Joe L. Kincheloe - Project For Critical Pedagogy

Project For Critical Pedagogy

Professor Kincheloe founded The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. Under Kincheloe's leadership the Freire Project is creating a global community of researchers and cultural workers in critical pedagogy. Kincheloe is considered one of the leading scholars in critical pedagogy, critical constructivism, the research bricolage, critical multicultural education, and contemporary curriculum discourses. He is the architect of a critical cognitive theory, having developed the notion of a critical postformal educational psychology. Postformalism focuses on exposing the unexamined power relations that shape cognitive theory and educational psychology in a larger liberatory effort to develop a psychology of possibility. Such a critical psychology focuses on typically underestimated human cognitive capacities, the socio-cultural construction of mind, collective intelligence, and the unexplored dimensions of human cognition. Postformalism posits that mainstream psychology has historically dismissed the cognitive abilities of those who fall outside of whiteness, the middle and upper socio-economic classes, dominant colonizing cultures, and patriarchy. In this context critical postformalism becomes a socially transformative psychology.