Critical Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures). The word “critical” in Critical Pedagogy functions in several registers:

• Critical, as in mission-critical, essential;
• Critical, as in literary criticism and critique, providing definitions and interpretation;
• Critical, as in reflective and nuanced thinking about a subject;
• Critical, as in criticizing institutional, corporate, or societal impediments to learning;
• Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inflects (and is inflected by) each of these other meanings.

Our work, the writers say, has wondered at the extent to which Critical Pedagogy translates into digital space.

In short, Critical Digital Pedagogy:

• centers its practice on community and collaboration;
• must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to re-imagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;
• will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;
• must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.

Preface by Audrey Watters. Book available for online reading here