Peter McLaren

His first commercial publication was about his great Aunt, Irma Wright, who won the world's fastest typist competition in 1928.

Peter McLaren (born 1948) is a Canadian-American scholar and Emeritus Professor of Urban Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, having taught at UCLA from 1993 until 2013.

Peter McLaren was born in Toronto, Ontario, on August 2, 1948, and raised in Toronto and also, for four years, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

He is the only child of Frances Teresa Bernadette McLaren and Lawrence Omand McLaren, from Canada.

McLaren's early family life was working-class until his father, a Second World War war veteran with the Royal Canadian Engineers, returned from battle in Europe and began work as a television salesman, eventually rising to the rank of General Manager of Phillips Electronics, Eastern Canada.

McLaren's mother was a homemaker before working as a telephone operator.

McLaren used to read voraciously in literature, philosophy, poetry, social theory, and literary and art criticism, was making creative 35 mm movies at 16, and dreamt of being an artist or film director.

McLaren's father had one sister, Bonnie, who married Terry Goddard, a Second World War Royal Navy pilot credited with helping sink the German battleship Bismark.

McLaren's mother had four sisters and two brothers.

McLaren compensated for being an only child by spending time with his many cousins and engaging in creative writing.

McLaren's first writing award was during middle school, where he won top writing honours by producing a science fiction story.

At 19, McLaren hitchhiked throughout the US, met with Black Panthers in Oakland, lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he participated in anti–Vietnam War protests, met with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and began writing poetry and short stories.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at University of Waterloo in 1973 (specializing in Elizabethan drama), 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, the University of Toronto (where he worked with the late Richard Courtney, a leading international authority in children's drama).

McLaren taught elementary and middle school from 1974-1979.

Most of that time was spent teaching in Canada's largest public housing complex in Toronto's Jane-Finch Corridor.

Cries from the Corridor, McLaren's book about his teaching experiences, made the Canadian bestseller list and was one of the top ten bestselling books in Canada in 1980 (Maclean's magazine, the Toronto Star), initiating a country-wide debate on inner-city schools.

(Later, McLaren would harshly criticize this book and go on to transform it into the highly acclaimed pedagogical text, Life in Schools.)

After earning his doctorate in 1983, he served as a Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University, where, as a one-year sabbatical replacement, he specialized in inner-city education and language arts.

After the Dean did not follow through on his promised extension of McLaren's contract, McLaren decided to pursue an academic appointment in the United States.

However, he remains on good terms with the faculty at Brock University, with whom he remains in a relationship of solidarity and friendship.

Prior to that, he taught at Miami University of Ohio (1985-1993).

McLaren left Canada in 1985 to teach at Miami University's School of Education and Allied Professions, where he spent eight years working with colleague Henry Giroux during a time when the epistemology known as critical pedagogy was gaining traction in North American schools of education.

McLaren 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 the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993.

In Finland, he gave an Opening Lecture at Paulo Freire Center–Finland on November 20, 2007.

La Escuela Normal Superior de Neiva in Colombia has named one of its buildings after Peter McLaren.

, McLaren is ranked in the top 15 percent of all social science and humanities scholars in the world, based on his D-index (Discipline H-index); he is ranked 217 in the United States and 428 in the world.

Most recently, he served as a Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies at Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University (2013-2023) until his retirement, where he was Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice.

He is the Honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China.

According to Stanford University's database, McLaren belongs to the top 2% of the world’s most influential scientists.

McLaren is the author and editor of over forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters.

His writings have been translated into over 20 languages.

He is married to Yan Wang from Northeast China.

They currently live in Orange, California.

He has a son and daughter from previous marriages.

McLaren is known as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy, and for his scholarly writings on critical literacy, the sociology of education, cultural studies, critical ethnography, and Marxist theory.

Paulo Freire, a founding figure of critical pedagogy, stated: "Peter McLaren is one among the many outstanding 'intellectual relatives' I 'discovered' and by whom I, in turn, was 'discovered.' I read Peter McLaren long before I ever came to know him personally. ... Once I finished reading the first texts by McLaren that were made available to me, I was almost certain that we belonged to an identical 'intellectual family'."

During a keynote address at Chapman University on October 25, 2014, Nita Freire, eminent educational scholar and widow of Paulo Freire, remarked: "It is ... a huge thrill for me to see Peter McLaren and Donaldo Macedo, who ever since through discussions and dialogue became old friends of work and friendship, partners of ideological and theoretical ideas of Paulo. They along with Henry Giroux formulated the critical pedagogy as we know of today."

McLaren is also the recipient of the 2023 Paulo Freire SIG Legacy Award.

McLaren has met with Abahlali baseMjondolo, in South Africa; the landless workers' movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST, in Brasil, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and members of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, and with the left education workers union in Turkey where amid a demonstration he was teargassed and hurled to the ground by a police's riot shield.

McLaren is a faculty member at the Institute of Critical Pedagogy at The Global Center for Advanced Studies and lectures worldwide on education's politics.