Joe L. Kincheloe

Joe Lyons Kincheloe (December 14, 1950 – December 19, 2008) was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban studies, cognition, curriculum, and cultural studies. Kincheloe received three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee. The father of four children, he worked closely for the last 19 years of his life with his partner, Shirley R. Steinberg.

Joe Kincheloe's first academic position was on the Rosebud Indian Reservation as the department chair of education at Sinte Gleska College (1980–1982). He was tenured at LSU-Shreveport (1982–1989), Clemson University (1989–1992), Florida International University (1992–1994), Pennsylvania State University (1994–1998), and was the Belle Zeller Chair of Public Policy and Administration from 1998-2000 at Brooklyn College. Kincheloe co-authored the Urban Education Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and served as Deputy Executive Program Officer there from 2000–2005. He moved to McGill University in January 2006 and received a Canada Research Chair in October 2006.

Kincheloe's work drew from a number of theoretical traditions, and his analyses focused on the social, cultural, political, economic, and cognitive dynamics that contextualize teaching and learning. Dr. Kincheloe's research provided for a compelling understanding of the forces shaping contemporary education. Understanding these dynamics, educators are better equipped to formulate policies and develop actions that rigorously cultivate the intellect while operating in a more socially just and inclusive manner. He and Steinberg spoke about critical pedagogy and cultural/media politics in North America, South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia.

Professor Kincheloe founded The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. Under Kincheloe's leadership, the Freire Project is creating a global community of researchers and cultural workers in critical pedagogy. Kincheloe is considered one of the leading scholars in critical pedagogy, critical constructivism, the research bricolage, critical multicultural education, and contemporary curriculum discourses. He is the architect of a critical cognitive theory, having developed the notion of a critical postformal educational psychology. Postformalism focuses on exposing the unexamined power relations that shape cognitive theory and educational psychology in a larger liberatory effort to develop a psychology of possibility. Such a critical psychology focuses on typically underestimated human cognitive capacities, the socio-cultural construction of mind, collective intelligence, and the unexplored dimensions of human cognition. Postformalism posits that mainstream psychology has historically dismissed the cognitive abilities of those who fall outside of whiteness, the middle and upper socio-economic classes, dominant colonizing cultures, and patriarchy. In this context, critical postformalism becomes a socially transformative psychology.

Central to Kincheloe's work in all of these areas is the construction of a rigorous form of multidimensional scholarship that draws upon critical theory, critical pedagogy, feminist theory, complexity theory, indigenous knowledges, post/anti-colonialism, and other global discourses to help end dominant power-constructed human suffering. In his work over the last few years Kincheloe has focused much attention on the politics of knowledge and epistemology and the diverse ways they operate to shape human consciousness and socio-political and educational activities. He was dedicated to creating a critical pedagogy that helps individuals reshape their lives, become better scholars and social activists, realize their cognitive potential, re-create democratic spaces in an electronically mediated global world, and build and become members of communities of solidarity that work to create better modes of education and a more peaceful, equitable, and ecologically sustainable world.

As educational scholar, Rucheeta Kulkarni (2008) writes: "With an authorial voice that blends conversational simplicity with visionary philosophy, Joe Kincheloe [outlines] the deepening crises of this nation’s actions at home and abroad—including preemptive wars against imagined enemies, scripted curricula for deprofessionalized teachers, privatization of public schools, and corporate ownership of the news media—he tells the reader not to despair but to hope...For any reader who aspires to do meaningful and transformative knowledge work, it is hard to refuse Kincheloe’s invitation into the ideas of critical pedagogy."

See Raymond Horn (1999) for a comprehensive overview of Kincheloe's scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s.

Kincheloe's work on the failures of positivism and mainstream Western research methods have been characterized by conservatives as an attack on viable modes of inquiry and accepted forms of reason. Some reviewers have labeled his multiperspectival bricolage as a form of anti-rationality. For example, educational researcher, Peter Smagorinsky (2007) argues in a review of Kincheloe's and Kenneth Tobin's Doing Educational Research: A Handbook that Kincheloe uses positivism as an inappropriate bogeyman in a misguided effort to resurrect this long-discredited way of knowing to justify radical perspectives on knowledge production. In Smagorinsky's opinion, Kincheloe's work is misleading and dangerous for those legitimate scholars who would seek to engage in scholarship that produces assured answers to specific questions. Detractors also critique Kincheloe's frequent attacks on U.S. educational, social, and foreign policy. Such attacks, it is maintained, are often unfair and reflect a one-dimensional biased point of view. His analysis of "whiteness" and Caucasian racism have often drawn fire from more moderate and conservative analysts.