Knowledge Production and Power in an Online Critical Multicultural Teacher Education Course

Abstract

This reflexive inquiry explores a teacher educator’s efforts to design opportunities for students to use their knowledge of social media and the Internet to contribute content to their online critical multicultural education course. Findings identify steps critical multicultural education pedagogues can take to design such opportunities: (a) identify contradictions in their practice, (b) take pedagogical risks, and (c) work with chronic tensions. Designing formal opportunities for students to identify and use content from social media and the Internet as learning resources and curricular content for critical multicultural education shifted the power relations in the course. These results demonstrate the potential of critical pedagogy online to create new practices of shared knowledge construction, expertise, and authority, and to address the call for research into the potential of online environments to foster critical pedagogy.