Chapter One: Engage Pedagogy

I want to continue to blog my reading of this book. I think that every three chapters, I will take a step back to reflect on the readings and think about how to use them in my own pedagogy.

Chapter One: Engaged Pedagogy

In order to teach as a practice of freedom, we need to believe that anyone can learn. We also need to believe that teaching is sacred, of sharing intellectual and spiritual growth. This act starts with acknowledging that our students are complete individuals with pasts, experiences, lives, and conflicts outside of the classroom, and that those experiences provide them each with unique knowledge that they can bring to the classroom.

We have to asks ourselves, how do we allow our students to bring and share that knowledge and how can we help them expand it?

Our first step is the total rejection of the banking system of teaching. hooks says “it was Freire’s insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called ‘conscientization’ in the classroom. Translating that term to critical awareness and engagement, I entered the classrooms with conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer” (14).

Too many of my students find themselves completely lost when I do not provide them easy answers. They have forgotten that they must create the knowledge that they feel is important, instead of passively consume knowledge that I “bank” into them. As hooks reminds us, the idea of education as a practice of freedom gets undermined by the teacher-centered classroom that discourages active and critical participation (14). hooks goes on to connect this idea to Thich Nhat Hanh, who also believe students need to be active participants in the classroom.

We need to see students as entire being—mind, body, soul—not just as students in seek of knowledge. For hooks, she found that space in the women studies’ classroom, where she managed to connect ideas learned in the university to ideas learned in living life (15).

This kind of teaching is more demanding that regular, or even feminist or critical pedagogy because it centers well-being. The teacher, then, must seek self-actualization (and how many smart teachers do we see who hold atrocious beliefs about their students or politics or teaching? Martin Heidegger was a Nazi who fell in love with his student, a Jew. Buddhist monks, enlightened, who advocate for killing without thinking. John Paul Sartre. . .  See: Albert Camus’s rejection of his friend). We need happy teachers in order to help student reach happiness—teacher who have social skills, not just book smarts.

We need to deconstruct (and when I say deconstruct, I mean it the way Derrida meant it: we need to look at how the binary definitions fall apart because the privileged position is always-already infected by the lower position). When we think of trying to separate mind/body, inner/outer, (to an extent: student in the classroom/person outside of the classroom), we see how much the binary falls apart. Part of affect studies shows this distinction falls apart. We cannot think of a sound mind without a strong body free of stressors. A student in our classroom comes into it with all the cultural, societal, and personal history.

Professors can follow this model (try to follow this model) and still perpetuate dictatorships in the classroom the replicate structures of domination. How then can we check to make sure that we do not fall into this trap.

[I think of Derrida and deconstructive ethics here: the emotion we should follow is one of [existential] anxiety. To always be questioning, nervous, hesitant that we are doing enough for our students, that we are challenging power structures enough, that we are being ethical enough. We can never relax and say we got it right because that attitude leads to falling back on perpetuating power structures.]

Professors do not have to be dictators (18).

Students increasingly “feel that there are no clear ethical guidelines shaping actions” and they want education to be liberatory (19). I say, it’s good there are no clear ethical guidelines. Guidelines, strict definitions, have us falsely believe that if we follow them, we are doing the right thing. Instead, we should always question.

One question we should ask is how will what we teach students—really, what students learn—will help them have a more fulfilling life? (19).

We then read about one of hooks’ students and the tensions that this kind of teaching can have.

“When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are sked to share, to confess” Engaged pedagogy involves allowing one’s self to be vulnerable in the classroom, teachers and students. Engaged pedagogy asks for teachers to grow as well. As hooks puts it “In my classroom, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I woud not share” (19).

As a professor, I need to think more critically about how I can break down dominant power structures in the classroom. I have started by rethinking the way I grade students, the way I engage with students, what I share with students. And I look forward to the rest of this book for more strategies.

 

On Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Teaching

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

At some point in the quarter, I tend to teach my students about ideology. I start by asking them why they are in the classroom, studying, trying to get a degree in the first place. Many of them, of course, mention the need to get a job and to make money.

But why? Why do they feel they need to get a job and make money? How many of them are studying something they are passionate about versus studying something to make money? Usually, at least half the class is only concerned with money. 

 I ask how many people want to get married and have kids—again, more than half do. I ask them again, why?

I present them with ideology and suggest that they only want to do these things because society has told them it is what they should do. You can see a breakdown of some concepts I go over with them HERE.

Teaching to transgress challenges ideology, and specifically the superstructure of pedagogy. The superstructure is the cultural that ingrains ideology within society. For teaching, that ideology is based on Euro-centric ideas of the banking system of teaching where students are empty vessels that we deposit knowledge, and they are tested on being able to recall that knowledge.

hooks starts her book by sharing her fear of getting tenure. She was not afraid that she would not get tenure; instead, she feared she would get tenure and cement herself as a teacher. Tenure led her to existential angst and clinical depression.

Her sister, a therapist, reminds hooks that her feelings are valid since hooks always wanted to be a writer. Growing up in the segregated South, hooks states that she had three choices growing up: get married, work as a maid, or become a teacher.

She comes to realize that she would do both. She reflects on her own teachers growing up, black women who realized that education was a form of freedom. Teaching was a form of political, antiracist work. She says,

“They [her black teachers] were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers—black folks who used our ‘minds.’ We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization” (2).

Teaching to Transgress

These teachers thought of their students in terms of individuals people with different backgrounds and lives. hooks loved learning.

Then school integrated. She had to enter the white school with the white teachers who did not see her as an individual but as an interloper; black students had to prove their worth (did white students have to prove they belonged and were smart?). She states, “knowledge was suddenly about information” (3). She left her loving black teachers’ world of love and teaching liberation and entered the white teachers’ world that perpetuated racist stereotypes.

She now hated school. School went from teachers who teach freedom to teachers who “reinforce domination” (4). School goes from liberatory to Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus to train Capitalist drones who were obedient to authority.

She goes to grad school, where she realizes the kind of teacher she does not want to become. She wants to avoid teaching that is concerned with rituals of control and power and punishment to one of love and liberation. She realizes that grad school forced people of color to prove they belong instead of critical thinking. (5).

hooks states her pedagogy is based on her elementary school teachers who wanted to make sure all students felt valued, the critical pedagogy of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s ideas about education as a practice of freedom, and radical feminists who didn’t include black female voices but did provide hooks with a method for a critical look at pedagogy.

She wants an exciting classroom—it reminds me of Helen Vendler arguing that we should teach what we love, and students will love it—if we teach with excitement, students will get excited. Her pedagogy emphasizes community and caring.

How do we acknowledge everyone’s presence in the classroom? How does the professor show that they value everyone’s presence?

The classroom should be decentered with an emphasis on a collective effort.

hooks then summarizes her pedagogy:

“This complex and unique blending of multiple perspectives [anticolonial, critical, and feminist] has been an engaging and powerful standpoint from which to work. Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to imagine and enact pedagogical practices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism) while simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse group of students” (10).

The teachers need to emphasize pleasure and resist the usual boredom and uninterest that accompanies the usual classroom experience. She also states there are no blueprints, which would go against engaged pedagogy that realizes all classrooms are different.