Does Your Vote Count?: Critical Pedagogy and Democracy (Counterpoints)
Book Details
Author(s)Paul R. Carr
PublisherPeter Lang Publishing Inc.
ISBN / ASIN1433108135
ISBN-139781433108136
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank3,871,404
CategoryEducation
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
The public debate on democracy is often constrained within an alienating and disenfranchising
narrative of opinion polls, campaign platforms, personalities and formal structures
that generate legislation, all of which surreptitiously seems to trickle down to the classroom.
Paul R. Carr asserts that democracy must be cultivated in a vigorous, conscientious, meaningful
and critical way in and through education in order for it to have salience in society,
especially within a neoliberal conjuncture that promotes limited space for epistemological
interrogation of how we understand and are engaged in maintaining and/or transforming
our societies. Building on the critical pedagogical work of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and
others, this book develops a framework for understanding how a thicker democratic education
can be conceptualized and implemented in schools. The book aims to move the focus
on democracy away from voting, and place it more properly on the importance of social
justice and political literacy as a way of understanding what democracy is and, importantly,
how to make it more relevant for all of society. The book concludes that another democracy
is possible, as well as being desirable, and that education is the fundamental intersection
in which it must be developed.
.......
"Paul R. Carr has produced a rich and impressive examination of the multiplicity of relationships
among notions of democratic formation, critical pedagogy, human rights, anti-racism,
and feminist, anti-colonial, political and cultural studies. Drawing from a deep well of intriguing
and eclectic sources..., he moves with clarity and élan between the broad and the
narrow, the general and the specific to capture the power of theory without sacrificing the
nitty-gritty of concrete practice. A balance of possibilities rather than false dualisms will be
found here. Does Your Vote Count? has become an essential contribution to my own work
and teaching."
--Tom Wilson, Chapman University
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