Educational Inquiry and the Pedagogical Other: On the Politics and Ethics of Researching Critical Public Pedagogies

Following the introduction of cultural studies and critical pedagogy into educational inquiry, researchers and practitioners have taken sharp interest in how forces outside of the walls of educational institutions-forces such as the media (e.g. Burdick, 2009; Dalton, 2006; Macedo and Steinberg, 2007; McCarthy, 1998), the social/material conditions of students’ lives (e.g. Willis, 1981), and the transformation of schools based on public policy/perception shift s (e.g. Roseboro, O’Malley, and Hunt, 2006)-all work to shape, augment, debilitate, and delimit the functioning of schools and their ability to serve as sites of democratic production. Drawing from these studies, as well as the theoretical contributions of critical theory and cultural studies, the term and concept public pedagogy emerged most cogently into the literature in the early 1990s (O’Malley, Burdick, and Sandlin, in press; Sandlin, Milam, O’Malley, and Burdick, 2008) as another way of framing and exploring the educational phenomena occurring outside of schools. Educational researchers interested in public pedagogy no longer need to locate the school as the epicenter of educational activity. Rather, they view public spaces and discourses themselves as innately and pervasively pedagogical.