Emancipatory pedagogy: a postcritical response to ‘standard’ school knowledge

Abstract

The paper articulates a postcritical perspective on school knowledge that can inform classroom praxis. The paper explains how the use of a master‐scripted, Eurocentric ‘standard’ over years of schooling has the power to limit the life chances of students because of supremacist codes embedded in language, conduct and pedagogy. An emacipatory response to such hegemony‐bearing school narratives and practices is suggested: expose students, who are centred as critical agents, to curricula and problem‐posing pedagogy that are more fully and indigenously voiced; use multiple forms of epistemology to contest dominant patterns of knowledge formation, dissemination, and perpetuation; and replace them with patterns that are multi‐perspectival and antithetical to privileging relations of power. An in‐depth example of such emacipatory praxis is provided through an analysis and rewriting of a piece of standard US fifth grade social studies around the revolutionary figure of Crispus Attucks. Suggestions are made for constructing a question‐driven pedagogy to teach the rewritten text in which African American and Indigenous peoples become subjects of their own narratives rather than objects of dominant, self‐serving and indifferent narratives about them.