[Book Review] Learning and social difference : challenges for public education and critical pedagogy

Abstract

The role of educators and educational researchers in critically interacting with the multi-located intersections of learning, difference and how, via the deployment of critical pedagogy, the function as well as the intentions of public education can be re-routed for the noble purposes of achieving inclusive public educational spaces cannot be overemphasized. Especially with the rapidity and the extensiveness of the processes of globalization, the mass movement of peoples across countries, seas and continents creates an instant call for the services of educational programs to suppress, indeed, fight against the increasing incidences of criminalizing difference when it selectively serves the life styles and social desires of dominant groups in one context or another. It is in relation to these global realities, but especially with respect to the Mediterranean area in general, and to Malta in particular that Carmel Borg and Peter Mayo situate their analysis and recommendations in this important work. While issues of difference and education and the needed critical pedagogy interventions have been studied and analyzed in the North American context for some decades now, the realities as well as the complexities of the growing difference in the public spaces of some European countries, both small (e.g., Malta) and relatively big (e.g., Italy) has not been discussed as much as it is needed in academic forums and related locations of knowledge construction and dissemination. But the issues both technically (i.e., in their physical characteristics) and socially (i.e., the constructive or disturbing relations that are created between the concerned agents) are not separable from basic educational and human rights pointers, and of course, by extension, form the overarching and fortunately globally expanding issues of ethically bound global citizenship. As such, Borg and Mayo’s book is timely, historico-geographically of the right location, and humanistically needed.