Pennycook- Critical Approaches

I really liked how Pennycook attempted to critically and thoroughly discuss critical approaches to TESOL in his article. Although he makes the disclaimer that his ideas and their organization are to be very broad, I nonetheless found it very informative and necessary for a pre-service teacher in TESOL to read and become familiar with.

Pennycook first mentions the differing domains that a critical perspective of TESOL may appear in. These include class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, as well as power relations and social and structural inequality (Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed comes to mind here). By incorporating all of these domains into the critical examination, "This reorientation seeks to explore multiple ways in which power may operate in social life; and it shifts the focus away from considering only material conditions of inequality in order to show how culture or discourse may play crucial roles in perpetuating the ways difference is understood, reproduced, or changed" (Pennycook 331-2)