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Henry Giroux, one of today's leading critical pedagogy scholars, was born on September 18, 1943, in Providence, R.I. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Maine, earned a Masters degree from Appalachian State University, and received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University (1977). From 1968-75, he worked as a high school history teacher in Barrington, R.I. After completion of his graduate studies, he obtained a position as a professor of education at Boston University. He later moved to Miami University in Oxford Ohio, where he was a professor of education and renown scholar in residence. Giroux now serves as Waterbury Chair Professor in Secondary Education at Penn State. Giroux describes his work in this way: "My work has always been informed by the notion that it is imperative to make hope practical and despair unconvincing. My focus is primarily on schools and the roles they play in promoting both success and failure among different classes and groups of students. I am particularly interested in the way in which schools mediate--through both the overt and hidden curricula--those messages and values that serve to privilege some groups at the expense of others. By viewing schools as political and cultural sites as well as instructional institutions, I have tried in my writings to provide educators with the categories and forms of analyses that will help them to become more critical in their pedagogies and more visionary in their purposes. Schools are immensely important sites for constituting subjectivities, and I have and will continue to argue that we need to make them into models of critical learning, civic courage, and active citizenship" (Contemporary Authors). Giroux's early scholarly work in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the promotion of educational reform for radical democracy, but by the early 1990s, Giroux's politics and theoretical orientation shifted. He began to draw upon postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial theories in an attempt to better address issues such as gender, race, sexuality, and age in his scholarship. Giroux also delved into the field of cultural studies, calling for an interdisciplinary approach to education theory that would cross the boundaries of fields like education, literary studies, media studies, and social theory. A major theme in many of Giroux's texts is the media's representations of youth. He argues that youth serve as a scapegoat for many social problems and that they are commodified by our corporate culture. Like Paulo Freire, Giroux believes that educators need to understand their students and to address the contexts of their everyday lives. As such, he argues for a pedagogy that critically examines the media and other cultural artifacts that shape students' cultural contexts but that are nevertheless frequently ignored in classrooms. The media enacts its own invisible pedagogy, constructing representations of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, occupation, age, etc. on the screen. A critical media pedagogy seeks to make visible how and why these representations are constructed, to ask whose interests they serve, and to locate sites of resistance to disabling representations and oppressive cultural narratives. Although Giroux has appropriated some postmodern theoretical concepts, he has not abandoned modernist categories altogether, calling for a reconstruction of modern categories such as democracy, liberation, and social justice, rather than lamenting/celebrating their demise. His work is appealing to many educators because it both critiques modern theory, pedagogy, and politics as well as suggests new alternatives that draw upon both modern and postmodern insights. Rather than ignoring difference, as modernist theory tended to do, or valorizing the endless play of difference, which is characteristic of some postmodernist theory, Giroux affirms difference while simultaneously defending the necessity of finding ways to articulate shared goals and values. Giroux points to the play of identity and difference as opening up possibilities for new and more democratic forms of discourses and practices. Like noted feminist and Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldua, Giroux deploys the metaphor of the border, calling for a "border politics" in which individuals cross the barriers that divide them and struggle together to fight against domination and to promote social change.
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