The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint that includes awareness of race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms will be uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained. It affects text choices, topics in courses, and tactics in the everyday classroom experience: Conscious attention to race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and intersectional equity experiences is at the heart of what I learned about teaching from bell hooks. Educators committed to a different way must set an intention to work against this status quo.
I must continuously be conscious of this today because a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks’ own phrase) makes it easy to access and value work written by white people and by men. One commitment I made early in my teaching career was to always include, in every course, work written by women and by people of color. I don’t think I’ve written or spoken about pedagogy without engaging bell hooks’ work ever since I first read it.
Her essays “are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the practice of freedom” (p.11).
In Teaching to Transgress, published in 1994, hooks described her pedagogical practices as emerging “from the mutually illuminating interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies” (p.10). Our program’s weekly colloquium on the scholarship of teaching included precious few women authors, and even fewer authors of color, and so when I finally got to read bell hooks and Paulo Freire, I could see the kind of teacher I wanted to become. It was when I was a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts twenty years ago that I came to appreciate bell hooks’ work on pedagogy and the vocation of an educator. Many memorials in the last few days have focused on her contributions to women’s studies and black feminist theory since her death on December 15th. The work of bell hooks (1952-2021) had always been part of my feminist education, in college as well as in graduate school.
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