Breaking the Silence within Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

There is a wide and rich scientific literature about Gender Violence (GV) in diverse institutions and contexts, now including Isolating Gender Violence (IGV). However, there is an almost absolute silence about GV and IGV within the field of critical pedagogy despite its pretention to influence children’s education. This paper is part of a long research program on GV and presents the first evidence about its existence within critical pedagogy. The communicative methodology of this research has included interviews to 15 authors of critical pedagogy and 1 discussion group. The gender dimension is key in this research, most lists of outstanding critical pedagogists include only white males and most of them from North America, in this research there are 15 women of the 21 interviewees and diverse gender options and cultures are represented. The results clearly show that, as in any other social institutions and domains, within critical pedagogy there are upstanders against GV, those who maintain a guilty silence and harassers making direct GV and/or IGV.