Abstract
Introduction
This special issue began as a book review symposium, which attracted so much interest and sustained engagement from its contributors that the decision was made to expand the format to allow for a more dynamic response to Peter McLaren’s The Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. As the special issue developed it became clear that a number of the contributors engaging with McLaren’s text found both resonances and productive dissonances between their own thinking and McLaren’s position. In ‘Pedagogy of Hate’ Mike Neary points to the problematic absence of ‘hate’ in McLaren’s book, contesting that it weakens the dialectical force of his thinking. Simon Boxley finds McLaren’s utilisation of Christianity intellectually and strategically challenging, putting into question the necessity of religious faith in critical educational thought as well as the specific prioritisation of (a very particular version of) Christianity over other spiritual beliefs and ethical dispositions, despite McLaren’s professed ecumenicism. John Baldacchino offers a reading of McLaren which positions him amongst contemporary and canonical philosophers and political theorists, carefully analysing and pointing out the strengths and weaknesses in the structural integrity of McLaren’s methodology and programme. James Kirylo, on the other hand, is more fully convinced by the love and hope he finds at the core of both critical pedagogy and liberation theology. Mike Cole and Alpesh Maisuria’s article engages less directly with McLaren but traverses much of the same territory, as well as offering Mike Neary and Gary Saunders’ concept and practice of the ‘student as producer’ as one possible contribution to current educational and social ills. Curry Malott’s review provides a rationale for the imminent political and educational significance of McLaren’s text to political discourse and social practice, while Samuel Fassbinder’s review marks out The Pedagogy of Insurrection as an insurrection against our current reality. Central also to this special issue is Petar Jandrić’s long interview with Peter McLaren, which explores many of the nuanced and complex positions developed in The Pedagogy of Insurrection in great detail. The interview also continues McLaren’s ongoing exegetical readings of a broad range of Marxist and Christian texts.
While McLaren’s book title implies that it offers ‘the’ pedagogy of insurrection, this special issue aims to show that there are, in fact, many; even within a group of authors at least broadly receptive to many of McLaren’s key principles. Equally, while being primarily focused on engagements with McLaren’s book, I would hope that this special issue provokes and opens a path to thinking and articulating other possible pedagogies of insurrection, perhaps even outside of the more obvious remit of critical pedagogy. Why and how might we develop our own individually and contextually specific pedagogies of insurrection? What opportunities might a less globally and more locally ambitious pedagogy of insurrection offer? Might there even be pedagogies of insurrection which target the very idea of education itself?