Following the launch of the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy as part of Liverpool Hope’s Centre for Education and Policy Analysis seminar series, Dr Naomi Hodgson, Dr Joris Vlieghe, and Dr Piotr Zamojski developed this in to a book project, published this month by Punctum Books.
The post-critical perspective invites a shift from a critical pedagogy premised on revealing what is wrong with the world and using education to solve it, to an affirmative stance that acknowledges what is educational in our existing practices. It is focused on what we do and what we can do, if we approach education with love for the world and acknowledge that education is based on hope in the present, rather than on optimism for an eternally deferred future.
The Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy sets out five principles that make manifest those educational practices that do exist today and that we wish to defend. The “Manifesto” also acts as a provocation, to start a conversation about what this means for research, pedagogy, and our relation to our children, each other, and the world.
The book presents not only the “Manifesto” but also six responses, by a range of international educationalists from philosophy, history, and sociology, and a conversation between the three authors in which they take up the questions posed by the respondents.
You can read an excerpt from the book via the Punctum Books website, where you can also purchase a hard copy, or an e-version. Punctum Books operates a graduated open access policy, and so the ebook will be fully open access in six months’ time. The authors are grateful to Liverpool Hope’s Higher Education Impact Fund, which provided support towards the cost of maintaining this, and other books, in open access in perpetuity.