Joe L. Kincheloe, a prolific scholar, tireless teacher and mentor,
irrepressible musician, and leading figure in the critical pedagogy
movement, died on December 19, 2008, after suffering a heart attack
while on vacation in Jamaica.
Joe, as he preferred to be addressed, was the Canada Research Chair in
Critical Pedagogy in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education
at McGill University. During his time at McGill, he and Shirley
Steinberg founded the Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for
Critical Pedagogy (http://freire.mcgill.ca/),
which has established itself as a leading archival and coordinating
centre for a global research initiative that works with teachers and
students to improve the contribution that education makes to social
justice and the democratic quality of people's lives.
Joe played a formative role in the development of critical pedagogy,
which is a fusion of Critical Theory, arising out of the Frankfurt
School, Antonio Gramsci, and others, and the radical democratic
pedagogy of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Over the course of 50
books, including Teachers as Researchers and Kinderculture, and
countless articles, Joe systematically uncovered the ways in which
institutional influences in the construction and representation of
knowledge, identity, and culture were badly serving certain
populations. By developing a politically sensitive approach to the
cognitive sciences, he was able to adeptly demonstrate how a number of
the leading ideas currently at play within education, such as standards
and intelligence, were being used unconsciously or knowingly to
undermine basic democratic principles in ways that, he made clear, the
schools could both study and address.
Such work was necessary in order, as Joe wrote at one point, "to build
an ethical sense on which [people] can build humane and evolving
institutions," and in setting out the grounds for such reconstructive
work, he was as likely to make use of the democratic philosophy of John
Dewey, as the constructivist psychology of Lev Vygotsky. He drew on a
vast range of figures and traditions, in a richly eclectic research
methodology that he identified as bricolage, which was rooted in a
self-reflective and self-critical grasp of "the relationship between a
researcher's ways of seeing and the social location of his or her
personal history." It was the rigor of critical vigilance that he
brought to his writing, as well as to his teaching and his
collaboration with educators in the schools.
Joe was born in what he described as "the mountains of East
Tennessee... in a very poor area of Sullivan County." Growing up among
"grotesque forms of classism and racism in the South of the 1950s and
1960s," he soon found a means, while still in high school, to bring
people together and move them as a blues musician and songwriter. His
song lyrics were to grow sharply satirical and political over the years
-Tom Lehrer meets Phil Ochs and Greg Allman - finding their raspy
soulful expression, most recently, with Tony and the Hegemones, which
has been playing the North American educational conference circuit
since 1998. It was in Tennessee that he also had his start as a
teacher, sharing with middle-school students the quirky counterculture
stories of Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins, and with fellow teachers
workshops on themes such as teaching "third-world" geography.
Prior to coming to McGill in 2006, Joe had held positions at CUNY,
including the Belle Zeller Chair of Public Policy and Administration,
Pennsylvania State University, Florida International University,
Louisiana State University at Shreveport, and, perhaps most
influentially, an initial posting as Education Department Chair at
Sinte Gleska College in the Rosebud Sioux Community of South Dakota.
For all of the prodigious scale and scope of his own published work
across each of these institutions, his exemplary generosity as a
scholar will long be remembered for the publishing guidance and
opportunities that he provided for well over 600 books of colleagues
through the many valuable books series that he edited, principally with
Shirley Steinberg, his partner in love, work, and family.
For Joe was also father and grandfather, to be dearly missed by his
children Ian Steinberg and Christine Quail, and their children Luna and
Hava; Chaim Steinberg and Marissa Fogel, and their child, Tobias;
Meghann and Ryan Clements, and their children Maci, Cohen, and Seth;
and Bronwyn Steinberg.
Yet what also needs to be said is that there was no occasion to which
Joe Kincheloe could not add warmth and levity, no conversation which he
could not indelibly enrich with a pointed story from his youth or the
endless misadventures of his adulthood. "Stop me if you've heard me
tell this..." would often be his opener. (One would as soon want to
stop Bob Dylan on launching into "Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.") And yet
he was as quick to laugh at another's story; as interested to take note
of others' struggles; as soon to be overly polite to the rude and
surly; and as certain to be patient with the inevitable frustrations of
getting from A to B in today's world. When you heard him gently say at
the close of a meeting or phone call, "Peace be with you," you knew
that the peace that went with you was every bit Joe's gift to you. Then
and always.
John Willinsky
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