Critical Pedagogy

First off, I loved this article.  I know this is going to sound cheesy and ridiculous, but I don't care.  When I read this article, I felt like I had found a home.  The topic of this article is largely why I decided to leave academia to go back to school to get certified to teach high school.  Clearly, the article is written from a sociological perspective (which is why I love it).  This perspective is something that I have been teaching my students on the college level.  At some point last year, while I was teaching a book that discusses the hidden curriculum at a public school in California, I realized that rather than teaching *about* this idea, I wanted to become a high school teacher so that I could try to enact change based on this idea.  

This is why I am here.  I understand that knowledge is socially constructed.  I agree that what we recognize as knowledge and learn in classrooms has been constructed through a lens of power and frequently perpetuates inequalities and reinforces hegemonic power relationships. If we want to effect change, if we want to eradicate inequality, we have to change how knowledge is constructed and communicated.  This is overwhelming.  So the question that presents itself is this:  This is an interesting theory, but what can we DO about it?  It's such a huge, all encompassing issue.  First, we must make sure that our curriculum represents multiple perspective so that we don't privilege one construction of knowledge over another. For teaching history, this means including a lot of primary sources and making sure these primary sources reflect multiple perspectives.  It's about teaching critical thinking skills, more than just data.  Perhaps, the most important thing we can do as teachers is to teach our students to challenge knowledge, to think critically about it, and even to think critically about what we teach them.