CRRE Annual Lecture with Professor Michael W Apple

Dominant knowledge and social transformation

Professor Michael W Apple, John Bascom Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison and Professorial Fellow University of Manchester

We were honoured to welcome back Professor Michael W. Apple to the University of Birmingham to give a talk on his latest research.

For all of the well-deserved attention that is given to neoliberal agendas and policies, to privatization and choice plans, to audit cultures and standardization, we must continue to pay just as much attention to the actual stuff that is taught—and the “absent presences” of what is not taught—in schools. These struggles over dominant meanings are crucial elements in social transformations. A major question here is whether dominant knowledge itself can be used to actually interrupt dominance.

I focus on two examples of these critically democratic attempts involving minoritized groups and on the contradictions and victories they produce.