Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. - Paulo Freire Teaching magazine design in a department of journalism presents unique pedagogical challenges, in large part due to the need to grapple with the ideological underpinnings of the graphic design process. Recent critical scholarship indicates that consumer magazine design, in particular, perpetuates hegemonies of race, class and gender in its portrayal of marginalized societal groups; and prominent public controversies-regarding, for example, the photo-illustrations of O.J. Simpson that appeared concomitantly on the covers of Time and Newsweek in 1995 - reflect these concerns. With a view to addressing these important dimensions of design, in this article I outline a new approach to teaching magazine design that incorporates radical pedagogical theories with contemporary issues in visual communication. Scholars of visual communication have recently attempted to develop pedagogical strategies that incorporate a consideration of ethics and culture into the teaching of design. Lester (1995), for example, discusses the symbolic content of images via a framework for analysis that alerts students to the powerful sociopolitical implications of the design process. Lester's approach is significant; an understanding of the politics of design must be the point of departure for teaching design to journalists. We have entered an era in which design can no longer be presented in the classroom as a purely mechanical act, and most teachers of magazine design are aware that the traditional fine-arts focus on aesthetic principles and computer applications must not deflect attention from the ideologically charged and politically significant aspects of designing journalistic publications. But while consciousness-raising is important, it is meaningless unless it can be connected to praxis. This is where current pedagogies of design fall short. Even the newest approaches to the teaching of design do not include radical interventions that would infuse a progressive politics into the conceptualization of publication design, a politics that would combat the hegemonic constructions currently at work in most mainstream consumer magazines. Is there a need for such interventions? In this article, I use the emancipatory theories of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to argue that there is. Admittedly, Freire's philosophies developed from his work with peasants in desperately impoverished circumstances, yet his approach to education has a great deal of resonance in contemporary middle-class America, where oppression exists but is masked and mediated through cultural texts. As Shaull (1994) points out: At first sight, Paulo Freire's method of teaching illiterates in Latin America seems to belong to a different world from that in which we find ourselves in this country ... But there are certain parallels in the two situations that should not be overlooked. Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system ... Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes `the practice of freedom,' the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (pp. 15-16) Magazine designers transform the symbolic world, and critical methods of teaching must be incorporated into the magazine design curriculum in order to develop students' ownership of the sociopolitical potential of their work. This article presents a theoretical and practical framework for developing such a pedagogical practice. After defining the frame via Freire's theoretical principles, I turn to Sandra Harding's concept of standpoint epistemology to develop a teaching method that incorporates social change into the practice of magazine design. …