Peter McLaren

Peter McLaren is a Canadian-American education scholar recognized as one of the principal architects of critical pedagogy, an approach linking classroom teaching to social justice and the critique of power. Born in Toronto in 1948, he taught elementary and middle school in Canada before earning his doctorate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1983. He went on to hold professorships at Miami University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Chapman University, retiring in 2023. His scholarship draws on Marxist theory, cultural studies, and critical ethnography to examine how schooling reproduces or challenges social inequality, and his writing helped revive Marxist analysis within education research. A practicing Catholic, he has also connected his pedagogy to Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology, influencing a later generation of critical education scholars.