How Teacher Educators Can Work to Sustain Themselves and Their Work
I answered that to me “critical thinking” was the primary element allowing the possibility of change. Passionately insisting that no matter what one’s class, race, gender, or social standing, I shared my beliefs that without the capacity to think critically about our selves and our lives, none of us would be able to move forward, to change, to grow. In our society, which is so fundamentally anti-intellectual, critical thinking is not encouraged. Engaged pedagogy has been essential to my development as an intellectual, as a teacher/professor because the heart of this approach is critical thinking. (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as an Act of Freedom [New York: Routledge, 1994], 202)
In my development as a conscious person and engaged citizen I think bell hooks’ works profoundly impact my growth, but her work was able to challenge me because I was in an environment where being subversive was nurtured. If I were in a different academic setting her works would have merely resonated with me. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to study her books and essays and attempt to apply some of her progressive ideas to my life. In my mind, this is theory meeting practice at the most basic and fundamental level: the individual. (Nicole S. Barden)1
Nicole S. Barden, and I are sixteen years apart—we are cousins and she attends my alma mater, Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the second quote above. We have many things in common, but perhaps the one I cherish the most is our love and respect for bell hooks. I was first introduced to bell hooks’s work at Spelman. The first time I read Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had never read anything like this before, where being black and female was centered, where the impact of socialization in America was critiqued. I chose Spelman as my undergraduate institution because I was the norm and not the exception and hooks’s work was further evidence of this. After reading her work, I signed up for English and Women’s Studies classes that allowed me to read more bell hooks and other critical feminist theorists.
Education at Spelman was like no other learning experience I had ever had. Unlike previous teacher centered classrooms where educators possessed all of the power and significant knowledge, I was enrolled in classes where I was told to, “Claim your space!”2 My professor explained that claiming my space meant that it was my responsibility to articulate my thoughts, ideas, and opinions in the classroom. It was my responsibility to give voice to my lived experiences as an African American and as a woman. I was told that this was my classroom, my learning process, and it was my responsibility to get what I needed from it. My responsibility as a student had never been explained to me this way. I graduated from a high school where academic achievement for African Americans was the exception as opposed to the rule. As the exception, I longed to be considered the norm and was aware of this when I decided to attend Spelman. As I took classes and began to hear myself give voice to my lived experiences in connection with the curriculum I was being exposed to, it occurred to me that I was learning a new way of being-in-the-world. Claiming my space in the classroom quickly translated into claiming my space in the world. I began to analyze how current events impacted my life and the lives of other African Americans and women. For the first time, I began to analyze the intersections of race, class, and gender. bell hooks’s work was central to this analysis, but more importantly, it was central to my development as an African American woman.
It is no accident that I am a professor or that I am a teacher educator. Any profession I embarked upon would have to allow me to continue to feed the hunger for knowledge, growth, and development that my college years did. Anything that I did for a living would have to give me the opportunity to address this hunger for knowledge in other starving young, African American women. The process I experienced at Spelman was so powerful that I wanted to understand how to create similar experiences for other students. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope hooks speaks specifically to educators in public schools and those of us who teach at colleges and universities. She outlines the benefits of teaching for self-actualization and of creating an engaged pedagogy. Reading these works forced me to reminisce about my own learning processes. While philosophically I believe in hooks’s works in these two texts, I now realize that I personally know the benefits of an engaged pedagogy because I experienced it as a student.
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks promotes engaged pedagogy as a strategy for addressing the “traditional transfer of knowledge approach to education.”3 Invoking Paulo Freire’s Education for Critical Consciousness, hooks contends that cultural pluralism is the way to transform teacher/student relationships and ultimately develop critical consciousness in students. Like Freire and other critical theorists, hooks calls for transformation through changing traditional paradigms so that personal and community empowerment is the end result of the process. Critical pedagogy, as defined by theorists such as Ira Shor, Henri Giroux, Peter McLaren, and Michael Apple, argues that school practices are designed to maintain and sustain the status quo by reinforcing white supremacy, maintaining patriarchy, and promoting capitalist values. hooks draws an important distinction between critical pedagogy and engaged pedagogy. Unlike conventional critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy, hooks argues that engaged pedagogy “means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.”4 Self-actualization, as described by hooks, centers on the work of the Vietnamese Zen monk, peace activist, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. hooks writes, “whereas Freire was primarily concerned with the mind, Thich Nhat Hanh offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of the body, and spirit.”5 She continues:
Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that “the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher, or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people.” In the United States it is rare that anyone talks about teachers in university settings as healers. And it is even more rare to hear anyone suggest that teachers have any responsibility to be self-actualized individuals.6
In educational jargon, self-actualization reads a lot like transformation. Unlike reform where the same components and methods are rearranged into a seemingly new model, transformation works “to develop new systems, new products, new experiences, new approaches, and new roles—preferably all at once around concepts of teaching and learning.”7 In educational literature, transformation is not limited to systems, models, and programs. It also includes changing individual people and the lives they lead. As Jack Mezirow explains in his definition of perspective transformation:
Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings.8
In addition to the intellectual dimensions of their students’ growth, educators interested in transformation also grapple with the emotional dimensions that inform learning. The idea of individual change has so captured the imagination of educators that even national accrediting bodies seem to allude to the concept.9 Interestingly, the transformation literature speaks most directly to the transformation of students as opposed to the transformation of teacher educators. One could incorrectly conclude from this that all professors, because they are teacher educators, have already been transformed. Or, that they are all self-actualized. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Creating an engaged pedagogy in schools of education where personal transformation occurs is not easy.10 Combine the era of high stakes testing and accountability with fear of the unknown and comfort of the easy and it becomes very difficult to convince teacher educators, let alone prospective teachers, that the profession is a safe place to enact a curriculum of transformation. For students and teacher educators alike, self-actualization within an educational community is frightening. Students, accustomed to education being purely an intellectual endeavor, find that when they are asked to do work that involves reflection or self-analysis are worried that their process of discovery will be held against them. In her work with students Brooks writes:
Overwhelmingly, students have shared that it is the “willingness to risk” (i.e. sharing tenuous ideas; sounding naïve, uninformed or even downright foolish; being thought of as inconsiderate, arrogant, and even heartless) that they have found to be the most challenging, and possibly “unobtainable,” to realize together.11
Teacher educators, schooled in environments very similar to that of their students, find that in the role of professor they subconsciously fall into traditional routines, even when the desire is to enact an engaged pedagogy. This dilemma is evidenced in my own work with Sheryl Cozart and Paula Price, where we contemplate the role of autobiographical representations in preservice teacher education, citing how uneasy we sometimes feel:
Many days we feel vulnerable as we look out across the sea of faces—most of whom are White, female and middle-class—staring back at us as we speak intellectually and personally to the lived experiences of the oppressed, all the while hoping that we can engage the students long enough to make a personal connection. The days when we feel particularly vulnerable each of us conjures up African American intellectuals who wrote (and continue to write) about how they stay the course. We also call each other.12
Paralyzed by the isolation, marginalization, and loneliness that can plague non-traditional academics, teacher educators attempting to create an engaged pedagogy oftentimes find themselves depleted and unable to work against “reinforcing existing systems of domination.”13 Yet, for those of us who remember why we became teacher educators, not creating an engaged curriculum is more frightening. Informal surveys of teacher educators indicate that there are many weary days when they are convinced that their conscious efforts to practice engaged pedagogy make no difference in the grand scheme. All too frequently one hears that the norms now associated with standardized tests in K-12 have effectively destroyed any real opportunities that existed to convince prospective teachers to be critical thinkers. I find that students entering into universities today are more obsessed with grades and tests scores, comforted by the banking system of education (they want to know exactly what the professor wants so they can get a grade), and frustrated when asked to demonstrate critical thinking skills.14 It is as if students realize that the traditional memorize, regurgitate process of schooling is much “easier” than being engaged and having to think critically about what it is they learn and the ramifications of such ways of knowing. As hooks reminds us, becoming a critical thinker is a “threat to authority.”15 It is also a threat to many prospective teachers, the majority of whom are white, middle-class, and enter the profession because of very positive schooling experiences. In other words, “it ain’t broke. It worked for me” attitudes are prevalent while children and their parents are vilified. For teacher educators, remaining audaciously hopeful, “the ability to take action when there is little evidence that doing so will produce a positive outcome” in this context is daunting.16 Again, hooks’s words inspire, “Passionately insisting that no matter what one’s class, race, gender, or social standing, I shared my beliefs that without the capacity to think critically about our selves and our lives, none of us would be able to move forward, to change, to grow.”17 I recall my learning experience at Spelman and I am reminded of that process through Nicole’s words, “In my development as a conscious person and engaged citizen I think bell hooks’ works profoundly impact my growth, but her work was able to challenge me because I was in an environment where being subversive was nurtured.” Their comments remind me that it is imperative that while teacher educators should work to transform students, they must continue to embark upon a process of self-actualization all the while encouraging their colleagues to do the same. Read closely, hooks’s work models ways in which teacher educators can embody engaged pedagogy that is transformative. These ways include an awareness of one’s self-narrative, creating communities of solidarity across difference, and being hopeful.
When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom. Realizing this, I lost my love of school. The classroom was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn. Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We were always and only responding and reacting to white folks.18
When speaking, bell hooks often comments on how the painful stories of her life allow her to make sense of the pain in our social world. In many of her early writings, hooks’s presents a rich and disclosive narrative of her educational experiences from grade school to graduate school, whereby she is able to outline the joy and pain of education and theory.19 Because of an awareness of the impact of her own lived experiences, she can better empathize with the disappointments of others. Despite criticism of being narcissistic,20 hooks’s vulnerability provides a particular type of insight into the impact of certain educational practices. Perhaps just as important, she provides an example of how others can use their own stories as the foundation to creating engaged pedagogy. hooks’s message to teacher educators is that educational transformation cannot take place until they first understand the impact of their own ways of knowing and being educated about their value system, beliefs, and desires for education. Hence, self-reflexivity is essential to educational transformation. Teacher educators have to be able to critically answer the question, “Why do I believe this and what outcome am I trying to produce?” For hooks, these questions must be asked and addressed in terms of a broader understanding of the context of the larger social system.
hooks’s personal story within the context of a cultural critique was what captured me as a student. Her story made the theory come to life. Her personal narrative made the theory consist of more than obtaining knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I found that her story made obtaining knowledge for the sake of self and others the central concern. Specifically, the theory did not exist in a vacuum; the theory helped me to understand that what I was experiencing was also the experiences of others and that there were ideas out there to help me better articulate my lived experiences to people with different experiences. Her work was an incredible gift because it opened so many possibilities for me that my previous schooling had not. I accredit the opening of possibilities directly to being able to personally identify with hooks’s story. In this way, narrative plays an important role in terms of functioning as a mirror in terms of which we can emulate and be encouraged to engage in self-critical reflection and transformation.
Teacher educators must be willing to explore the patterns, the connections and the disconnections of their lives, and, like any good researcher, turn it into data and analyze it. Then, they must share their findings in narrative form. For example, they must be able to interpret their lived experiences through the educational theory presented to their students. It is no coincidence K-12 teachers lament the discernible disconnect between theory and practice. During their training no one ever modeled for them how the theory they studied is actually connected to what they experienced as students, or what their students will experience every day. In other words, within the classroom, apparently there were no teacher educators who demonstrated how, for example, critical race theory, feminism, and poverty frame and continue to shape K-12 teachers’ lives. Prospective teachers need to know that not every teacher is in the profession because they had wonderful teachers and role models. Some become teachers because of the harm and hurt perpetuated on them as students and they want to break that cycle. This is learned through narrative.
hooks explains why more teacher educators do not share their narratives. She asserts “the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalization.”21 Simply put, the classroom is just not the place to bring our whole selves. Yet the impact of neglecting this aspect of learning has significant consequences. hooks’ writes:
Denying the emotional presence and wholeness of students may help professors who are unable to connect focus more on the task of sharing information, facts, data, their interpretations, with no regard for listening to and hearing from students. It makes the classroom a setting where optimal learning cannot and will not occur.22
hooks’s definition of self-actualization, of being whole, requires that professors create classrooms where sharing stories is possible. To do this, we must know our own stories. Teaching for self-actualization requires that we share them.
In the absence of understanding how personal narratives shape who we are as educators and the type of curriculum we create, we are likely to repeat many of the harmful acts of schooling that have been done to us. According to Kevin Kumashiro, repetition is when, “educational practices, perspectives, social relations and identities remain unquestioned”23 and merely reinforce and sustain the very thing it is designed to dismantle. Mark Hicks and I assert that this is:
…where many well intentioned people become trapped. We routinely enter into the classroom ready to work with students on issues of their transformation without challenging our own set of assumptions and expectations. Failing to investigate and more importantly, begin to understand how our own lived histories—and the intentions that accompanied those histories—often [make] us ineffective at articulating our own needs and values.24
Self-actualization as defined by hooks is supported by other theorists. Developmental psychologists and critical theorists25 believe that acts of inquiry lead to the naming of less desirable aspects of our lives so that we can better take control of them, as opposed to those factors having control over us. If creating engaged pedagogy so that individual transformation is the result, teacher educators must be willing to critically investigate and share their own stories with students and colleagues.
It is fashionable these days, when “difference” is a hot topic in progressive circles, to talk about “hybridity” and “border crossing,” but we often have no concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern with teaching practices.26
For me, the hardest part of engaged pedagogy is community building. It is hard for me because it is painful to watch how inept we are as a culture when it comes to working across differences. I have been a member of socially conscious educational communities with the best of intentions and watched as projects slowly, but surely disintegrate because we were unable to effectively communicate across our race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Self-actualization, while an individual act of becoming whole, is also about developing healthy communities of solidarity that have common goals. Creating healthy, sustainable communities as a means of recreating the world is not a new revelation. At many times in history, philosophers, theologians, and other socially conscious theorists, whether through their activism or writings, have called for community building with each providing insightful ways of doing so. W. E. B. Du Bois,27 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.28Mahatma Gandhi,29 Anna Julia Cooper,30 and others were exemplars in this area. The work of these great thinkers reminds us of our common goal of creating a more just and equitable world. Through their cultural analyses and personal stories, these conscious individuals understood that the best hope for creating a world that resists racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice requires the ability to cross cultural divides. In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, hooks remembers Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for a “beloved community.”31 She writes:
His vision remains. King taught that the simple act of coming together would strengthen community. Yet before he was assassinated he was beginning to see that unlearning racism would require a change in both thinking and action, and that people could agree to come together across race, but they would not make a community.32
Indeed, the work of building community across racial lines “remains difficult, even painful for both people of color and well-intentioned whites.”33 Again, Hicks and I maintain:
People of color, long weary of efforts that promise equality and justice, can find working in such communities daunting reminders of how privilege can inoculate people from the realities of other people’s lives. Those socialized into dominating systems of privilege find themselves exasperated by feelings of guilt, shame, or feeling as if they “never get it right.”34
Such pain is ever present in schools of education when white prospective teachers espouse their “colorblindness” in classrooms with students of color. Because there are very few models explaining how to communicate about race within mixed groups, far too many times teacher educators fail to challenge such claims so as not to create too much dissention within the classroom “community.” This is when the ease of repetition and fear of vulnerability rears its ugly head. In the absence of analyzing our personal narratives, we are less likely to fully understand the types of communities we want to create, and therefore, as a result, we settle for communities that come together and are formed purely by chance. Given that our lived histories frame our personal understandings of community and our role within and responsibility to it, creating communities of solidarity with common goals requires thoughtful and careful planning.
Again, this can be difficult. hooks’s personal story of schooling reminds us that the academy is designed for uniquely different individuals to proceed through the same white, male, privileged, heterosexual process of framing and interpreting knowledge. Yet, we each hold a different collection of “mental models”35 that frame and interpret knowledge and therefore, have different understandings of what constitutes a community. The literature on whiteness outlines particular orientations and ways of knowing that shape whiteness in America. They include individual consciousness, an ethic of personal responsibility, and strong commitments to intellectual rather than emotional ways of knowing.36 Since this orientation is the very foundation of higher education, as engaged teacher educators we are called to daringly challenge it by asking: what happens to the curriculum when people from historically marginalized groups enter and their ways of knowing suggest “multiplicity, for example, DuBois’ ‘two-ness’”? Add to these different orientations various complex emotions and you have a storm brewing.37
In an unpublished manuscript about my collaborative work as a professor in the Initiatives of Educational Transformation (IET) Program at George Mason University, I learned a great deal about myself as a collaborator within a community. Dr. Mark A. Hicks, my coauthor, colleague, and friend, sat down with me and together we wrote a paper hoping that it might provide some insight into our experiences as African Americans working with well-intentioned white people seeking to create a transformative curriculum for teachers. What I learned about myself as a professional and community member was directly connected to who I am personally, to my own expectations, wants, needs, and desires. Mark and I learned five very important things about who we were when we came to that community:
1) We entered into [the] process with an unchallenged set of assumptions about what we [could] and should expect from our White colleagues; 2) We failed to understand how our own lived histories—and the good intentions that accompanied those histories—often made us ineffective at articulating our own needs and values; 3) We need to be conscious of how the historical freedom project of African Americans is subjected to issues of repetition; 4) People of color and Whites have different developmental needs that determine how transformation looks and feels; and finally, 5) that, in keeping with the tenets of transformative learning, all members of the collaborative needed to acquire new sets of skills and habits of mind in order to achieve these aims.38
Working within the IET community reminded me that self-actualization is an on-going process and that multiple contexts and experiences are necessary for us to be fully actualized, to the extent to which this is possible.
In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, hooks’s reminds teacher educators that to “build a community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”39 She continues, “when we take the theory, the explanations, and apply them concretely to our daily lives, to our experiences, we further and deepen the practice of anti-racist transformation.”40 In an effort to be better curriculum developers and colleagues, Mark and I:
…engaged in reflective exercises—journaling, reconstituting discussions and critical incidents—to unearth the source of our dissonance, trying to make meaning of how our own story fused with the larger narrative of which we were a part. We traced the trajectories of African American intellectual redwoods, like DuBois, Patricia Hill Collins, Anna Julia Cooper, bell hooks, Bayard Rustin, and Cornel West, reading their narratives and critiques of gender, race, spirituality and so forth. But we also found ourselves surfacing and then tracing a personal journey much closer to home, that of our parents and grandparents who modeled how to negotiate what it means to be a person of color in a world that both welcomes us, and also treats us like strangers.41
We took our professional tools and used them to make us better community members. For me, the process was a beginning. For the first time, I was able to articulate many aspects of collaboration and community that both inspired and deflated me. But most importantly, because of the process I am a much better community member. And, while it is still painful for me to watch how inept we are as a culture when it comes to difference, I am hopeful about the possibilities of addressing those differences. I have my colleagues at IET to thank for that. I wish this process on all teacher educators.
It was difficult to maintain fidelity to the idea of the intellectual as someone who sought to be whole—well grounded in a context where there was little emphasis on spiritual well-being, on care of the soul.43
On a recent radio show, I heard Rev. Jesse Jackson say, “Hope is a weapon. Hope is a weapon.”1 His statement resonated with me. When I am feeling hopeful, I believe that I have made the right decision and that there will be a positive outcome. When I am hopeful, I am able to take actions that make a difference. Hopelessness, on the other hand, garners a very different response. Instead of believing in my decisions, I second guess myself. Instead of having faith in the outcome, I am pessimistic. Indeed, hope is a weapon. When I am hopeful I am intensely committed to taking actions that make a difference personally and within the community, such that no matter what individuals or groups do, I continue to act. Hope is a weapon that protects us from the violent acts of patriarchy, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and classism that shape our daily lives.
In Beyond Reflective Competency: Teaching for Audacious Hope-in-Action, Hicks and I explain that despite creating an antioppressive, transformative curriculum that sharpened our teachers’ reflective, collaborative, and inquiry skills, and evidence that our teachers came to new and more critical insights, our curriculum failed to inspire teachers to take an antioppressive stance in remedying oppressive practices in schools. We believe that teachers could not take an antioppressive stance, or actions, because they failed to understand that “hope and action are inextricably dependent on each other.”44 Specifically, “for action to be taken, one must have a hopeful view. And the reverse is also true: For one to be hopeful, action must be taken. Indeed, hope and action are in a symbiotic relationship with each other.”45 We created a curriculum that focused on the needed tools for doing antioppressive work and not the needed weapons.
The strength of Teaching Community lies in the hope filled personal stories shared by hooks. One particular story of hope stuck with me. In it she describes being the commencement speaker at a conservative school in the South and being booed. She provides a rich description of the experience, citing what she learned. But, what gave me pause was her analysis of the event and the hopefulness she took away from the experience. She writes:
To many onlookers this experience was viewed as a failure of efforts of diversity and inclusion. I saw it as a triumph, first of free speech, which any college must support to be true to its mission…. I had also been empowered by a world of “white male privilege” to speak to masses of white people who probably have never listened to a black female give a lecture about any subject, let alone a Leftist dissident feminist black intellectual…. Just as I spoke in my commencement address about the importance of not merely conforming in college but daring to courageously cling to open-mindedness, to critical thinking, my hope was to embody this courage, this radical openness by my presence. That hope was fully realized.46
hooks did not just wish for something to happen, she took action, and despite not having the impact she may have wanted on the majority of the audience, she was inspired by knowing that she had remained true to her beliefs. In doing so, one audience member, Dean Jim Hunt, was positively engaged. She shares his comments, “There is not a week that goes by without my thinking of some of the ideas that were raised.”47 Despite being afraid, hooks spoke with passion about her convictions and steadied herself for the criticism. In the end, it was a learning experience not just for the audience, but for her as well.
Teacher educators must begin to educate prospective teachers with a sense of audacious hope that sustains them during moments of uncertainty and when they are afraid. In this sense, audacious hope is both an offensive and defensive weapon against despair and disillusionment. Teachers should be just and stand for what is right, even when it is not popular. Because students are involved, we must be willing to take risks if the outcome of the risks improves the lives of others. hooks’s belief in the role of the imagination is analogous to this notion of sustaining hope. Speaking of the role of imagination, she writes, “Throughout my teaching career, I have shared with students my beliefs in the power of prophetic imagination, telling them again and again ‘that what we cannot imagine we cannot bring into being’.”48 Teacher educators must be audaciously hopeful and work to assist prospective teachers to actualize a sense of hope as well. We must fight against the traditions and realities of a demoralized educational system that overshadows any actions taken on the behalf of others, just as hooks did in her commencement speech. Recognizing that the process of self-actualization and working to build communities of solidarity is much harder than we could ever have anticipated, hope will help teachers stay the course. Hope is a weapon that teacher educators must pass on to prospective teachers. If we fail to do so, they will certainly not pass it on to children sitting in their classrooms in the future.
If I were in a different academic setting her works would have merely resonated with me. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to study her books and essays and attempt to apply some of her progressive ideas to my life. In my mind, this is theory meeting practice at the most basic and fundamental level: the individual.49
Engaged pedagogy demands that we create spaces that support wholeness and uphold the idea of mind and body as one.50 I believe bell hooks has it right. Once you experience engaged pedagogy, education literally becomes an act of freedom. You are free to share your personal story in ways that are significant, in ways that build and sustain communities across differences, and, most importantly, in ways that are hopeful. Watching my young cousin Nicole’s enthusiasm about her learning experience at Spelman, an environment where education is an act of freedom, I am nostalgic about my own process. I am also confident that if teacher educators apply the works of bell hooks to their personal and professional lives then we will have an opportunity to create for all students an engaged pedagogy where theory meets practice. Perhaps, just as important, creating an engaged pedagogy allows teacher educators to sustain themselves and the work they do.
1. At the time of writing, Nicole S. Barden was a junior English major and Women’s Studies minor at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.
2. Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles, an English professor at the time at Spelman College, told us this in a freshman composition course.
3. Namulundah Florence, bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey Press, 1998).
4. hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as an Act of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15.
5. Ibid., 14.
6. Ibid., 15–16.
7. Hugh Sockett, and others, eds., Transforming Teacher Education: Lessons in Professional Development (New York: Bergin & Garvey Press, 2001), 4.
8. Mezirow and Associated cited in Patricia Cranton, Understanding and Promoting Tramsformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 22.
9. Ibid. One might conclude that transformation is implied in the NCATE standard 1: Candidate Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions. The targeted goal for a teacher candidate disposition reads, “candidates recognize when their own dispositions may need to be adjusted and are able to do so” (NCATE Web site, http://www.ncate.org; accessed July 10, 2008). One might argue that the accrediting body desires that candidates are able to negotiate and respond critically as opposed to having their purposes, values, feelings, and meanings gathered uncritically from others.
10. There are departments within schools of education that are committed to an engaged and transformative pedagogy and that support faculty designing such a curriculum. It is my belief that this should be the aim of all schools of education.
11. Julia Brooks, “Sharing Power in the Social Foundations of Education: Risky Emotions as Antecedents to Transformation,”(Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Studies Association, Cleveland, Ohio, October 24–28, 2007).
12. Sheryl Cozart, Gretchen Generett, and Paula Price, “Biography as Curriculum: Autobiographical Representations in Preservice Teacher Education,” Vitae Scholastica (forthcoming).
13. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 18.
14. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1970).
15. Ibid., 5.
16. Gretchen Generett and Mark Hicks, “Beyond Reflective Competency: Teaching for Audacious Hope in Action,” Journal of Transformative Education 2 (2004): 192.
17. hooks, Teaching to Transgress.
18. Ibid., 3–4.
19. Several of hooks’s works, including Killing Rage, Talking Back, and Ain’t I a Woman? describe her educational experiences.
20. Michele Wallace, “For Whom the Bell Tolls: Why America Can’t Deal with Black Feminist Intellectuals,” The Village Voice 40 (45): 19–24.
21. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 16.
22. bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129.
23. Kevin Kumashiro, “Against Repetition: Addressing Resistance to Anti-Oppressive Change in the Practices of Learning, Teaching, Supervising, and Researching,” Harvard Educational Review 72(2002): 68.
24. Mark Hicks and Gretchen Generett, “Barriers to Transformative Collaboration for Justice Within Cross-Cultural Communities” (Unpublished Manuscript, 2007), 32.
25. Antonio Darder, William Perry, and Paulo Freire all address inquiry as a significant aspect of development.
26. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 129–130.
27. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
28. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope; The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
29. Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence: A Selection from the Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1964).
30. Vivian May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007).
31. hooks, Teaching Community, 35.
32. Ibid., 35–36.
33. Hicks and Generett, “Barriers to Transformative Collaboration,” 3.
34. Ibid., 3–4.
35. Peter Senge and others, ed., Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook or Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares About Education (New York: Fifth Discipline Books, 2000), 68.
36. Thomas Nakayama and Judith Martin, Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
37. Hicks and Generett, “Barriers to Transformative Collaboration for Justice,” 34.
38. Ibid., 32.
39. hooks, Teaching Community, 36.
40. Ibid.
41. Hicks and Generett, “Barriers to Transformative Collaboration for Justice,” 4.
42. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 16.
43. Jesse Jackson, Keep Hope Alive Radio Talk Show, Pittsburgh, PA, January 13, 2008.
44. Generett and Hicks, “Beyond Reflective Competency: Teaching for Audacious Hope in Action,” 199.
45. Ibid., 199.
46. hooks, Teaching Community, 194–95.
47. Ibid., 195.
48. Ibid.
49. Nicole S. Barden, January 7, 2007.
50. hooks, Teaching to Transgress.