Learning to Teach from bell hooks
BTG issue no. 24
In memoriam
bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021)
Many of us are probably at the threshold of a new semester in a year that seems to have begun on the wrong foot. Entering the third year of the pandemic, with many still reeling in the aftermath of the typhoon Odette or struggling to recover from a surge in COVID infections, and with the national elections fast approaching, we are facing the coming months steeped in an undercurrent of palpable anxiety.
As a teacher, I worry about infecting my students with this feeling of world-weariness that I can’t seem to shake off. If you somehow feel the same way, you might wish to join me in finding some inspiration in bell hooks’s book, Teaching to Transgress. There’s nothing like fighting a good fight to pull us out of a deep funk.
Teaching to Transgress (Routledge, 1994) is a book to be read slowly, and more than once. It’s a book in which to burrow, a book to return to in dark times. A collection of essays that are both profoundly theoretical and deeply personal, it invites us to reflect upon our own pedagogical and scholarly practices in a manner rooted in our personal histories and social conditions and anchored in a political commitment to transformation. She invites us to experience teaching and learning as a practice of freedom:
The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. For years it has been a place where education has been undermined by teachers and students alike who seek to use it as a platform for opportunistic concerns rather than as a place to learn. With these essays, I add my voice to the collective call for renewal and rejuvenation in our teaching practices. Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. (12)
bell hooks describes her pedagogical practices as having “emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.” (10) Although written decades ago, it is nevertheless utterly relevant to our situation today. This is partly due to the fact that the current crisis of education – in the Philippines as well as in other parts of the world – is not just about the disruption of the face-to-face classroom brought about by the pandemic. Rather, the pandemic has simply laid bare and has made it impossible for us to ignore the interlocking structures of exclusion and inequality that constitute our educational institutions and practices.
The challenges we face as educators during the pandemic are daunting indeed. Perhaps for the first time, many of us have had to confront in a radical way the material conditions of our pedagogical practices. The obviously mediated nature of online courses has made visible the inequalities – among students, between students and teachers, and among teachers – that we were previously able to ignore.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that these structural problems have seized us by the throat, we are still liable to miss this opportunity for radical self-examination and creative transformation being occasioned by the pandemic, because our attention has been captured by the technical challenges of adapting to the online setting. While it is true that our forced migration to the online classroom has opened up new possibilities for more student-centered and transformative pedagogical practices, we are also in danger of ignoring the emergence of exploitation in new fronts (for instance, the increased precariousness of untenured employment) and of re-inscribing old structures of oppression in the new online setting. (I wonder, for example, whether the need to reduce the number of required readings offers another excuse for excluding women authors from the syllabus.)
I think we should be asking ourselves these questions: What aspects of my current situation disturb me? How do I replicate structures of oppression in my classroom? How might I resist and transform these structures?
Teaching to transgress involves drawing our boundaries so that we might articulate sites of resistance. This means learning to listen to our dissatisfactions and to recognize when something puts us ill at ease because it is oppressive and dehumanizing.
I am thinking, for instance, of how “asynchronous learning” can so easily morph to “asynchronous content delivery” to “content on-demand.” Something in me chafes at the implicit equation of “inclusion and equity” with “access to class recordings and materials.” It calls to mind the neoliberal assumption that capitalism equals democracy and that the free market is the index of liberty. But does granting access to educational content “on-demand” necessarily give our students a voice in our classroom? Is ensuring the online accessibility of our lectures and course materials sufficient to transform our class into a just community?
Without even knowing it or, worse, even when we think we are responding to their needs and accommodating their circumstances, is it possible that we are still excluding our students from a transformative learning experience?
Last year, a student’s comment in my course evaluation made me realize that I have a tendency to cut my students off and to answer their questions too quickly. Carried away by my own ideas, I sometimes fail to address their questions well or sufficiently.
I thought about this and realized that perhaps it has to do with the fact that growing up, it was never an easy thing for me to speak up. I grew up in a household where conversations were something that ended with someone – for the most part, my father – having the last word.
I also realized that my education has taught me the same thing. Even in philosophy, standard attestations about philosophical discourse notwithstanding, the conversation in the classroom is not really an ongoing, open-ended thing. It ends when my professor – almost always male – pronounces the last word.
Raising my hand to recite was never an easy thing for me. It came with quivering hands, a pounding heart, and tunnel vision. For most of my personal and professional life, I have had to struggle to be able to speak. Socially awkward, I have never been a good conversationalist. Even now, in meetings, I worry about talking too much or speaking too soon; I get anxious about finding the right moment to speak, and sometimes end up rudely interrupting other participants. At the heart of it, I believe, is a deeply ingrained sense of not having an unquestioned right to speak.
How much has this sense of insecurity and defensiveness turned me into that professor who must have the last word? How often have I – despite my best intentions – silenced my students with my impatience and inattentiveness?
A commitment to teaching as a practice of freedom entails the transformation of what bell hooks calls our “habits of being.” I’m still working on the transformation of my habit. I still have to make a conscious effort to remember this three-step mantra: Stop. Breathe (slowly and deeply). And only then… speak.
Because it is unavoidably personal, teaching is a risky business. As teachers, we end up enacting our preferences and aversions, our desires and our visions as well as our fears and distrusts. In the way we speak, in the way we listen, in the way we respond to queries and complaints, in what we attend to and in what we ignore, we teach our students a manner of relating with knowledge and of inhabiting experiences that either replicates structures of domination or liberates us and our students from these structures. In our words and in our silences, we teach them complicity or transgression.
If teaching were to become a practice of freedom, we need the courage to embrace the vulnerability entailed by self-discovery. As bell hooks puts it, we ourselves have to be committed to self-actualization:
Progressive professors working to transform the curriculum so that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination are most often the individuals willing to take the risks that engaged pedagogy requires and to make their teaching practices a site of resistance. […] Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply. (22)
Jean Tan
Interdisciplinary Studies Department
Ateneo de Manila University