The Promise and Threat of Engaged Pedagogy: A Tribute to bell hooks

Introduction

In 1994, bell hooks, author, scholar, teacher, and activist, wrote her landmark text on higher education, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. In the book she introduced what she called engaged pedagogy, a call to teach in a way that respected the student's (and the teacher's) humanity as much as their intellect. At the time, hooks was struggling with educational systems that felt like assembly lines, where students were seen as absorbers and regurgitators of a teacher's knowledge, and where issues such as race, gender, and class were addressed only as abstract subjects, not in their complex, lived realities. Originally educated in all-Black elementary schools where she “experienced learning as revolution” (hooks, 1994, p. 2), racial integration took her into schools where “knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved” (p. 3). A student of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), she wanted more when she began teaching at the college level. She wanted teaching that transgressed the boundaries of race, gender, and class and taught students to think critically and care deeply.

There is no doubt that higher education is different in 2022 than it was in 1994. The standard lecture and test philosophy has largely been replaced with calls for learner-centered pedagogy (Weimer, 2002) that places students at the center of the design process. Compassionate teaching and understanding a student's unique context have become staples of the inclusion and equity literature (Emdin 2016; Kaufman & Schipper, 2018; Verschelden, 2017) as have texts on culturally appropriate teaching (Garcia 2019; Ginsberg & Wlodkowski, 2009). Similarly, universal design for learning (CAST, 2018) requires accounting for the multiple learning needs of students and has even been applied directly to the racial boundaries hooks discusses (Fritzgerald, 2020).

There are efforts that challenge academic rigor (Nelson, 2010) and common assessment strategies (Blum, 2020), attempts to decolonize or indigenize the classroom (Bishop, 2015; Pete et al., 2013; Ragoonaden, 2017), and to acknowledge trauma (Thompson & Carello, 2022). While there remain plenty of traditional tomes on educational practice, it would seem as if the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has heeded hooks' call for a more inclusive, challenging, engaged classroom, even if perhaps it has not gone as far as to “experience learning as revolution” (hooks, 1994, p. 2).

This is encouraging. However, these new pedagogical approaches are happening at the same time higher education is facing perhaps unprecedented challenges. So, looking forward may require looking back. This article is an attempt to explore what hooks' engaged pedagogy might have to offer today's educators, in particular, those committed to using education as a way to forward causes of social justice.

Engaged Pedagogy: An Overview

At its very heart, engaged pedagogy is about two interrelated ideas. The first is that teaching is relational and personal. Students and teachers must make the effort to know one another, but beyond this, they must actually care about each other. As hooks explains, “the work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students” (p. 13). This level of influence can only function within relationships.

This relational process requires the teacher to be engaged in “self-actualization” (p. 15). At the time of her writing, this was a radical concept, as hooks explains that “whether academics were drug addicts, batterers or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our minds functioned, whether we were able to do our jobs” (p. 16). Now SoTL has largely accepted the premise that relational teaching is beneficial for students and instructors (Bovill, 2020; Felton & Lambert, 2020) so self-actualization is not a foreign concept in higher education. Even when hooks was writing, the origins of mutuality in teaching were already finding their way into feminist classrooms and women's studies programs where the premise the “personal is political” had found a footing in the women's rights movement of the 1970s. This mantle has, in the last 20 years, been picked up by other educators seeking to define the educational space as one of revolution (Ayers 2004; Gannon 2020; McLaren 2000).

But, hooks' engaged pedagogy and its call for relational teaching, has another component. The relational process must not just involve getting to know one another, even deeply. To be meaningful, this relational connection must emerge from the transgression of boundaries that keep us separated as human beings in the first place—for hooks, namely, race, gender, class, and power. When educators are willing to transgress those boundaries in the name of pedagogy that “respects and cares for the souls of our students” (p. 13) what emerges is true mutuality, collective responsibility, and power sharing. Hooks is clear that this requires risk taking, personal disclosure, active listening, and a willingness to cocreate with students (p. 21).

But mutuality is not an end in and of itself. Engaged pedagogy asserts that in “sacred” spaces where teachers and students are willing to form these relational connections through the transgression of boundaries, both personal and intellectual, something unique happens. Education (knowledge) moves beyond just empowering students to actually becoming a path to freedom. Consider a classroom where climate change or the prison industrial complex is the academic focus. In many classrooms, these issues are taught with a focus on the head at the exclusion of the heart or the lived experience. Students learn facts, interact with theories, perhaps even participate in group assignments where they explore/critique interventions. In this context they leave the experience better educated but perhaps with no intimate, personal connection to what they have just studied.

In a classroom of engaged pedagogy, instructors seek to understand the way what they teach lives in the lives and hearts of their students. Classroom discussions about facts or theories become conversations about life—about the intersection between the personal and the political. This requires transgressing boundaries so that students feel safe to share deeply. It requires instructors who say overtly, “This is my experience of what we are studying, and this is how this topic is affected by issues of race, gender, class, or other forms of marginalization. What is your experience with what we are learning? I want to know. It matters in making our experience of learning this material meaningful.” It is the reminder that everything being taught already lives in the room, in the lives of students.

If done with sincerity, the classroom then becomes a place where students share about their incarcerated family members, perhaps victims of racially prejudiced systems of justice. In doing so they are able to make connections between their lives and their intellects. A marginalized student exploring sustainability is encouraged to discuss the connection between poverty and food desert and is further encouraged to share their lived experience of this reality. This only happens in an intellectual environment where instructors know their students well enough to assist them in seeing these lived connections, and where lived experience is valued in the classroom space. When it happens, however, the end result can be a student who is empowered by their knowledge to act on their lived experience. Instead of a better educated graduate, engaged pedagogy allows the creation of real change agents, seeking to directly alter the circumstances of their lives.

Transgressing the boundaries in the classroom through meaningful relationships between students and teachers is the path for breaking down, societally, those same boundaries. Students are able to see the connections between “what they are learning and their overall life experiences” (p. 19), between the personal and the political. This is the sacred location where knowledge becomes action and students become change agents about the things that matter to them. In this manner, hooks' engaged pedagogy offers us the opportunity to empower students as a way of solving the crises of our day. But the impact of years of a global pandemic and the current politicized nature of education, offer unique opportunities and challenges to hooks' goal.

Pandemics, Mental Health Overwhelm and the Gift of Engaged Pedagogy

In April, 2022, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article entitled “A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection” (McMurtrie, 2022). It dispelled, once and for all, the belief of any single instructor that students not coming to class, not being able to concentrate, not doing homework, and suffering from an array of mental health issues, was an individual phenomenon. In it, instructors talked of 30 percent or more of their students simply not being able to do what was asked of them, and instructors, themselves, admitted feeling the same kind of brain fog, lack of motivation, and even depression.

Mental health issues in college students are by no means a new topic. Research from before the pandemic asserts that college is a uniquely stressful period in a person's life, and struggles such as depression and anxiety are commonplace (Pedrelli et al., 2014). But the recent Covid-19 pandemic pushed many students to the breaking point. In addition to the normal stresses of college, students reported worrying about their own health or the health of their family members, and of feeling increased anxiety related to isolation and social distancing (Son et al., 2020). Similarly, college educators faced many of the same stresses as they were asked to move their classes online, sometimes in the middle of a semester, while trying to balance their own anxieties and physical health concerns related to the pandemic.

The university landscape and the SoTL had already been trying to adapt to the increase in the mental health needs of college students. More universities were investing resources in counseling services and informal networks of peer support and mentoring. Likewise, training on trauma-informed pedagogy became a staple of national educational organizations, as faculty attempted to understand the balance between teaching, caring about their students, and feeling like personal counselors. In the present period, “I am a teacher not a therapist” is a more and more common refrain from educators attempting to see their students as human beings, but also calls attention to their role as educator to give students the education they were hired to provide.

It is important to understand, in the context of the discussion here, engaged pedagogy does not equate education with therapy. In fact, as hooks makes clear, “it is utterly unreasonable for students to expect classrooms to be therapy sessions” (p. 19). At the same time, however, she calls on us as educators to recognize that our classrooms “are overflowing with students who feel terribly wounded in their psyches” (p. 19). The balance she attempts begins with a willingness as educators to be vulnerable enough in our classrooms to show ourselves as complex human beings still working through our own fears and struggles. This “engaged voice” reveals to students that instructors are “always evolving in dialogue with the world” and that the process of education is not a fixed path, but a constantly, personally changing landscape (p. 11). This kind of personal presence in the classroom models for students how to allow their own lived experiences to enter those spaces reserved for learning. It does not allow an emotional free for all or, what hooks calls the “abuse” of the “freedom of the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personal experience” (p. 19). Instead, it makes connections between the personal and the political, and in doing so, it allows for the student to experience hope and perhaps how to transmit their anxiety into action, at least individually and perhaps globally.

In this sense, engaged pedagogy offers educators a way to balance the personal challenges students bring into the classroom with the need to assist them in seeing these challenges as reflective of larger social issues. Creating space for their individual Covid stories or fears, for instance, provides an opportunity to create a connection between students' experiences and social justice. For instance, these personal discussions can be connected to the increased vulnerability of those at the margins of society, particularly during times of national or international crisis. In this way, engaged pedagogy transgresses personal boundaries in hopes of allowing students to recognize lived experiences and feel empowered to transgress political boundaries. By being heard, students are able to globalize their experiences and perhaps see the connection between their personal healing and collective action.

The Legislation of Thought and the Threat of Engaged Pedagogy

The other challenge to engaged pedagogy is in the form of recent political attempts to control academic freedom. For example, in 2021, Arizona became the first state in the country to ban what it called critical race theory from its K-12 classrooms. In House Bill 2898, the state threatened to fine schools $5,000 for teaching “that one race, ethnic group or sex is in any way superior to another or that anyone should be discriminated against because of these characteristics” (Gradillas, 2021). It should be noted that critical race theory is a specialized discipline within racial studies that seeks to identify structural and legal aspects of racism. These laws lump any racial education that could be seen as divisive under this one general category without any real understanding of the academic nature of this specific discipline. This new regulation, hidden in the state budget, was touted by the governor's office as a continuation of the state's commitment to teach civics in schools. Arizona is one of the first states to require passage of a civics exam for high school graduation.

In a related effort, Governor Ducey of Arizona signed HB2906 (Arizona House Bill 2906, 2021), which prohibits “the state and any local governments from requiring their employees to engage in orientation, training or therapy that suggest an employee is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” (Williams, 2021). This law was touted as an effort toward creating unity and eliminating the divisiveness that studying race or oppression may bring. As its sponsors would articulate in a press release from Governor Ducey's office (2021), “Arizona stands with Martin Luther King Jr.'s proclamation that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin” (Representative Jake Hoffmann) and “We should be focused on bringing people together, not pushing people apart. Critical race theory will do nothing but increase divisiveness in our communities” (Representative Michelle Udall). Even Governor Ducey echoed this claim, “I am not going to waste public dollars on lessons that imply the superiority of any race and hinder free speech. House Bill 2906 goes a long way towards protecting Arizonans against divisive and regressive lessons” (Office of the Governor Doug Ducey, 2021).

While the language of these bills, on the surface, seems to ban the teaching of White Supremacy and protect students of color from racism or sexism, the unspoken message behind them, especially given Arizona's history of prohibiting ethnic studies in schools, has had a chilling effect on the teaching of controversial subjects generally. For example, in 2010, Arizona passed HB 2281 which prohibited any class or program that “promotes the overthrow of the United States government, promotes resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocates ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals” (Arizona House Bill 2281 2010, p. 2). The prohibitions are under a statement declaring that “public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people” (p. 2). The law was challenged in court, and an injunction was issued in 2017 by a federal judge after one of the bill's sponsors (and former state superintendent of public instruction) published racist comments after the bill's passage (Fay, 2018). In 2020 the law was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court.

The original law was aimed at a middle school and high school program in Tucson that celebrated the contributions of Mexican Americans and that had positively impacted the academic success of the Latinx students involved. A less divisive version of the program currently is still in operation with a court-appointed overseer (Stephenson, 2021). Teachers are afraid that teaching the history of racism in this country (i.e., slavery, Indigenous genocide, the Chicano power movement, civil rights, etc.) will cause White students to feel uncomfortable, causing them to make claims that they are being taught that they are “inherently racist” “consciously or unconsciously.” As one Tucson High School teacher explained, “Whose story are we telling? There's a mainstream narrative that's been around for as long as we've been teaching these things, and it seems a little ridiculous people would object to having other perspectives” (Gradillas, 2021).

The Arizona laws that have passed apply only to K-12 educators and state and local governmental offices, but it is anticipated that they will impact higher education classrooms, especially in Arizona. Students coming out of high schools governed by these regulations, particularly White students, have an expectation about how racism, sexism, and power will be taught. When college instructors seek to push the same boundaries, there may be ramifications. That remains to be seen, but it also doesn't appear Arizona will stop at the K-12 level. In March, 2022, the Arizona House of Representatives attempted to get a state constitutional amendment onto the November ballot. The legislation, called the Stop Critical Race Theory and Racial Discrimination in Schools and Other Public Institutions Act would have made it unconstitutional to teach critical race theory in any public or charter K-12 school in the state and any university governed by the State Board of Regents, thus applying to the three public state universities. The amendment states that “the ideologies and practices known as critical race theory contradict the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Arizona Constitution by dividing people based on race and ethnicity” (Ballotpedia, 2022). At the time of this article, the amendment will not appear on the November ballot, but it may be reintroduced in the future.

While what ultimately happens in Arizona is uncertain, recent legislation in Florida does reach the college level for all state public universities. House Bill 7, which was originally called the Individual Freedom Measure, was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis in April, 2022. It bans the teaching of its version of critical race theory in all educational settings, including colleges and universities supported with state funds. Specifically. the language of the bill affirms that “all individuals are equal before the law and have unalienable rights” and as such, “instruction on topics [enumerated in this section] and supporting materials must be consistent with the following principles of individual freedom.” In this way it uses a similar logic to the bills in Arizona and other states, implying that banning critical race theory is not an effort to not talk about racism, but to have these discussions in ways that honor individuality.

Specifically, Florida's House Bill 7 prohibits: “subjecting any K-20 public education student or employee to training or instruction, that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual to believe the following concepts…

Proponents of the measure and conservative thinkers assert regularly that the bill does not ban discussions on controversial topics related to race, gender, or other issues of identity, but instead is designed to ensure that such discussions are “presented in an objective manner without endorsement.” So educators can discuss slavery or racism, for instance, but only in a manner that is “objective” and “without endorsement.” As one senior fellow at National Review explained, “It does not bar all things that make people (White or otherwise) uncomfortable, but only targets efforts to do so on the basis of race” (McLaughlin, 2022).

In this atmosphere, how one would transgress boundaries in the way hooks' suggests is essential if we are to not “merely share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students” (1994, p. 13). Remember that it is this transgression which she says is “the necessary condition where learning can most deeply and intimately begin” (p. 13). The Florida bill, and others like it, eliminate a place for any discussion of systemic or structural racism or sexism as they advocate only for the supremacy of individuality. By the same token they eliminate, in fact prohibit, any academic space where students might explore privilege and the fluid and varied role it might play in individual lives. Students are forbidden then from exploring their ongoing racial identities and responsibilities and are never able to make the distinction between this and being responsible for events of the past in which they did not play a direct role. In this new legislated academic context, then, engaged pedagogy is impossible. Educators must be wary of presenting information and leading discussions that are anything but objective and, therefore, by definition, detached from our lived experiences—the very place where engaged pedagogy thrives.

These laws create environments where teachers may actually be penalized for transgressing the boundaries of race, gender, and power. They are legally prohibited from having difficult conversations that allow students, across race for instance, to really discuss oppressor/oppressed dynamics without fearing this will be interpreted as blaming some students for the historical position of others. In this atmosphere, it becomes impossible for a teacher to implement engaged pedagogy which requires perspective sharing, active listening, personal recognition, and deep communication. And if the opportunity for this initial transgression of boundaries is denied to students, in the name of unity building, students are also denied the opportunity to learn how to turn their recognitions and new knowledge into social advocacy to change these issues at a societal level. Is this a price we are willing to pay?

It is the fear that education has the potential to breed activism with a political agenda that has caused the conservative desire to regulate educational freedom. In engaged pedagogy, teachers become powerful agents in the life of a child, exposing them to information that might be oppositional to what they have been taught in their homes. The right to be a child's first educator is critical in a society that believes in the value of the family as the predominate shaper of morality. In this world view, parents have a right to teach their child their own values because children are an extension of their parents. While unpacking, and perhaps even challenging, these notions of parental duty is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to acknowledge these roots, as most of the new political regulations on academic freedom have focused on mandatory public school, K-12.

Higher education, however, is a very different beast. It is not compulsory. In fact, there are continual assertions that it has even decreased in value while increasing in cost and debt. It remains true that students decide to go to college in order to learn a discipline, but also to explore ways of knowing, generally. This article assumes a version of higher education where students are not taught necessarily just how to do something (as they might in a trade school), but are given the intellectual space to explore whether or not the thing is even worth doing. In this context, students are exposed to intellectual ideas that may be new to them. In college classrooms, students seek out the knowledge of historical events they were not taught previously, are given space to discuss and challenge theories about how the world works, and are encouraged to explore scientific information from scholars who have dedicated their lives to its discovery. College is, by its very definition, a period of self-actualization.

Engaged pedagogy does not assert that the scholar-activist who emerges from a transformative educational experience will do so with a fixed political agenda. Instead, it asserts that the process of transgressing boundaries enables both students and teachers to grow together to better understand the role of structural issues such as race, gender, and class. Both teachers and students will begin to understand experiences outside of their own, and in doing so, it is hoped that they will develop their own activism, which, in many cases, will disrupt the status quo. But it will also find new answers to the nagging problems of society.

Political regulations that extend to higher education restrict what information is valid to be taught and what emotional or intellectual discomfort students should experience. It thus disengages student learning and mutual growth because it controls and ultimately penalizes open discussion, varied opinions, and intellectual challenge. This may result in stagnation of student empowerment and thus of student activism. Higher education may produce more cogs in the existing mechanisms of society and fewer change agents, creative thinkers and problem solvers. If we are to address critical issues such as climate change and marginalization of people groups, we need academic spaces where discussion, mutual respect, and true learning remain unhindered.

Call to Action

Given the issues described, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom is as relevant now as it ever was in the 1990s. In fact, if higher education is to play a role in solving climate change, poverty, mass incarceration, racism, and efforts to turn back the clock on gender equality, sexual freedom, and identity, then it must create new generations of scholarly activists not just graduates. Hooks' call to provide “education that is healing to the uninformed, unknowing spirit” (p. 19) through the transgression of boundaries, both personal and political, gives us a roadmap, one we have only begun to follow.

Hooks' ideas can be found in more contemporary SoTL literature, but is the application of new pedagogical techniques enough? Is there something more transformative that must take place in the lives of both students and teachers, something more personal, more intimate?

Engaged pedagogy requires us to see one another as living, breathing human beings engaged in mutual learning. While techniques and how-to-seminars are a beginning, they are not enough in a world of pandemic challenges to face-to-face education or one where politicians seek to control access to knowledge. Group work won't solve students being overwhelmed and the crisis of mental health. Addressing micro-aggressions is only a starting point in an educational system increasingly uncomfortable with allowing students to be intellectually uncomfortable. Equity-minded syllabi do not go far enough in allowing us to “teach without reinforcing existing systems of domination” (hooks, 1994, p. 18), especially in a climate where politicians seek to regulate which information is appropriate to discuss and with whom. Yet, the premise remains; if higher education is to play a role in solving the crises of our day, we must find a way forward. Perhaps looking back to hooks' call for education as the practice of freedom is one place to begin.