Critical Education: The Politics of Food

Abstract

This chapter examines the possibilities and challenges of using critical pedagogy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Giroux, 2011) to promote student engagement with academic conversations about the modern food system. It specifically focuses on the first unit of an academic writing module on food politics which introduces students to key concepts and debates surrounding mass production, international trade and food (in)security. As they work through different ideas and viewpoints, students are encouraged to think about knowledge production as necessarily contextual, ideological and contestable and to make connections between academic arguments and issues of power, structural inequality and social justice in the real world (Canagarajah, 2002; Giroux, 2004, 2011). In the context of the Singapore classroom, this also involves initiating difficult conversations about “systemic privilege” and the discourses and identities that maintain it as a first step toward developing a critical perspective (Allen & Rossatto, 2009). The chapter illustrates how source selection, scaffolded reading strategies and classroom interactions generate both consensus and conflict (Trimbur, 1989) as students make the transition from reading primarily for information to reading in order to make politically and ethically informed judgments about critical issues in preparation to draft their first writing assignment—a reflective summary. It also engages with questions of authority in the classroom. The author argues that for critical pedagogy to be effective, the teacher must be attentive to the ways her own positions influence classroom interactions and be willing to subject them to rigorous discussion and scrutiny even as students are invited to do the same.