Rocking Your World: The Emotional Journey into Critical Discourses

Excerpts from the final chapter: "A Conversation Amongst the Authors," developed as an online discussion about the process and importance of writing for this book. Authors are identified with the title of their corresponding book chapter from this volume:

Wow, FINALLY, a text that will address the emotional and personal struggles - and victories - of teaching a critical pedagogy!...Gaining and sharing insights to the real personal and emotional struggles critical pedagogues feel while engaging in critical teaching is crucial if we want to survive in the academy where academic freedom and promotion and tenure may be at risk simply due to one's ideological position.
Priya Parmar: "The 'Dangers' of teaching a critical pedagogy"

I had a class I taught in the fall ("Diversity in Human Relations") read my piece for this book. It was a risk. Some people thought I was insane to stand in front of a class of students who had just read about these deeply personal, deeply painful experiences of mine. But I thought it was pedagogically important to do so. I ask my students every day to push themselves, take risks, ask questions, and expose themselves. If I'm not prepared to do so myself, then how dare I expect them to?
Liz Meyer: "I am (not) a feminist: Unplugging from the Heterosexual Matrix"

Through my classroom research and teaching of pre-service teachers, I've become increasingly convinced that individual's belief systems and school ideologies inform/influence/construct/create discriminatory practices in schools. I think that intellectual and scholarly rigor and/or critical action are important but I also think that unless people connect their feelings to their thoughts and actions, their ideologies go untroubled and real change can't occur.
Andrea Sterzuk: "From Buffalo Plains to Wheat Fields: Critical thinking in the Canadian praires"

The problem is, it [the affective] is not important- or, it has not been important enough. It is too easy to deny the relevance of me, my life, my history, my being in the context of academia.
Carmen Lavoie: "Activism where I stand: Moving beyond words in graduate education"

To me, critical self-reflection is about accepting that self-understanding and social change go hand in hand (Pinar, 2004); it's about going beyond understanding criticality - it's about living it. And once you start reflecting on yourself critically - and I hope I'm starting to - you might be surprised at the layers of deception that you uncover in yourself. Oh yeah, humility is required. But only then can you start to be more understanding, rather than simply critical, of the duplicity found in others.
Sandra Chang-Kredl: "'My Future Self N' Me:' Currere and childhood fiction in education"

In a faculty of education we often ask undergraduate and graduate students to undergo the type of critical self reflection that comes out in Rocking Your World.... We extol the benefits of critically reflecting to undergraduates because we are adamant it w...