AbstractThis chapter argues that some form of critical pedagogy should be promoted and sustained in
foreign language/culture education despite current ideological and social challenges to the
paradigm. It is not readily apparent what form a twenty-first-century critical pedagogy, as a
theoretically grounded praxis, should take. One option would be Gerald Graff’s systematic,
curriculum-centered approach, which advocates the teaching of academic controversies.
A second would derive from a classroom-centered, “bottom-up” approach as represented by
Ira Shor, which focuses on the needs and concerns of those we teach. A third model, and the
one argued for in this chapter, would develop an identity-centered, psychologically informed
approach to developing students’ compassion in relation to others while examining the core
causes of human behavior, based primarily on the work of Bracher (2006). At stake is whether
foreign language/culture learners might respond to a “prosocial” pedagogy and revise their
conventional “information-processing scripts” so as to approach or mediate other languages/
cultures with communicative and also with ethical competence.
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