âFear of losing control in the classroom often leads individual professors to fall into a conventional teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively.â â bell hooks
As a teacher, I have always felt that our academic culture needs a thinker/ educationist/ emancipator like bell hooks. Even though we can no longer see, feel and experience her embodied existence, it is important for us to invoke her time and again, allow ourselves to be touched by her passion and conviction, and redefine the meaning of teaching and scholarship. Yes, we have already read a series of obituaries; and enough has been said and written about this Black American feminist thinker, her sharp critique of racism and patriarchy, her expanded horizon that enabled her to continually write on gender, racism, sexuality, culture, pedagogy, love and even childrenâs literature, and above all, the immense politico-intellectual strength that characterised her lifeâs trajectory â from being born in a working-class family, growing up in a ghettoised/segmented Black locality, and eventually emerging as a charismatic professor nurturing and inspiring generations of students.
However, I wish to stress three principles that bell hooks internalised as a scholar/teacher; and these principles, I would argue, have immense relevance if we wish to humanise the prevalent academic culture. To begin with, let it be stated clearly that bell hooks was refreshingly different from a typical âvalue-neutralâ academic â devoid of emotion and passion, and burdened with heavily technical and jargonised publications. And this sickness, every insider knows, is tempting; it has affected many Marxist, poststructuralist, postmodernist and even feminist thinkers and writers. Ironically, scholarship has been equated with incomprehensibility. But then, bell hooks was endowed with immense courage; she defied the style of this sort of prose; instead, her books and articles flow like a river, her words touch the soul of the reader. In a way, theory, for her, was like poetry. Yes, many scholars of the leading American universities where she taught were not very happy with her style and mode of writing. Yet, she inspired us, and gave us the confidence to realise that writing, instead of being reduced to a purely narcissistic exercise of demonstrating oneâs âintellectâ, can be therapeutic.
Second, she altered the character of the classroom. In a way, she took Paulo Freire pretty seriously. For her, emancipatory education ought to be dialogic and experiential. And a teacher ought to cultivate the art of non-judgmental/compassionate listening. Quite often, in our classrooms, no engaged dialogue takes place. A âscholarlyâ lecture by a professor, absence of lived reality and experience (even poetry or popular culture is taught like differential calculus), with a lengthy reading list, and repeated production of jargonised seminar papers: Most of our students experience this routine, or coldness of academia. But then, bell hooks transformed her classrooms, altered the meaning of the relationship between teacher and student, and encouraged young minds â particularly, Black women in a White male-dominated space â to articulate their voices, and their pain and trauma. Through this dialogue, reflexivity and inner churning, she continually interrogated patriarchy, racism, and other forms of domination in her classroom. Of course, most of us seek to avoid this sort of engagement with our students because it can also be emotionally taxing. Hence, quite often, our engagement with students remains limited to a bureaucratically-defined task â âcoveringâ the syllabus, grading the students, and then forgetting them. Anyone who wants to join the vocation of teaching, I feel, must read bell hooks â particularly, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
Without love, there cannot be any pedagogy of hope. Possibly, for those who celebrate the enchanting power of engaged pedagogy, and still dream of a compassionate, inclusive and egalitarian world, bell hooks would remain alive, and continue to sing her songs.
This column first appeared in the print edition on December 31, 2021 under the title âTeaching to transgressâ. The writer is professor of Sociology at JNU
