14 Workshop Eleven: Teaching Community by bell hooks
Workshop on “Preface,” “The Will to Learn,” “Talking Race and Racism,” “Democratic Education,” “Keepers of Hope,” “Progressive Learning,” “Heart to Heart,” “This is Our Life” from Teaching Community by bell hooks.
Created by Sydney Seymour, Afra Ahmed, and Madisson Hesse (April 2021).
(120 min of small group discussion) + (20 min total for breaks) + (10 min for class discussion) = 150 min total
Check in (10 min)
How has your week been going? Anything exciting to share?
Preface to the Workshop
Before you begin discussing, have a member of your group read this bell hooks quote aloud:
“The practice of ‘pausing’ is a practice of respect. It allows you to acknowledge and access others peoples’ feelings without violating that space with your insistence that you have a right to be there, or anywhere you want to be.” (hooks 114)
We understand that some of our discussion topics are going to be challenging to talk about, and we want to let you know that we have left enough time in each question for you to really pause and reflect, for a few minutes if necessary. Leave space for yourselves to form a response, and let go of the need to fill the awkward silence just to fill it. Instead, focus on thoughtfully listening to each and on searching for hope throughout the process.
Connecting Themes and Experiences
What Speaks to You
Below, we are going to insert some brief yet poignant quotes from Teaching Community. After reading each of the quotes out loud as a group, leave a few minutes for each member to silently reflect on the one which spoke to them the most and why. Don’t overthink it! Then, if you feel comfortable doing so, share your thoughts about the excerpt and its meaning to you. Try to actively connect your quote to another member’s quote through a shared theme (love, dominator culture, passion, community, etc.). If two or more of you chose the same quote, discuss why it was so powerful. (15 min)
- “Whenever we love justice and stand on the side of justice we refuse simplistic binaries. We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.” (hooks 10)
- “…students are encouraged to doubt themselves, their capacity to know, to think, and to act. Learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture.” (hooks 130)
- “‘If the acquirement of my self-determination is part of a worldwide, an inevitable, and a righteous movement, then I should become willing and able to embrace more and more of the whole world, without fear, and also without self-sacrifice. This means that as a Black feminist, I cannot be expected to respect what somebody else calls self-love if that concept of self-love requires my suicide to any degree.’” (hooks 170, citing Ann Petry’s character June Jordan)
- “Most of us have been raised with a misguided understanding of love. We have been taught that love makes us crazy, makes us blind and foolish, that it renders us unable to set healthy boundaries” (hooks 133)
- “Competitive education rarely works for students who have been socialized to value working for the good of the community. It rends them, tearing them apart. They experience levels of disconnection and fragmentation that destroy all pleasure in learning” (hooks 49)
How does bell hooks use language, both in these quotes and in the text as a whole, to engage in an accessible way? Does it matter if she is precise with her language in an academic sense? What about us? Should we be especially vigilant about our use of language in an academic setting? (5 min)
Anti-Racist Theory of Pedagogy
Who do you listen to?
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- Again considering language and ethos, hooks challenges her students to consider whose words they value by presenting the example of Oprah, a Black woman who:
“daily commands the attention of masses of white folks, and yet her role is usually that of commentator.” (hooks, 32)
How does mass media affect the stories you hear and the prejudices you construct about the value of the BIPOC voices in your own classrooms and friend groups? Can you think of other specific examples? (5 min)
How could we, as future educators in a classroom practicing “radical openness” combat the either overt or subliminal messages to disregard BIPOC voices? (5 min)
- Considering our Claremont College community:
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- Take 90 seconds to reflect on each: What points of identity do you view the majority of our community fall into? What do the majority of your friend group fall under? Before sharing with the group, take about 5 minutes to read this article by Brooke Sparks Pomona ‘22, either aloud or independently: https://tsl.news/opinion-pomona-is-still-a-pwi/. (feel free to move on whenever but also feel free to take a little longer here if you need a break from talking!)
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- Sparks paints the picture of a community where BIPOC and white, often wealthy students are splintered. How and where do you see the “othering” she discusses? How do homogeneous groups impact not only dynamics in social communities, but in classrooms specifically? (10 mins)
- Reflect on the way in which you have built your personal “communities” inside and outside of the academic world (e.g. within clubs/ religious organizations, athletic teams). Are these communities homogeneous or heterogeneous, and why? How do those activities fall along invisible pre-set lines of separations between groups? For example, do these activities have unspoken or systematic barriers that hinder certain groups from participating? (10 mins)
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Just something to keep it a little ~playful~ after all that hard work you did:
“If your friend group looks like vanilla ice cream with a few spare chocolate chips sprinkled over, you may need to re-evaluate…”- A South Asian Pomona Student ‘19
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Please take a 10 minute break – you deserve it.
- When you return, keep your cameras off, or say hello to each other and then turn them off again. Take another 10 minutes to look over as much of this article as you can by yourself: (no pressure to finish, just try to be present with it! And feel free to keep eating while you read or to have a dance party if you finish early)
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html
For the next two questions especially, feel free to completely ignore them. If this article inspires a connection with bell hooks that we had not considered or sparks an important tangent, FOLLOW IT! If not, these might help you get started:
- White supremacy is a system that leaves no one untouched. With bell hooks’ “Teach 3: Talking Race and Racism” in mind, and referring back to the “Showing Up for Racial Justice” article, try to discuss at least 2 characteristics of white supremacy culture that you find yourself struggling with in some capacity. Do parts of your identity leave you feeling especially vulnerable to or protected from some of these traits? (10 min)
- Work collaboratively as a group to brainstorm two practical steps you can begin to take going forward/ have already begun taking to combat the damaging effects of these tendencies on education within your communities. (5 min)
Building Hope, Lovingly
- Consider hooks’ definition of love as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust” all working interdependently.
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- What do you think about this definition of love? Does it differ in any way from what you think of is love? Does it feel complete? Based on your lived experiences and values, what would you add or remove from this list? (5 mins)
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- In talking about love, hooks takes a moment to cite Parker Palmer who states that:
“the goal of knowledge arising from life is the reunification and reconstruction of broken selves and worlds” (131)
In considering this quote, how does Palmer frame knowledge as being akin to love, particularly in considering it as a reaching towards wholeness? (5 mins)
- Can you think of an experience where learning lacked love? What was the impact? Can you think of an experience in which you learned either out of love or with love? (5 mins)
- What can be learned from both of these experiences? What about these experiences can we take to start learning more lovingly? How can love cultivate a “spirit of joyful practice in the classroom,” thereby building community? (5 mins)
- Looking at the world around you….
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- How do you feel about hope? Has it disappeared or is it flowing? Did hooks’ conversation about hope change your outlook? (10 mins)
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- How can the use of elements of hook’s pedagogy about love and hope help to actively work against dominator culture? (5 mins)
- Consider the following quote by hooks. When we reconvene as a class, we would like to start off the discussion with the final question, so keep that in mind:
“Since our place in the world is constantly changing, we must be constantly learning to be fully present in the now. If we are not fully engaged in the present we get stuck in the past and our capacity to learn is diminished” (hooks, 43)
- What does it mean to be present-oriented in a world that fixates on the past and future? How can we begin to understand hope in terms of a present-orientation? What is the role of knowledge and learning in this framework of hope?