cannot necessarily recognize these assumptions, because wecannot clearly reason all the way down without these ‘‘structures of anticipation,’’reason and faith begin to resemble each other. As Caputo puts it,

‘‘seeing as’’ weakens the idea of ‘‘pure seeing’’ defended in the camp of reason and strengthensthe idea of ‘‘seeing in part’’ defended in the camp of faith. ‘‘Seeing as’’ gives faith a larger roleto play in what was hitherto called reason and sends negotiators on both sides of this classicaldebate back to the drawing board. (PT, 56)

Because both reason and faith ‘‘see as,’’ seeing begins to look like believing andbelieving begins to look like seeing (PT, 57). To act, then, from a critical perspectivebased on critical reasoning is a form of practicing or manifesting faith because itis to act while ‘‘looking through a glass darkly.’’

Ultimate Concern

The second standpoint from which to view critical pedagogy as faith is from thestandpoint of ultimate concern. For this part of the discussion, I draw extensivelyfrom Paul Tillich’s book Dynamics of Faith. Tillich held that ‘‘the most ordinarymisinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a lowdegree of evidence’’ (DF, 36). For Tillich, faith is not trust in the truth or existenceof something not seen, such as trust that God exists or belief in the truth ofGod. ‘‘If this is meant,’’ Tillich told us, ‘‘one is speaking of belief rather thanfaith’’ (DF, 36, emphasis in original). In distinguishing faith from belief, Tillichdid not discriminate against belief. Indeed, he claimed that ‘‘without such trustwe could not believe anything except the objects of our immediate experience’’(DF, 37). Instead, Tillich made the case that faith is more than just belief, morethan just trust: ‘‘For faith is more than trust in even the most sacred authority. Itis participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being’’(DF, 37):

Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those whichcondition its existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other living beings,has spiritual concerns — cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, oftenextremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for ahuman life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender ofhim who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have tobe subjected to it or rejected in its name. (DF, 1)

From this perspective, faith and reason are not two different ways of knowing:while Caputo blurs the modernist division between faith and reason, calling bothfaith and reason ‘‘looking through a glass darkly,’’ Tillich insisted that the twobelong to separate realms. Reason involves knowing; faith involves concern. ForTillich, then, faith, properly understood, holds no quarrel with reason:

Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of ourworld, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. Theknowledge of our world (including ourselves as a part of the world) is a matter of inquiry byourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith. (DF, 38)

Critical pedagogy, of course, carries an ultimate concern. According to Kanpol,critical pedagogy ‘‘refers to the means and methods that test and hope to change


the structures of schools that allow inequalities and social injustices.’’24 It isa praxis ‘‘that sees education as a tool for eliminating oppressive relationshipsand conditions.’’25 Its literature carries the rhetoric of ‘‘emancipatory’’ education,‘‘liberatory’’ education, and ‘‘revolutionary’’ education.26

But by no means does critical pedagogy have a single ultimate concern, because,as Joan Wink reminds us, critical pedagogy ‘‘is not easily defined and understoodin a neat little package.’’27 For Peter McLaren, ‘‘critical pedagogy is as diverse asits many adherents.’’28 And for Kanpol, ‘‘its areas of concern can involve anythingto do with schooling and the wider culture.’’29 Patti Lather and Ilan Gur-Ze’eveven refer to critical pedagogies instead of a singular critical pedagogy.30 But evenif critical pedagogy is not narrowly defined, it nonetheless holds ultimate concern.From this perspective, critical pedagogy is faith not because of the blurring betweenfaith and reason or because of critical pedagogy’s heritage in the Catholic Church,but because of its overriding principles and purposes, even if those principlesand purposes might sometimes be expressed differently by different criticalists.Critical pedagogy is faith simply because of the presence of an ultimate concern.

For Tillich, the content of an ultimate concern, though important to anindividual or group, does not affect its definition as faith. While ‘‘there is not faithwithout a content toward which it is directed,’’ the nature of that content does notdetermine whether or not faith exists (DF, 12). Tillich offered numerous examplesof ultimate concern that are directed toward a variety of different content. Forinstance, ‘‘if a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimateconcern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life,family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed’’ (DF,2). In another example, what he called ‘‘more than an example,’’ Tillich wrotethat ‘‘faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately andunconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand,threat and promise’’ (DF, 3). And in what he called ‘‘almost a counter-example,’’Tillich discussed

the ultimate concern with ‘‘success’’ and with social standing and economic power. It is thegod of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate

24. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey,1999), 27.

25. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Movingfrom Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 14.

26. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo Torres, eds., The Critical Pedagogy Reader (New York:Routledge Falmer, 2003); Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Peter McLaren, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy: ALook at the Major Concepts,’’ in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, ed. Darder, Baltodano, and Torres.

27. Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 1.

28. McLaren, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts,’’ 69.

29. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 185.

30. Patti Lather, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,’’ Educational Theory48, no. 4 (1998): 487–497; and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, ‘‘Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,’’ EducationalTheory 48, no. 4 (1998): 463–486.


concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is thesacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. (DF, 4)

One’s ultimate concern transcends fleeting, temporal, or transitory concerns; itreaches to the core of our being. Even a skeptic or an atheist can have faith, because‘‘the despair about truth by the skeptic shows that truth is still his infinite passion.The skeptic, so long as he is a serious skeptic, is not without faith, even thoughit has no concrete content’’ (DF, 22). Thus, an ultimate concern need not beconsidered religious to be ultimate; it must simply be something that concernsone ultimately.

We are driven toward our ultimate concern by, as Tillich put it, ‘‘the passionfor the infinite’’ (DF, 11). This passion is not religious in an institutional sense, butis driven ‘‘by [an] awareness of the infinite to which [we] belong, but which [we do]not own like a possession’’ (DF, 10). It is religious in the sense of longing for unionwith the infinite, for ‘‘that which is really ultimate over against what claims to beultimate but is only preliminary, transitory, finite’’ (DF, 11). The opposite of faith,then, is relativism, which Tillich called ‘‘an attitude in which nothing ultimateis asked for’’ (DF, 65). Tillich’s relativism intensifies commonplace notions ofrelativism, in which things are equal and substitutable, as he seemed to speak toa larger spiritual inertia. If relativism is the opposite of faith, it would seem thatTillich established a continuum of personality: from faith-ful to faith-less. Yet hemade no such argument; indeed, he claimed that people cannot be wholly withoutfaith. Tillich considered faith to be ‘‘an act of the total personality. It happens inthe center of the personal life and includes all its elements. . . . They are all unitedin the act of faith’’ (DF, 4). As such, he went on to argue,

ultimate concern is the integrating center of the personal life. Being without it is beingwithout a center. Such a state, however, can only be approached but never fully reached,because a human being deprived completely of a center would cease to be a human being. Forthis reason one cannot admit that there is any man without an ultimate concern or withoutfaith. (DF, 123)

Because we are human, Tillich seemed to say, we must have an ultimate concern.And because we must have an ultimate concern, because we cannot fully embracerelativism, we must have faith.

Tillich argued that even though the content of faith does not matter for itsdefinition, its content is indicative of the type of faith: ontological or moral, theholiness of being or the holiness of what ought to be. Holiness, in this paradigm,is not reserved for religious symbols or teaching, or for a sort of moral perfection.Rather, ‘‘what concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holyis awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our ultimateconcern’’ (DF, 14). The holy is the longing for a higher power, not necessarilyin terms of purpose, but certainly in terms of meaning. ‘‘The feeling of beingconsumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of man’s relationto the holy’’ (DF, 15). In ontological faith, ‘‘the holy is first of all experiencedas present’’ (DF, 66). In moral faith, holiness is experienced as a feeling of what‘‘ought to be.’’ But let us not draw too wide a distinction between these types offaith, for ‘‘there are always elements of the one type within the other’’ (DF, 80).


Critical pedagogy embodies both types of faith. Tillich described a humanistvariant of ontological faith: ‘‘For humanism the divine is manifest in the human;the ultimate concern of man is man’’ (DF, 72). This faith is secular in that it doesnot try to transcend the limits of humanity, ‘‘belonging to the ordinary process ofevents, not going beside it or beyond it into a sanctuary’’ (DF, 72). Tillich explainedsecular humanist faith:

Often people say that they are secular, that they live outside the doors of the temple, andconsequently that they are without faith! But if one asks them whether they are without anultimate concern, without something which they take as unconditionally serious, they wouldstrongly deny this. And in denying that they are without an ultimate concern, they affirmthat they are in a state of faith. (DF, 73)

Critical pedagogy embodies an ontological secular humanist faith in its concern forpeople’s actual lived experiences. Critical pedagogy struggles with life as it is, withmanifest realities. As Kincheloe writes, ‘‘critical pedagogy should never, neverlose sight of its central concern with human suffering.’’31 Even the sometimesheavily theoretical emphasis of critical pedagogy bridges theory to that which ismanifest, in that critical pedagogy ‘‘must always be connecting to the reality ofhuman suffering and the effort to eradicate it.’’32

Yet, critical pedagogy also emphasizes what ought to be; thus, here we canconnect it to what Tillich called an ethical moral faith. This faith, even its modernhumanist iterations, has roots in ‘‘Old Testament Judaism,’’ and it demands justice.For this faith, ‘‘the experience of the holiness of being has never overwhelmed theexperience of the holiness of ‘ought to be’’’ (DF, 77). This faith emphasizes ‘‘thelaw of justice and righteousness.’’ As Tillich put it, ‘‘modern humanism, especiallysince the eighteenth century, rests on a Christian foundation and includes thedominant emphasis on the ‘ought to be,’ as elaborated by the Jewish prophets’’(DF, 78). Tillich went so far as to link revolutionary proletarian movements to thismoral faith:

Their faith was humanist faith, expressing itself in secular more than in religious terms. Itwas faith and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of reasonunited with justice and truth. The dynamics of their humanist faith changed the face of theworld, first in the West, then also in the East. It is this humanist faith of the moral type whichwas taken over by the revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. (DF, 79)

Tillich’s history situates this angle of faith within a broad landscape, one thathelps create a fuller context from which to analyze, and possibly enact, criticalpedagogy.

Religious Faith

From a third, and quite different, perspective, critical pedagogy can also beseen as reflecting or manifesting as religious faith in action. Perhaps the strongestand most well-known connection of critical pedagogy with religious faith comesfrom Paulo Freire. Stenberg claims that ‘‘those of us who espouse critical pedagogy

31. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 12.

32. Ibid.


and embrace Paulo Freire’s visions of praxis and conscientization work out of atradition, often unknowingly, with deep ties to religious faith.’’33 And as NicholasBurbules writes, ‘‘Many have noted the strong link between Freire’s theology, hispersonality, and his political practice; and from his earliest writings overt religiousallusions and analogies can be found.’’34 Peter Jarvis, for example, ‘‘locates Freirewithin the prophetic tradition of the Christian church,’’35 and according to GillianCooper, ‘‘Freire not only uses theological language, but also acknowledges theinfluence on his thinking of the Roman Catholic Church of his Latin Americanbackground.’’36 Yet, according to Priscilla Perkins, Freire’s religious influences areoften overlooked or ignored by criticalists.37 Indeed, ‘‘many on the educationalleft are uncomfortable talking about any form of spirituality, especially regardingschools.’’38 For Cooper, this results in a misuse of Freire’s philosophy: ‘‘thoseMarxist or socialist educators who adopt Freire’s philosophy miss one importantelement of it, namely the influence of Christianity; conversely, Christian educatorsdownplay his Marxism and simplify his Christianity.’’39

Freire’s Christianity has roots in liberation theology, arising from what hecalled the prophetic church. Unlike the traditional church and the modernizingchurch, which, according to Freire, alienate the oppressed social classes by either‘‘encouraging them to view the world as evil’’ or by ‘‘defending the reformsthat maintain the status quo,’’ the prophetic church ‘‘rejects do-goodism andpalliative reforms in order to commit itself to the dominated social classesand to radical social change’’ (PE, 136 and 137). Like critical pedagogy, ‘‘theprophetic church demands a critical analysis of the social structures in which theconflict takes place’’ (PE, 138). Within this prophetic church, ‘‘the theology ofso-called development gives way to the theology of liberation — a prophetic,utopian theology, full of hope’’ (PE, 139). Thus, Freire ‘‘roots the religiousstruggle for faith and the political struggle for liberation in the same momentand the same set of events — the historical reality of conscientization for politicalinvolvement.’’40

Liberation theology is an expression of a ‘‘resolute process that is changing thecondition of the poor and oppressed of this world.’’41 It is ‘‘an attempt to help the

33. Stenberg, ‘‘Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies,’’ 271.

34. Burbules, ‘‘Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy,’’ 206.

35. Peter Jarvis, ‘‘Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement,’’ Convergence20, no. 2 (1987): 31.

36. Gillian Cooper, ‘‘Freire and Theology,’’ Studies in the Education of Adults 27, no. 1 (1995): 68–78.

37. Priscilla Perkins, ‘‘A Radical Conversion of Mind: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the MetanoicClassroom,’’ College English 63, no. 5 (2001): 585–611.

38. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 2 (emphasis in original).

39. Cooper, ‘‘Freire and Theology.’’

40. James Fraser, ‘‘Love and History in the Work of Paulo Freire,’’ in Mentoring the Mentor: A CriticalDialogue with Paulo Freire, ed. Paulo Freire (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 194.

41. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, xxi.


poor interpret their own faith in a new way’’; at the same time, it is a critique ofeconomic and social structures and ideologies that justify inequality.42 Growingfrom the efforts of Latin American clergy to effect social change on behalf of thepoor and dispossessed, liberation theology has been called ‘‘an interpretation ofChristian faith out of the experience of the poor.’’43 In the 1970s and 1980s, LatinAmerican Catholic priests, nuns, and lay activists interested in advocating for thepoor and in directly challenging structural inequalities drew a model for engagingwith the poor from Freire’s concept of conscientazacao: ‘‘As church people becameaware of the method and spirit of concientizacion (in the Spanish), they came to seeit as fitting very neatly into the emerging sense of how the church should opt for thepoor.’’44 As these elements in the Church renewed and revitalized their advocacyfor the poor, bishops began ‘‘calling for a ‘liberating education,’ and stating thateducation should be ‘democratized.’ Education should not mean incorporatingpeople into existing cultural structures but ‘giving them the means so that theycan be the agents of their own progress.’’’45 Thus, liberation theology ‘‘sought tocarry out the Church’s mission by showing the lot of the poor and engaging themin a process of evangelization that would develop a critical consciousness.’’46

Some of Freire’s writings make explicit connections to Christianity andChristian faith, citing his Christian background as an early powerful influenceon his thinking. Freire described an early experience that illustrates the rootsconnecting his faith and his activism:

I remember that when I was 6 years old, one day I was talking with my father and mymother, and I protested strongly against the way my grandmother had treated a black womanat home — not with physical violence, but with undoubtedly racial prejudice. I said to mymother and to my father that I couldn’t understand that, not maybe with formal speech I amusing now, but I was underlining for me the impossibility of being a Christian and at the sametime discriminating against another person for any reason.47

He explained further, regarding his later activism, that ‘‘when I went first tomeet with workers and peasants in Recife’s slums, to teach them and to learnfrom them, I have to confess that I did that pushed by my Christian faith.’’ Thisbeginning, being pushed by faith to advocate for the poor, might be considered aform of mission, reflected in Freire’s statement that ‘‘I have to say that I wentfirst as if I had been sent.’’48 In fact, Freire claimed little distinction between hisChristian faith and his revolutionary ambitions:

Being a Christian, a revolutionary; these are very close. It assumes a totality of humility oftelling me that I am a man trying to become a Christian; I am a Christian trying to become

42. Berryman, Liberation Theology, 5.

43. Ibid., 4.

44. Ibid., 37.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 38.

47. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 243.

48. Ibid., 245.


a revolutionary. I am a Christian revolutionary or a revolutionary Christian because I knowwhat I want to become.49

Yet, in other writings, he maintained a role for spirituality, but did notnecessarily emphasize those early Christian influences,50 even, as Peter Robertsclaims, ‘‘feeling a certain discomfort in doing so.’’51 Thus, Freire did not advocate aproselytizing faith, but rather ‘‘interpreted the Gospels as a call to social action.’’52

He claimed that ‘‘if you ask me, then, if I am a religious man, I say no, I’m not areligious man. They understand religious as religion-like. I would say that I am aman of faith.’’53 Indeed, Freire wrote as a man of faith influenced by early Christianexperiences, but not interested in a static, institutional religion. Instead, his seemsto be a religion of the street and of the slum, with a prophetic investment inthe historical material reality of the poor and oppressed. As Henry Giroux writes,Freire’s faith ‘‘is informed by the memory of the oppressed’’ and by ‘‘suffering thatmust not be allowed to continue.’’54

Freire could hold simultaneous conversations with both Christ and Marx,‘‘always [speaking] to them both in a very loving way.’’55 Freire’s optimismabout human nature, and his faith in its worth, are not only Marxist butalso Christian.56 While the Marxist influence in Freire’s philosophy receivesconsiderable attention, it is important to remember these early Christian, pre-Marxist influences. Freire’s use of the language of Easter and of Exodus istelling: when we look behind the Marxist influence, we find these religiousideas of rebirth and of leading out informing critical notions of transformation andemancipation.

For Freire, ‘‘liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one[, which] . . . bringsinto the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, buthuman in the process of achieving freedom.’’57 He noted further that ‘‘Conversionto the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on anew form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.’’58 This processof transformation is ‘‘based not on miraculous revelation or shallow ‘quick fix’solutions but on a complex, difficult and often lengthy process of critical reflection,

49. Margaret Costigan, ‘‘‘You Have the Third World Inside You’: Conversation by Paulo Freire,’’Convergence 16, no. 4 (1983): 37 (emphasis in original).

50. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

51. Peter Roberts, ‘‘Education, Death, and Awakening: Hesse, Freire and the Process of Transformation,’’International Journal of Lifelong Education 28, no. 1 (2009): 7.

52. Ibid.

53. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 246.

54. Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (New York: Berginand Garvey, 1988), 113.

55. Ibid., 246.

56. Cooper, Freire and Theology.

57. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 31.

58. Ibid., 43.


dialogue and social action.’’59 This is not simply the Easter of sacraments andliturgy. It is the Easter that

results in the changing of consciousness, [which] must be existentially experienced. The realEaster is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easterof rhetoric is dead — with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historicalpraxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible. (PE, 123)

This Easter signifies a transformation that ‘‘means a deep change in theconsciousness of teachers; a shift that goes beyond mere commemorative rhetoricto a genuinely transformative, biophiliac (life-loving) process of educationalresurrection.’’60 In this Easter, Freire held, ‘‘you have more and more to dieas an elitist mind in order to be born as a popular mind.’’61

Yet when Freire claimed that the prophetic church invites the oppressed ‘‘toa new Exodus’’ (PE, 139), he was, of course, not suggesting that criticalists — oreven the church — can or should act like a modern-day Moses leading the Jewsout of Egypt. Because as he stressed again and again, ‘‘revolutionary leaders cannotthink without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.’’62 Thus,the faith in Freire’s writings is a dialectical faith, a dialectical worlding in whichthe world is named in the word, which, once named, ‘‘reappears to the namersas a problem and requires of them a new naming.’’63 Language, here, becomesa world-builder. In reading the word, we also read the world, because in readingthe word, ‘‘we read the world in which these words exist.’’64 But in reading theword-world, we are presented with the problem of renaming the world with newwords, thus building new worlds. We change the world through the conscious,practical work of writing and rewriting the word-world.65 As Jarvis writes,

Hence, for Freire, the idea of development is grounded in a theological understanding of theworld and of humankind. Any theory, or action, that does not allow the individual humanityshould be avoided. The destiny of the person is to be involved with the Divine in the creationof a new world.66

Giroux has called this a language of possibility, one ‘‘linked to forms of selfand social empowerment that embrace the struggle to develop active forms ofcommunity life around the principles of equality and democracy.’’67

Freire positioned critical ethics, what he called a ‘‘universal human ethic,’’ asa critical genesis: ‘‘I speak of a universal human ethic in the same way I speak of

59. Roberts, ‘‘Education, Death, and Awakening,’’ 66.

60. Ibid.

61. Costigan, ‘‘‘You Have the Third World Inside You’,’’ 37 (emphasis in original).


63. Ibid., 69 (emphasis in original).

64. Paulo Freire, ‘‘A Response,’’ in Mentoring the Mentor, ed. Freire, 304.

65. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley,Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987).

66. Jarvis, ‘‘Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement,’’ 36.

67. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals, 135.


humanity’s ontological vocation, which calls us out of and beyond ourselves.’’68

To be world-builders is first to recognize and then to act from that recognitionas historically conditioned subjects: ‘‘Insofar as I am a conscious presence in theworld, I cannot hope to escape my responsibility for my action in the world.’’69

In this theological position, each of us is not only responsible for our actions, butis called by our presence in the world to partner with the Divine to continuallyrecreate the world. But notice how Freire evinced little or no interest in exactlyquantifying what that Divine is, for, again, that would lead us into a reductionismhe abhorred. Instead, the theology of critical ethics emphasizes ontology anddevelopment, the flux between being and becoming:

It is in our becoming that we constitute our being so. Because the condition of becoming is thecondition of being. In addition, it is not possible to imagine the human condition disconnectedfrom the ethical condition. Because to be disconnected from it or to regard it as irrelevantconstitutes for us women and men a transgression.70

A transgression from what? From humanization, ‘‘people’s historical vocation.’’71

Faith in Freirean praxis, though religiously influenced, seeks no liturgicalvalidation or mandate. It is faith from and in the ontological vocation ofhuman development. It is Easter and Exodus manifested as transformation andemancipation.

Interconnectedness of Faith

The interconnectedness of critical faith lies not in finding elements of, say,Tillich in Caputo or Freire in Tillich, although I believe these connections exist.Rather, these elements of faith interconnect in how they inform our positions oncritical pedagogy — in our deciding what critical pedagogy means. The precedingdiscussion is not intended to suggest clear, independent divisions between thesethree elements of faith; instead, these elements overlap and intersect. I see Caputo,Tillich, and Freire as positioned at three points of a triangle of critical faith, eachinforming and influencing the others, but each having its own gravity well. Ibelieve these three faith elements inform all of critical pedagogy, perhaps evencontributing to the tension found in the literature among its various positions andinstantiations.

As readers of this journal certainly know, critical pedagogy has long beenin tension with itself. In the language of the faith orientation I present here,this tension seems to exist among its ultimate concern, its religious drive, andits inherently unstable nature. To take one example, in a previous issue ofEducational Theory devoted to the topic of critical pedagogy, Patti Lather writes,‘‘To counter Peter McLaren and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev’s insistence on the ‘right story’of critical pedagogy, I propose a thinking within Jacques Derrida’s ‘ordeal of the

68. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, trans. Patrick Clarke(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 25.

69. Ibid., 26.

70. Ibid., 39.



undecideable’ and its obligation to openness, passage, and non-mastery.’’ WhileLather seeks to ‘‘discipline’’ the ‘‘masculinist voice of abstraction and universalism[in critical pedagogy] . . . with some feminist pedagogy,’’ viewing the tension withincritical pedagogy as a ‘‘boy versus girl thing,’’ I see this more in terms of a tensionof faith.72

It is hard to say just what critical pedagogy is: more materialist? more political?more feminist? more spiritual? more student-centered? In this essay I have alsosituated it all over the map: as solidarity, as transformation, as listening, as ethics.The tension, then, arises in articulating an essence of critical pedagogy, because, itseems to me, we are pulled in various directions by our own particular faith, suchthat perhaps any one rendering of critical pedagogy reflects the tug of one’s owncritical faith. In other words, I find that instances and variations within the criticalpedagogy literature seem to voice positions grounded more in one or the other (ormultiple!) faith elements, while still containing influences from the others.

Let me momentarily engage in a bit of mind reading (albeit with admittedlysuspect clarity) and examine a few selections from that 1998 issue of EducationalTheory in which the authors present substantively different takes on criticalpedagogy. In this issue, Lather, for example, seems to draw more from Caputo,while McLaren and Gur-Ze’ev seem to draw more from Freire. Although I believean engaging debate might be had to deconstruct the faith of various criticalpositions, my intent here is instead to show how these positions might fall, togreater and lesser degrees, within the three gravity wells of faith. In borrowinglanguage from Derrida, Lather speaks to exactly the kind of ‘‘undecideability’’that Caputo references,73 while McLaren and Gur-Ze’ev, on the other hand, speakmore to a material reworlding. Yet, this (arguable) distinction is not absolute,because Lather too seeks a manner of reworlding and McLaren and Gur-Ze’ev alsoacknowledge contingency.74 And each is certainly guided by a sense of ultimateconcern, even if the specific content of those concerns varies. In other words,none of these positions solely inhabits only one of the three faith elements, but,arguably, each draws more strongly from one than the others.

This interconnectedness makes critical pedagogy a risky business. For whilewe might feel the surety and righteousness of our ultimate concerns, Caputodestabilizes our footing, reminding us of our always tenuous stance and the faith

72. See Lather, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities,’’ 488–489; Peter McLaren, ‘‘RevolutionaryPedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times,’’ Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 431–462; and Gur-Ze’ev,‘‘Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy.’’

73. For more on Caputo’s extensive scholarship on Derridean deconstruction, see John Caputo, ThePrayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1997); and John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the HermeneuticProject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

74. I recognize here that Gur-Ze’ev critiques Freire as ‘‘naıve.’’ However, from a faith orientation,Gur-Ze’ev’s argument for ‘‘counter education,’’ in my reading, nonetheless emphasizes the religiousdesire for autonomy and worlding, even as he also pulls from Caputo in intending to ‘‘demystify andnegate any self-evident ‘knowledge.’’’ See Gur-Ze’ev, ‘‘Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,’’ 486.


implicit in our assertions. And while, following Freire, we might feel a passionfor critical proselytizing, Tillich reminds us of the shared nature, and individualvalue, of our ultimate concerns.

Implications and Possibilities

What does this argument mean for critical pedagogy? These elements of criticalfaith — the inbreath of hope, one’s ultimate concern, and a critical Easter andExodus — combine both to differentiate critical pedagogy from other educationaltheories and to instill in it a renewed sense of ethics and humility. This criticalfaith cautions us toward hesitancy, not in our strength of insight, but in ourforce of prescription: ‘‘We must have the courage not only to examine how we asindividuals reflect the values and norms of the culture. As educators we often arethe system, even as we are both its cause and effect.’’75 Thus, one implication forcritical pedagogy is a renewed push for communion: critical pedagogy as ‘‘bordercrossing.’’76 For to make communion with students and teachers is to engage innot merely persuasion, but collaboration. In this reading, critical faith is both anethics of ‘‘ought to be’’ and an ethics of listening. Perhaps by orienting from criticalfaith, critical pedagogues can find ways to situate theory closer to lived praxis inschools and to the immediate values and concerns of teachers and students.

Here I think not in terms of criticalist with criticalist, but of criticalistwith parent or criticalist with uncertain colleague. For parents who mightbalk at ‘‘criticalese’’ still hold ultimate concerns, as do colleagues who careabout educating for democracy but reject Marxist or postmodern or feministcritical analysis. I believe it is at this juncture of faith and communion thatnew possibilities open up for critical pedagogy. This is critical pedagogy astransformation, one that ‘‘starts with the postmodern rupture of difference, butwithin that rupture a vision of faith can transcend theoretical discourses withoutdenying their value. This may lead us toward a higher belief in a spirit that helpsto form a community of faith.’’77

My experience in schools tells me that teachers care about their students. Andthey often value critical analysis. But that analysis must be tangible, even in asense organic. Thus, to begin at a place of faith is to esteem one’s positionalityand one’s a priori values. This is also critical pedagogy as solidarity and a counterto the ‘‘limitations and excesses of a detached critical perspective.’’78 To formcommunion, then, is to meet on a common ground of faith, exploring how ourfaiths converge. As Tillich put it, ‘‘faith is real only in the community of faith,or more precisely, in the communion of a language of faith’’ (DF, 135). If critical

75. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 63.

76. Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York:Routledge, 2005).

77. Kanpol, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology,’’ 116.

78. William Ayers, Gregory Michie, and Amy Rome, ‘‘Embers of Hope: In Search of Meaningful CriticalPedagogy,’’ Teacher Education Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2004): 128.


pedagogy is to be an effective exploder of myths,79 it must begin from this place ofshared faith.

However, orienting critical pedagogy as faith also presents conceptualobstacles. If, as Tillich held, the content of one’s ultimate concern does notdetermine whether or not one has faith, but that simply holding an ultimateconcern is itself indicative of having faith, then, one might reasonably ask, howdoes critical faith differ from, say, the faith implicit within the No Child LeftBehind Act or within the standards movement? The answer lies in the totalityof critical faith. Critical faith is not faith only because it holds an ultimateconcern; it is also faith because of the content of that ultimate concern and,just as importantly, because conceptualizing a critical pedagogy is inherentlyunstable. Thus, while perspectives on education as diametrically opposed ascritical pedagogy and the standards movement both hold an implicit faith, thecontent of those faiths radically diverge. Unlike the standards movement, criticalfaith urges toward transcendence, driven by that spiritual calling to recreate theworld through a critical Easter and Exodus. In this faith, however, is also ahumility, acknowledging that we look through a glass darkly and thus ‘‘reasonfrom a faith,’’ reasoning as much from hope as from critical analysis. This qualitydifferentiates critical pedagogy from other educational discourses, and especiallyfrom essentialist discourses such as the standards movement, for criticalismacknowledges radical contingency: of presence, of interpretation, of context.Therefore, while the religiousness of critical pedagogy reaches toward rebirthand renewal — an evocative reworlding — Caputo pulls it back from, and indeedpast, mere instrumentalism. Kincheloe seems to espouse both this communionand this troubling of outcomes in arguing that ‘‘unless such a position inducesa letting go that moves us to new forms of interconnection and compassion,then critical pedagogy is a sham.’’80 In other words, even as critical faith movesforward, in terms of concern and worlding, it must also turn back on itself, toalways interrogate its own assumptions.

Another obstacle of a faith orientation lies within the idea of faith astranscendence, presenting transcendence as a problem. For many, perhaps mostpeople, faith specifically means religious faith, with all of its accompanyingbaggage. For the religious person, identifying critical pedagogy as faith mightclash with his or her own beliefs about what faith means, perhaps signalingsomething insufficient or even offensive to religious faith. For those who aresuspicious of organized religion and associate faith with those suspicions, a faithorientation might present obstacles of perceived dogmatism and evangelism. Myhope, and a challenge I lay down here, is that fundamentalism on all sides can beovercome, perhaps through listening and patient, respectful engagement. We sawthis possibility in Amy Goodburn’s account: while initially at odds and opposed,

79. Sonia Nieto, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (WhitePlains, New York: Longman, 1996).

80. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 136.


even affronted, by the beliefs expressed by her Christian fundamentalist students,she saw through critical reflection ‘‘more connections than differences betweenthe discourses of fundamentalism and critical pedagogy.’’81 I do not suggest thatcriticalists set aside transformative and emancipatory questions; however, wecan initiate dialogue and action, not in the language of abstract and oftentimesimpositional analysis, but from what we hold most dear.

The problem of communion leads us to yet another implication, and onethat speaks to the question of what constitutes critical pedagogy: the problemof effect. Back in 1996, Kanpol argued that ‘‘a sovereign of possibility must beheld if we are to make serious inroads into the dominant culture.’’82 This isa point worth exploring, because as I believe any examination of schools andschooling will show, and as Tony Knight and Art Pearl have argued, apart fromisolated instances, critical pedagogy is essentially invisible in schools.83 As farback as 1987, scholars struggled to theorize a meaningful critical pedagogy thatmight breathe life in schools.84 Perhaps the persistence of this struggle stems inpart from emphasizing critical pedagogy as something almost entirely other thanthe dominant culture, and thus from the culture (even of the teachers) alreadypresent in schools. Put differently, while people may hold different levels ofawareness, there is no critical self completely separate from the structures andvalues criticalism critiques, no ‘‘repressed or truer self for educators’’ from whichto panoptically diagnose the educational landscape below.85 So while productivecritiques can be made of the forces affecting schools and society, critical pedagogytoo often seems to be articulated as merely another force to affect schools andsociety. My reading of the critical pedagogy literature suggests that there is moredistance than community with the teachers and administrators who run ourschools. Yet, the school reform literature clearly tells us that for any reform ofschool culture to be successful and lasting, teachers must hold it close.86 As

81. Goodburn, ‘‘It’s a Question of Faith,’’ 348.

82. Kanpol, ‘‘Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology,’’ 116.

83. Tony Knight and Art Pearl, ‘‘Democratic Education and Critical Pedagogy,’’ Urban Review 32, no.3 (2000): 197–226.

84. Elizabeth Ellsworth, ‘‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Mythsof Critical Pedagogy,’’ Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297–324.

85. Noah de Lissovoy, ‘‘Staging the Crisis: Teaching, Capital, and the Politics of the Subject,’’ CurriculumInquiry 40, no. 3 (2010): 427.

86. Cheryl Craig, ‘‘The Relationships Between and Among Teachers’ Narrative Knowledge,Communities of Knowing, and School Reform: A Case of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’,’’ Curriculum Inquiry31, no. 3 (2001): 303–331; Cheryl Craig, ‘‘Why Is Dissemination So Difficult? The Nature of TeacherKnowledge and the Spread of Curriculum Reform,’’ American Educational Research Journal 43, no.2 (2006): 257–293; Mary Metz, ‘‘Real School: A Universal Drama Amid Disparate Experience,’’ inEducation Politics for a New Century, ed. Douglas Mitchell and Margaret Goertz (Bristol, Pennsylvania:The Falmer Press, 1989), 75–91; Jonathon Silin and Fran Schwartz, ‘‘Staying Close to the Teacher,’’Teachers College Record 105, no. 8 (2003): 1586–1605; and David Tyack and Larry Cuban, TinkeringToward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress, 1995).


Michael Fullan has observed, ‘‘Educational change depends on what teachers doand think — it’s as simple and as complex as that.’’87 The question for criticalpedagogy, then, is how can it speak to the teacher in the school down the street?

If we take a broad look at education, a heavily Marxist critical pedagogyclearly has little, at best a marginal, influence on schools. Perhaps this resultsfrom the fact that it is often couched in language that only educational scholarscan read. But more likely, I submit, it is because most people, at least in theUnited States, just are not Marxists. Most Americans, it seems to me, believe thestory of progress and perseverance, whether this is mythology or not, and are, evenif they are without capital themselves, capitalists nonetheless. This question ofeffect problematizes reconstructionist, and especially Marxist, end zones and goallines. In other words, is the possibility of critical pedagogy some ‘‘better’’ futuretoward which critical analysis is bent? Or does its possibility lie in the exhaustingof outcomes? Before we ask the instrumental and material question, ‘‘where dowe go from here?’’ we must examine a more foundational question: Is the contentof critical pedagogy a promised land, or is it merciless criticality, methods ofinquiry, and a process of critique that return us, again and again, toward graspingat how we know we know that we know? Put differently, and perhaps too simply,the question of effect asks us whether critical pedagogy is a period or a questionmark. Or can critical pedagogy escape this seemingly fundamental, yet essentiallyarbitrary dichotomy in recreating itself? The possibility for the continued growthand influence of critical pedagogy lies in how this question is answered. It is mybelief that a faith orientation presents new avenues from which to conceptualize acritical pedagogy that escapes this either/or thinking and serves as a foundation forboth communion and transformation while balancing the tension inherent withincritical faith.

87. Michael Fullan, The Meaning of Educational Change (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 115.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Nicholas Burbules, Neil Liss, and the three anonymous reviewers for theirkeen insight in helping me develop this essay.

critical pedagogy and faith

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