Peter McLaren's Bio

mclaren@gseis.ucla.edu
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~mclaren/
or click here to go Back

Peter McLaren is Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1948, and raised in both Toronto and Winnipeg, Manitoba, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Waterloo University in 1973, attended Toronto Teachers College and went on to earn a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Education, a Masters of Education at Brock University’s College of Education, and a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Professor McLaren taught elementary and middle school from 1974-1979, and most of that time was spent teaching in Canada’s largest public housing complex located in Toronto’s Jane-Finch Corridor. In 1979 he was selected as a representative for Canada’s Commission of Inquiry into The Education of the Young Child.

After earning his doctorate in 1983, he served as Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University where he specialized in teaching in urban education and language arts contexts. He also served as a consultant for the National Film Board of Canada and served on the Canadian Cancer Society Educational Subcommittee, 1980-83.

Professor McLaren left his native Canada in 1985 to teach at Miami University of Ohio's School of Education and Allied Professions. He also served as Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies, and held the title of Renowned Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University before being recruited by U.C.L.A. in 1993, a year after the Los Angeles uprising Professor McLaren became a US citizen in 2000.

He is the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of approximately forty books and monographs. Several hundred of his articles, chapters, interviews, reviews, commentaries and columns have appeared in dozens of scholarly journals and professional magazines since the publication of his first book, Cries from the Corridor, in 1980. This book was one of Canada's top-selling non-fiction books of the year and consistently appeared on Canada’s bestseller lists. Some of the journals in which Professor McLaren's work has appeared include:

The Journal of Advanced Composition, Ethnicities, The Harvard Education Review, Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Cultural Studies, Educational Theory, Social Text, Strategies, Polygraph, the Australian Journal of Education, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, American Journal of Semiotics, Semiotic Inquiry, Discourse: Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Interchange, International Journal of Leadership in Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Theoria, Journal of Thought, Educational Policy, Cultural Critique and Socialist Review.

He is the co-editor of two books on the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (Routledge, 1993, 1994). His most recent books include Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory (with Dave Hill, Mike Cole, and Glenn Rikowski), Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millenium, Westview Press, 1997; Counternarratives (with Henry Giroux, Colin Lankshear and Mike Peters), Routledge, 1997, and Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, Routledge, 1995. He is also author of Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Longman) which is now in its fourth edition (2002 Allyn & Bacon).

From 1986 -1996, Professor McLaren co-edited a publication series, "Teacher Education and School Reform" for the State University of New York Press (with Henry Giroux) and he also co-edited the series "The Edge: Critical Studies in Educational Theory" (with Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg) from 1996-1998. He also serves on the editorial boards of Canadian, U.S., Latin American and European journals.

For twenty years Professor McLaren has served as an Associate of Massey College (where he once served as a Junior Fellow), Canada, and, since 1984, as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, England. He is also has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Latino Museum of History, Art, and Culture in downtown Los Angeles. He has presented distinguished lectures at a number of North American universities and continues to speak and write from a transdisciplinary perspective in four areas for which he has become well-known internationally: critical pedagogy, multicultural education, critical ethnography, and critical theory.

He lectures regularly throughout Latin America and Europe. His works have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, German, Polish, Hebrew, and French.

Professor McLaren is the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award presented by Chapman University, California, April 2002. He also received the Amigo Honorifica de la Comunidad Universitaria de esta Institucion by La Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, Unidad 141, Guadalajara, Mexico. He was a recipient of a "Lilly Scholarship" at Miami University of Ohio. Professor McLaren taught a course at the University of British Columbia, Canada, as a "Noted Scholar", and taught a course as Visiting Distinguished Professor at Brock University. He presented the Eminent Scholar Lecture at The Ohio State University, the Read Distinguished Lecture at Kent State, Ohio, the Freeman Butts Lecture for the American Education Studies Association, and delivered the Claude A.. Eggerston Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society. Two of his books were winners of the American Education Studies Association Critics Choice Awards for outstanding books in education. (he also received an honorable mention in the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award).