Critical Theory

As with other professions, early childhood educators can have set views and beliefs that underpin their work and determine what they actually do in practice. Critical theory questions these often taken for granted beliefs about practice prompting teachers to think about whose knowledge is assumed and how this shapes the early childhood curriculum. Questions about how children’s rights are being upheld, as well as their agency are considered important.

Critical theories assist educator’s to expose children’s experiences of learning while acknowledging that there are many different ways of thinking about what counts as knowledge and what might constitute a curriculum. Education can be seen as a way of transforming the world rather than upholding the status quo. This is achieved through rethinking and challenging practice that privileges particular bodies of knowledge and ways of learning over others. The key idea in critical theories is that educators work with children to challenge taken-for-granted experiences and

Paulo Freire worked with illiterate poor people in Brazil, where at the time literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections. During this time he embraced a non-orthodox form of pedagogy, away from one of ‘transmission’ towards a pedagogy of ‘transformation’. One example of his work documents how he taught 300 sugar cane workers to read and write in just 45 days.

He saw traditional forms of education as oppressive and successful in maintaining the ‘status quo’, indeed he saw educational policies and practices as having social implications. They either perpetuate current practices or they can assist people in constructing conditions for more transformative experiences. Brazil, at the time of Freire’s developing ideas, was a society of increasingly large political, social and economic inequalities in which millions of people were excluded from the ranks of power. They were oppressed and remained