Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning Book

This book was fantastic being both critical and quite honest with the trouble with critical perspectives (that they can go around in ever tightening circles of despair and not leave room for any reality or hope)

Unlike many criticisms, and criticisms of criticisms that I read this one actually proposed an answer to what it was criticising. Oh it didn't completely join the dots for us (which is an impossible task) but spoke about keeping hope alive, staying complex about culture and agency (instead of identifying victims), staying political and in touch with real people and reality. It said some unpleasant things about academia and the tendency of some types of intellectuals to distract themselves with clever games from actually addressing reality. That is a possible trap for me as I want to learn the academic game to make my life easier. But politically and morally there is a trap there.

Giroux mentioned (of course) Freire, Gramsci, Eagleton and a feminist liberation theologian by the name of Sharon Welch. Soooo fascinating. He talked about suffering and struggle and gave the bad news that struggle will always be (in effect democracy IS struggle). But seeing as how I experience struggle in some ways it was reassuring even if I would like to believe in a future happily ever after fair and ideal society. Giroux in talking about hope and possibility (he talked about possibility a LOT and reclaimed the idea of Utopia for me) links struggle also to happiness. Moral consciousness demands that we enter struggle AND HAPPINESS not just find ways of anaesthatising the pain or becoming so cynical that in effect we are worshipping the despair.

For me this intersected with many examples I could give of great literature, with my experience, with my faith, with everything. I resounded with much of this book.

And I will read Welch ASAP