Shirley R. Steinberg
Shirley R. Steinberg is an educator, author, activist,filmmaker, and public speaker whose work focuses on critical pedagogy, social justice, and cultural studies. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about critical pedagogy, urban and youth culture, community studies, cultural studies, Islamophobia, and issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Steinberg is the Research Chair of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, executive director of the Freire Project freireproject.org, and a visiting researcher at University of Barcelona and Murdoch University. She has held faculty positions at Montclair State University, Adelphi University, Brooklyn College , The CUNY Graduate Center, and McGill University. Steinberg directed the Institute for Youth and Community Research at the University of the West of Scotland for two years. She is a frequent media contributor to CJAD Radio, CBC Radio One, CTV, "The Toronto Globe and Mail", "The Canadian Press", and "The Montreal Gazette". Steinberg worked at Peter Lang Publishing as the executive editor of education for twenty years, and with Joe L. Kincheloe she created Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, the largest book series on Education in publishing. The organizer of The International Institute for Critical Pedagogy and  Transformative Leadership [freireproject.org], her work centers on creating a global community of transformative educators and community workers engaged in radical love, social justice, and the situating of power within social and cultural contexts. Education. Steinberg received two degrees from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, a B.Ed in English language and arts education in 1987 and a M.Ed in 1991. In 1997, she received her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from Pennsylvania State University. Professional career. With her partner Joe L. Kincheloe, Steinberg founded The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy (freireproject.org) at McGill University. After Kincheloe 's death, the project transformed into a digital archive of global initiatives on critical pedagogy. Steinberg presently serves as the project's executive director. Steinberg is the Managing Editor of "The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy" and with Kincheloe, a founding editor and now consulting editor of "Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education". She was the founding director of The Werklund Foundation's Youth Leadership Centre (YLC) that was launched in the Werklund School for Education at the University of Calgary in from July 2011-March 2014. Awards and honors. Steinberg has been recognized for her teaching, activism, and  scholarship in the field of education and for her mentorship of students, community members, and colleagues. In 1997, Steinberg and co-editors Joe L. Kincheloe and Aaron D. Gresson III received the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights for their book Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined. In 1999, she received the Adelphi University Woman of Distinction award. The University of Lethbridge's Alumni Association recognized Steinberg as the Distinguished Alumna of the Year in 2006. Steinberg has received the American Educational Studies Association's Critics' Choice Book  Award for several of her publications: Additional awards received by Steinberg: Scholarship. Critical multiculturalism. Critical Multiculturalism is a pedagogy focused on the intersection of power, identity and knowledge. Steinberg laid out its framework in her 2001 book, "Multi/Intercultural Conversations", though Kincheloe and Steinberg introduced the concept in their 1997 book, "Changing Multiculturalism". In a 1998 review, Dr. Stephen Bigger writes, "'Different ways of seeing' could be a powerful concept to underpin a challenging and transformative curriculum, encouraging 'learning from difference'." He explains further: Multiculturalism, a problematic term, is clarified into a position called ‘critical multiculturalism’, described with approval inasfar  as it explores ‘the way power shapes consciousness’...Race, gender and class are seen as linked as forms of oppression rooted in social and economic structures. These forces of oppression play out in the classroom, through which pupils construct their own understandings, sense of identity and aspirations...We can view the classroom as ‘a central site for the legitimization of myths, lies and silences about non-white, lower socio-economic class and other marginalized individuals’. Media literacy. Steinberg's courses revolve around the critical pedagogical approach to media, as defined in a book co-edited with Donaldo Macedo:"Media Literacy: A  Reader". Central is the notion that social, cultural, and political forces affect human agency. According to the publisher's website, the authors' conception of media literacy, "analyzes the ways our everyday decisions are encoded and inscribed by emotional and bodily commitments relating to the production of desire and mood, all of which leads, in Noam Chomsky’s famous phrase, to the 'manufacture of consent.'" Kinderculture. Steinberg and Kincheloe introduce their notion of "kinderculture" in "Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood" (Westview Press 1997), an edited collection of essays focusing on the social construction of childhood in contemporary America. According to  Steinberg and Kincheloe, "our society's most influential pedagogues are no longer classroom teachers" or parents. Instead, large corporations become pedagogues, using mass media and popular culture (such as television, films, and video games) to culturally socialize the postmodern child. In their introduction, "No More Secrets - Kinderculture, Information Saturation, and the Postmodern Child," the pair provide a name for this corporate construction of children's culture: kinderculture. Steinberg and Kincheloe point out that corporations use various forms of kinderculture such as Barbie dolls, Disney movies, horror novels, and educational television programs "to inject their teachings into the fantasies, desires, and  consumptive practices of contemporary children." Corporations recognize that children and parents have different tastes and "exploit" these differences in order to both make a profit and (re)produce targeted cultural images and ideologies. The edited collection includes Steinberg's chapter, "The Bitch who has Everything," where she analyzes how Barbie and Mattel's messaging around Barbie impact young girls' lives. Critics point out two shortcomings of Steinberg and Kincheloe's work: the (mostly) homogenous make-up of the collection's contributors and its bias toward an audience of teachers and parents of middle-class children. While many of the essays address  the role race, class and gender play in the construction of kinderculture, they do not focus on how children of color/less-privileged children fit into this scheme of corporation consumption. Post-Formalism. In 1993, Kincheloe and Steinberg revolutionized notions of cognition with their seminal article, "A Tentative Description of Post-Formal Thinking: The Critical Confrontation with Cognitive Theory" in the "Harvard Education Review", drawing attention to the positivist assumptions made in much of concrete analyses in the work of Jean Piaget. In their 1996 work, "Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined", Steinberg and Kincheloe write that "post-formal thinking  about thinking involves our ability to engage in ideological disembedding, the ability to remove ourselves from socio-interpersonal norms and expectations...post-formal thinkers engage in a running meta-dialogue, a constant conversation with self." In 1999, Steinberg and Kincheloe teamed with Patricia H. Hinchey to write "The Post-Formal Reader : Cognition and Education", and Steinberg and Kincheloe continued to develop this idea for the next several decades. According to a review of post-formalism by Raymond A. Horn, Jr., he notes that post-formalism is explicated "in a four-part structure that includes etymology, pattern, process and contextualization." More  generally, postformal inquiry looks at questions of meaning and purpose, multiple perspectives, human dignity, freedom, and social responsibility. Curriculum and instruction based on postformalism involve detecting problems, uncovering hidden assumptions, seeing relationships, deconstructing, connecting logic and emotion, and attending to context. Published works. Journal articles: Books, authored: Books, edited: Books, co-edited: References. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468794113518884