During an interview, Paulo Freire described his pedagogy as a “pedagogy of happiness, laughter, of questioning, or curiosity, of seeing the future through the present, a pedagogy that believes in the possibility of the transformation of the world” (McLaren, 2007, p. 320).

Last Friday, while visiting my parents in New York, I made a quick stop at my favorite clothing store (Ann Taylor Loft) while I was waiting for my folks to get home from work. Luckily, ATL was having one of its fabulous sales, and I found a beautiful, turquoise, empire waist dress that fit me perfectly AND had been marked down from $79.99 to $29.99. What a find! I brought it up to the register, the sales woman rang it up, and to my wonderous surprise, the dress rang up at only $11.19—BONUS!

I am excited to have been invited by Joe and Shirley to do a blog as part of this important virtual community. The focus of my blog will be on rethinking critical pedagogy. I take it as basic that any tradition must be able to fundamentally examine its assumptions in response to changing historical conditions; of course it is often easier not to do so. But if critical pedagogy is to remain vital, it has to be able to interrogate itself in a sustained manner. In this first blog I want to suggest a few reasons why such a rethinking is in order in the present.