IntroductionIt is my belief that perhaps the most significant dimension in the conservative/progressive continuum in public education revolves around the matter of faith in the educability of humanity. At one end of the continuum is the faith that only a very small number of people can be expected to be well educated....At the other end is the idea that all people are capable and desirous of living a life of meaning and that all can be educated to be free and responsible. This is the position that refuses to accept [the] inherent inequality of people....It therefore becomes the task of educators to provide the conditions under which all people can express their full human potential. (Purpel, 1988, p. 10)David Purpel (1988) articulates a major issue as reformers and critics debate the conflicting purposes of United States schooling. Should our schools function as social reproducers of hegemonic interests - that is, maintain the power and control of the socioeconomic elite over the economically disadvantaged? Or should we construct public education to provide equal opportunities for all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender and nationality?Issues like curriculum, public schooling and leadership cannot be discussed outside the language of power, politics and struggle. Thinking about school curriculum as neutral knowledge is naive, according to Apple (1992, pp. 4-11). Legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations and struggles among class, race and religious groups. The fundamental issue is one of power relations: how schools help our elite intellectuals maintain their power over those destined for work positions. When the patterns of minority student school failure are examined, it becomes evident that power relations between minority and majority groups exert a major influence on school performance. There is always a dominant group that controls the institutions and rewards systems within a society. The dominated group is regarded as inherently inferior within the institutional structure of society (Goodlad, 1984).Educators need to create a public space that also speaks to a sense of utopian purpose. This language would refuse to reconcile schooling with forms of tracking, testing and accountability that promote inequality by unconsciously ignoring the cultural attributes of disadvantaged racial and class minorities. According to Henry Giroux, the vocabulary of educational leadership needs a language which actively acknowledges and challenges those forms of pedagogical silences which prevent us from becoming aware of and offended by the structures of oppression at work in both institutional and everyday life. As Giroux (1993) correctly states:Administrators and teachers need a new language capable of asking bold questions and generating more critical spaces open to the process of negotiation, translation and experimentation. At the very least educators need language that is interdisciplinary, moving skillfully among theory, practice and politics. This is a language that makes the issue of power and ethics primary to understanding how schools construct knowledge, identities, and ways of life that promote nurturing and empowering relations. Students need to learn that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory; that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do can count as part of a wider struggle to change the world around them. (Giroux, 1993, pp. 24-25)In my paper I want to argue for a pedagogy of action that not only recognises the importance of complexity and difference but also provides the condition for educators to cross borders, where disparate linguistic, theoretical and political realities meet as part of an ongoing attempt to engage in a continual process of pedagogical negotiation and translation. I contextualise my argument by examining Maxine Greene's (1988) and Paulo Freire's (1968) concept of action as it relates to a pedagogy of transformation. …
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