A leading international expert in critical education studies, Professor Michael Apple, Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) in November and December as a professor in the Fundep Magda Soares Basic Education Chairs program at IEAT/UFMG.

His first activity at the university will be the mini-course Educational Discourses and Processes IV: Dominant Politics and the Politics of Knowledge in Education, which will take place on November 17th and 24th and December 1st, 2025, from 2 pm to 5:30 pm, in room 3053 of the Institute of Geosciences at UFMG.

45 places are available, primarily for UFMG postgraduate students. Registration must be done through the UFMG postgraduate program in Education, using code FAE003. For other interested parties, registration is free, with limited spaces, and must be completed between November 3rd and 10th, 2025 via the Even3 platform. Certificates of participation will be issued.

From a critical perspective, this mini-course will analyze the disputes surrounding what is considered “official” knowledge, revealing how it is shaped by political and ideological interests. The goal is to understand how certain forms of knowledge are legitimized at the expense of others, which directly impacts educational development and the reproduction of inequalities.

About the professor

Michael Apple is John Bascom Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States and Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London, England. He has worked with governments, researchers, trade unions, political movements, and dissident groups in Latin America and many other parts of the world to build more critically democratic research, policies, and practices in education. His recent books include Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (2006), The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles (2006), The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education (2009), and Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (2010).