Critical Practitioner-Scholars

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Series editors: Barry Down and Robert Hattam

 

The new educator must be awake, critical, open to the world. It is an honour and responsibility to be a teacher in such dark times – and to imagine, and to act on what we imagine, what we believe ought at last to be(Greene, 2005, p. 80).

 

Critical Practitioner-Scholars series calls for a new kind of educator committed to challenging the existing social order, questioning dominant discourses, confronting injustices and reconstructing socially just alternatives. Critical practitioner-scholars show a willingness to interrupt, in a systematic, scholarly and rigorous way, those common sense beliefs, habits, routines, behaviours, assumptions and values which sustain the way things are. These critical practitioner-scholars engage in forms of critical self-reflection, social criticism, emancipatory learning, and critical consciousness by making everyday categories and practices problematic. 

 

This series draws on Paulo Freire’s vision of a more humanizing education based on the values of democracy, curiosity, equality, respect, freedom, compassion, civic responsibility and activism. Critical practitioner-scholars see their work as part of this larger critical democratic project within and across local and global contexts. These knowledge workers, as Kincheloe (2002) describes them, seek to ‘research, interpret, expose embedded values and political interests, and produce their own knowledge’ (p. 241). In doing so, they ask more probing kinds of questions about what kind of knowledge should be taught and how it should be taught. 

 

Critical Practitioner-Scholars provides space for sharing critiques of contemporary policy regimes that are undermining the professional autonomy of educators and for articulating alternative visions and practices for teachers, educational leaders, academics, social workers and community activists.