Stephen Brookfield started his career in 1970, Stephen has worked in England, Canada, and the United States, teaching and consulting in a variety of adult, community, organizational and higher education settings. His overall project is to help people learn to think critically about the dominant ideologies they have internalized and how these can be challenged. (For more you can visit his page, https://www.stephenbrookfield.com/)

The Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching (JALT) is a Scopus-indexed and open access journal. JALT aims to share with its readers quality articles on educational practices with a non-exclusive focus on higher education.

In this post you can find an interview made with Professor Stephen Brookfield.

For the interview you can visit here:

https://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/article/view/489/425

Classrooms are never power-free zones. Every learning environment contains student-to-student and student-to-teacher power dynamics. We discuss various influences on Stephen Brookfield’s conceptual understanding of power, especially Michel Foucault’s concepts of sovereign, disciplinary and bio-power and their applicability to education. In this context, we explore similarities between prisons and schools, the metaphor of the panopticon, and the continued relevance of bio-power during the current pandemic. The democratic practice of discussion groups is questioned (despite Stephen Brookfield’s personal preference of that modality) and the lecture is reinstated as one of several useful modalities. We then arrive at Brookfield’s concept of powerful teaching & learning and how teachers can exercise their power in ethical, productive and responsible ways. The interview ends with Brookfield’s advice on institutional criticism.