Abstract
Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks offers invaluable insight into critical teaching pedagogy for persons interested in reshaping the future of public education in the United States. In her latest book, hooks addresses the embedded race, class, and gender complexities often found in U.S. higher educational institutions and instructional methods that not only drastically influence the quality of education but subsequent student learning outcomes as well. Most of hooks’s thoughtful analysis is drawn from her prior educational opportunities as a youth in Kentucky during the Jim Crow Era, incidents in the classroom as a black female student at a predominantly white university, and finally, her experience as an academician.
The main premise of the book centers on the issue that teachers must critically evaluate their own instructional methods and practices in order to truly educate. To that end, hooks uses a self-reflective critical analysis in an attempt to have an honest conversation about education. Critical pedagogical questions emerge throughout the book such as: How do large classes fit into the larger educational paradigm? How can humor be infused into the classroom in a tactful manner? and Why is it necessary to have an answer to every question raised? Taken-for-granted assumptions that affect the quality of education are challenged, such as that students are passive learners and the top-down approach that assumes that professors are the sole purveyors of knowledge. According to hooks, many students challenge existing ideologies, pose relevant questions, and reinterpret critical issues, thus directly and indirectly “teaching” their own professors and fellow classmates.
The critical analysis of renowned Brazilian educator and theorist, Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed [2006]), is primarily used to inform hooks’s teaching methodology. Teaching Critical Thinking is the third and final book in her series of books on teaching pedagogy. The previous two books, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (hooks 1994) and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (hooks 2003), differ from the current book in that hooks did not follow the previous pattern of presenting a collection of essays. Rather, she developed the present book out of a series of conversations with students and professors to foster critical thinking and engagement within the classroom environment. As such, it contains 32 “teachings,” what hooks refers to as cases based on experiences in the classroom that are honest, practical, and ripe with wisdom.
Books such as Teaching Critical Thinking are meant to move beyond theory and rhetoric to practical application. For example, I used a passage within the book on “Passive Learning and Conversation” to have a candid discussion on student apathy with my students. After the selected discussion, it seemed as though my own students were more thoughtful about passive learning and at least developed a greater self-awareness of their place in the classroom as potential agents of change. Although there is no clearly identifiable set order to each teaching, the reader will find that each teaching is linked by the common thread of critical thinking in the classroom. With such a variety of selections as “Teaching 4: Decolonization,” “Teaching 11: Imagination,” “Teaching 14: Crying Time,” “Teaching 20: Teachers against Teaching,” “Teaching 29: Moving Past Race and Gender,” and “Teaching 32: Practical Wisdom,” educators are bound to find some topic of interest that resonates in some way, shape, or form.
The writing also has the unique quality of reflexivity and is free from tones of condescendence. Part of the ability to do this lies in hooks’s candor about her personal growth as a professor. To illustrate my point, she shares the following story with the reader:
In my early years of university teaching, I, too, was somewhat brainwashed and felt that my central role was to impart knowledge, that it was not my role to be a therapist. Yet it soon became apparent to me that if lack of self-esteem served as a barrier to student’s learning, then I would have to help them work at removing that barrier so that the information and knowledge I hoped to share could be constructively grasped by them. (P. 125)
Besides the freedom hooks gives the reader (while not explicitly stated) to start reading anywhere without feeling lost, hooks’s writing is so vivid and inspiring that she forces the reader to engage with the intellectual rigor of her words. With a plethora of meaningful statements, such as “Classrooms cannot change if professors are unwilling to admit that to teach without biases requires that most of us learn anew, that we become students again” (p. 31) and “I did not understand at the beginning of my teaching career that the majority of students would arrive in my classroom colonized in their minds and imaginations” (p. 35), the reader is sure to be engrossed in the book from beginning to end.
This book is a must read for any professor who wants to be more informed, seeks to engage critically students, and questions his or her own methods of instruction. It also has the intended or unintended consequence of challenging one’s own teaching methods as to how students are actually engaged, if they are engaged at all. The book is timely in that it is becoming increasingly apparent that greater solutions to our ineffective educational system must come from educators on the front lines.