English At 50 | University of Waterloo

For Dr. Peter McLaren (BA 1972), an English degree gave him the foundation on which he built his professorial career. He is currently a professor of Urban Education in The Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I work in the area of social justice education, have published a lot on the topic of critical pedagogy, and speak worldwide on human rights and the struggle for socialist democracy,” says Dr. McLaren. He is the author and editor of forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters. Dr. McLaren's writings have been translated into 20 languages. Four of his books have won the Critic's Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Association. One of his books, Life in Schools, was chosen in 2004 as one of the twelve most significant education books in existence worldwide by an international panel of experts organized by The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.

Many of the classes Dr. McLaren attended at Waterloo influenced his current work and area of research. “My work with the Chavistas in Venezuela, and my support for the Cuban revolution and for movements worldwide such as the Landless Peasants movement in Brazil, and the Shackdwellers movement in South Africa, and the Zapatistas in Mexico, has been profoundly influenced by my experiences at Waterloo,” says Dr. McLaren, “especially classes in Christology and philosophy at St. Jerome's College.” These experiences led him to explore a new subject area, liberation theology. “Waterloo was filled with wonderful educators who revealed a strong compassion for those who have been oppressed by racism, capitalism, and patriarchy,” says Dr. McLaren, “and these teachers turned out to be wonderful examples of social justice educators, although I am sure they didn't call themselves by that name at the time.”

Dr. McLaren’s love for English began when he entered and won a school-wide writing contest in junior-high school. He then joined a student group who called themselves "The Young Poets." “I was influenced by beatnik culture at the time and the avant-garde,” says Dr. McLaren.

Waterloo wasn’t initially Dr. McLaren’s first choice of university. He began his university studies at the University of Toronto. “Actually, I got in trouble with some of my professors studying Middle English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, and decided that I needed to escape Toronto and get grounded,” recalls Dr. McLaren. “I was drawn to Waterloo's stellar reputation.”

While living in Waterloo, Dr. McLaren loved attending the musical events and seeing folksingers. Among his favourites was “Poor Charlie.” “Poor Charlie wore a world war two sheepskin flight jacket, smoked cigars, and played bottleneck guitar. He inspired an interest in vintage clothing and country blues. Fortunately not in cigars,” says Dr. McLaren. “But there was one weekend in particular, when a US anti-Vietnam war activist came and spoke, that had a profound effect on the direction on my life,” recalls Dr. McLaren, “and now I can’t even recall who it was who spoke!”

Dr. McLaren left his native Canada in 1985 to work in the United States where he continues to be active in the struggle for socialism. A Marxist humanist, he lectures widely in Latin America, North America, Asia, and Europe. His most recent book (co-authored with Nathalia Jaramillo) is Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (Rotterdam and Taiwan, Sense Publications).

Dr. McLaren was the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award presented by Chapman University, California.

The charter for La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogia Critica was signed at the University of Tijuana in July 2004. La Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated in Venezuela on September 15, 2006 as part of a joint effort between El Centro Internacional Miranda and La Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.

In 2006, during the Bush administration, Dr. McLaren made international headlines when he was targeted by a right-wing extremist organization in the United States and put at the top of the "Dirty Thirty" list of leftist professors at UCLA. The group offered to pay students a hundred dollars to secretly audiotape McLaren's lectures and those of his fellow leftist professors.

Dr. McLaren's work has been the subject of two recent books: Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent, edited by Marc Pruyn and Luis M. Huerta-Charles (New York: Peter Lang Publications) [translated into Spanish as De La Pedagogia Critica a la pedagogia de la Revolucion: Ensayos Para Comprender a Peter McLaren, Mexico City, Siglo Veintiuno Editores] and Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation, edited by Mustafa Eryaman (New Jersey: Hampton Press). Dr. McLaren's latest books are A Critical Pedagogy of Consumption, Living and Learning in the Shadow of the "Shopocalypse" (with Jennifer Sandlin, Routledge) and Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (with Steve Best and Anthony Nocella, AK Press).

To read more about Dr. McLaren, you can visit his websites:

Source: McLaren, Peter. Speech. Mexico, Tuxtepec, Oaxaca. July 2010.