Troubling Heroes: Of Rosa Parks, Multicultural Education, and Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, the author explores some of the implications of cultural studies perspectives on representation, curriculum, and pedagogy. The most significant and far reaching of these implications has to do with the postmodern disruption of the binary opposition that has framed thinking about education in the modern era: the logos/mythos or truth/myth binary. To develop these ideas, the article focuses on the mythologizing of Rosa Parks as a new, multicultural hero in American education and popular culture. The author argues that although the growing attention to Parks's life must be taken as a hopeful sign that new multicultural heroes are beginning to be celebrated in the curriculum, as Parks's life has been mythologized, it increasingly has been incorporated within a nonthreatening and even culturally conservative mythology. The article then explores some of the attributes of alternative, more progressive mythologizings of Parks's life.