Giroux's critical pedagogy is a program of rhetorical education in which pedagogy is a form of cultural production¶

Theory · All theories
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The paper interprets Henry Giroux's critical pedagogy as explicitly rhetorical education. Giroux defines pedagogy as "a configuration of textual, verbal, and visual practices that seek to engage the processes through which people understand themselves and the ways in which they engage others and their environment." The paper concludes that "critical pedagogy, as defined by Henry Giroux, is a program of rhetorical education": students must learn how a culture establishes and enforces its norms and how individuals negotiate their role in cultural production. The paper uses this framework to derive six operationalizations for the basic speech course.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Instruction must go beyond developing a liberal or inclusive curriculum to teach students to recognize how social relationships are formed and maintained through discourse

Constraints¶

• The framework is presented as one interpretation of Giroux's literature, not an empirically tested model

Target Learners¶

• undergraduate students in the basic communication course

Target Learning Objectives¶

• understanding how culture establishes, maintains, and enforces discourse norms
• finding a voice to participate in rhetorical exchange

Claims¶

Related Theories¶

• Critical pedagogy as an emancipatory framework contrasting with Freire's banking model of education

Examples¶

• The basic course should teach canonicity — how communities standardize and enforce discourse — rather than the canon itself
• The basic course should teach rhetorics — multiple voices and how communities create public spheres — rather than a single rhetoric

Key Sources¶

• Cyphert, Dale. (1996). Taking the Helm in Critical Pedagogy: The Basic Speech Curriculum as an Operationalization of the Paradigm. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED403616