Toward a “Modest Pedagogy”: Reflections on the Problematics of Critical Pedagogy

The practical implementation of and assumptions underpinning critical pedagogy have taken something of a battering over the last decade of the 20th century. In the field of physical education, the article by O'Sullivan, Siedentop, and Locke (1992) delivered a challenge that deserved to be answered. In education more generally, major voices of critical pedagogy such as Giroux and McLaren have been roundly criticized by feminist scholars such as Gore, Lather, Ellsworth, and Luke. In this paper, I discuss the difficulties of “doing” critical pedagogy with postmodern students. I will consider the advantages of working toward what I am calling a “modest pedagogy” (after Law's modest sociology), which takes seriously the problematization of knowledge and schooling yet avoids some of the pitfalls of Enlightenment thinking and the neglect of student subjectivity.