Support of social reconstructivism as a practical educational paradigm often engenders the reification of Critical Theory as Critical Pedagogy. With regard to Critical Pedagogy, McLaren (2009) suggests that knowledge is organic and subjective; that is, he believes that knowledge is the product of an ongoing conversation between members of a given society at a given time. McLaren further asserts that “[c]ritical pedagogy asks how and why knowledge gets constructed the way it does, and how and why some constructions of reality are legitimated and celebrated by the dominant culture while others clearly are not” (p. 63).
McLaren delves deeper into the subgroups of knowledge and suggests that emancipatory knowledge is often utilized by critical educators to bring to parity quantifiable knowledge and analytical knowledge and, in so doing, create “the foundation for social justice, equality, and empowerment” (p. 64).
McLaren goes on to point out that Critical Pedagogy is a tool by which educators self-critically analyze modes of thought generation and dominant discourse in an effort to expose power asymmetries and their manifestation in school curricula with particular regard to notions of cultural capital. He suggests that “[s]tudents from the dominant culture inherit substantially different cultural capital than do economically disadvantaged students, and schools generally value and reward those who exhibit that dominant cultural capital” (p. 81). He further explains that students who subscribe to the subordinate class culture often find that the cultural capital that they inherit from such an oppressed culture holds very little value as a social currency within schools that systematically devalue that said cultural capital. As such, in McLaren’s view:
Cultural capital is reflective of material capital and replaces it as a form of symbolic currency that enters into the exchange system of the school. Cultural capital is therefore symbolic of the social structure’s economic force and becomes in itself a productive force in the reproduction of social relations under capitalism. Academic performance represents, therefore, not individual competence or the lack of ability on the part of disadvantaged students but the school’s depreciation of their cultural capital. The end result is that the school’s academic credentials remain indissolubly linked to an unjust system of trading in cultural capital which is eventually transformed into economic capital, as working-class students become less likely to get high-paying jobs. (p. 81)
References:
McLaren, P. (2009). Critical pedagogy: a look at the major concepts. In A. Darder, M.P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 61-83) New York, NY: Routledge.
Social Justice in Education 