LETTER OF SUPPORT FOR KAREN SALAZAR

A second-year English teacher at Jordan High School, Karen Salazar embodies the warrior
spirit of the critical educator. A transformative intellectual, her critical pedagogy creates
important spaces for students to discover, to deepen, and to extend their voices as agents of
history-in-the-making. She challenges her students to question many taken-for-granted guiding
assumptions about US history and culture, and in this sense she has become an important
exponent of critical patriotism rather than mindless patriotism. Rather than force-feeding
students information, Karen stresses the importance of creating contexts where students can
learn to question--and therefore deepen and/or transform--those core constructs and values that
guide their lives, so that they can live everyday life more fully as active agents of social
transformation. Karen knows that education too often helps to reproduce asymmetrical
relations of power of privilege and she struggles to make education a partner with social
movements that are dedicated to bringing about social and economic justice for those
communities most exploited in our social order. I strongly protest the cowardly act by the
Jordan High School administration in firing Karen. Such an act shames critically engaged
teachers everywhere. As someone who regularly works with teacher groups worldwide, this
act on the part of Jordan High School will come as no surprise, especially during the political
climate in the United States under the Bush administration. Karen is a victim in an overall
assault against academic freedom by the Right, and her dismissal will only spark more outrage
against school policies that stifle the voices and the minds our our youth.

Peter McLaren,
Professor of Urban Schooling
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles