Michael Apple on praxis, rhetoric and educational research: in dialogue with Jennifer Bleazby

Michael Apple is probably best known as one of the founders of critical pedagogy in the United States. For over forty years, he has critiqued the “New Right”, a powerful social and political movement that incorporates the ideologies of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. His research examines the influence of these ideologies on education. A particular focus has been an examination of the ways in which schools perpetuate racial, class, and gender inequalities and other social injustices. In the following dialogue, Apple discusses the theories and methodologies that have shaped his work. Given the focus of his research, it is not surprising that he has made extensive use of neo-Marxists and critical theorists, including Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Andre Gorz and Paulo Freire. However, as Apple states in this dialogue, “labels are lazy,” and referring to him as merely a neo-Marxist may obscure the wide range of theorists that have shaped his thought. This includes many feminist theorists, critical race theorists, pragmatists and post-structuralists. He has also made use of a diverse range of interdisciplinary research methods and forms of data, including qualitative and quantitative research, as well as the tools of both analytic and continental philosophy.