"Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire" incorporates insights about the current effects of global capitalism culled from McLaren and Jaramillo's recent conversations with teachers, scholars and social activists in Colombia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, South Africa, and Venezuela.
UCLA News
Date: January 22, 2007
Contact: Shaena Engle ( engle@gseis.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-5951
Peter L. McLaren, UCLA professor of education, and Nathalia Jaramillo, a doctoral candidate in education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, have recently authored "Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism" (Sense Publishers, 2007), a collection of essays that investigates corporate global capitalism and its relation to education and social movements in the United States and abroad.
The book incorporates insights about the current effects of global capitalism culled from McLaren and Jaramillo's recent conversations with teachers, scholars and social activists in Colombia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, South Africa, and Venezuela, and explores social, political and economic initiatives that primarily affect racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States.
"This book exposes the current condition of neoliberalism that has created stagnating wages, an economic surplus at the top, a persistence of racism and class warfare, and a redistribution of income and wealth toward the upper classes," McLaren said.
Furthermore, McLaren and Jaramillo argue that the primary way to collectively combat social injustice is to create awareness of the need for change.
"It is imperative that we examine alternative visions of what the world should and could look like outside the value form of capital," McLaren said.
Known as one of the leading critical pedagogists in North America, McLaren has written and edited approximately 40 books and monographs on critical pedagogy and multicultural education. His book "Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education" was named one of the 12 most significant writings by foreign authors in the field of educational theory, policy and practice by the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
McLaren lectures around the world, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, German, Catalan, and French. He has presented distinguished lectures at a number of North American universities and continues to speak and write from a trans-disciplinary perspective in the areas of critical pedagogy, multicultural education, critical ethnography and critical theory.
McLaren was the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award, presented by California's Chapman University in April 2002. His body of work as a curriculum theorist has been analyzed in "Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent" (2005), edited by Marc Pruyn and Luis M. Huerta-Charles.
McLaren's most recent books include "Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism" (2006), "Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism and Critical Pedagogy" (2006), "Capitalists and Conquerors: Critical Pedagogy Against Empire" (2005), and "Red Seminars: Radical Excursions Into Educational Theory, Cultural Politics and Pedagogy" (2005).
Jaramillo earned a master's degree in international education policy at Harvard University before pursuing doctoral studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. She has co-authored numerous publications with McLaren, including "Alternative Globalizations: Toward a Critical Globalization Studies" and "A Moveable Fascism: Fear and loathing in the Empire of Sand." She was recently appointed assistant professor of educational studies at Purdue University.
-UCLA-