Last week I found myself on the subway to Brooklyn at 7:03 AM, nodding my head vehemently. I was reading the first couple of chapters of bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and I felt like she was calling me out. I wasn't offended; she writes about not only the struggle between oppressed students and their educators, but also the struggle that educators feel within themselves. That need to meet the standards set by states and societies, but also feeling the need to acknowledge and celebrate and energize the individual passions our students have within them. We know this, we feel this-- I disappoint myself consistently by wanting to be culturally responsive, and wanting to build that critical consciousness within our students, but instead I make them learn the acronym GEMDAS to ensure that they remember the order of operations and always do multiplication before subtraction in a numerical expression. hooks refers to the rote memorization/banking system of education that not only kills most of learning's joy, but also allows for multiple systems of domination (racism, sexism) to persist. When students know only facts, they do not learn to ask, "But why?" of their realities or, "But why not?" of their dreams. When the norm is celebrated, or at least accepted gladly, questions about it are insurgent. We as teachers fear that we may lose control if insurgence prevails in our classrooms-- yet without allowing our students to ask those hard questions and look critically at the systems of domination they are oppressed by, they remain oppressed. It's exactly what we're fighting against.
So far in my reading, hooks hasn't given me a life plan to change my classroom, allow me to equally share the control of the classroom, push my students to be critical thinkers everyday while also delivering rigorous content, and eventually facilitate their being free. Bummer. What she offers is more like some first steps. In the order of operations for promoting critical consciousness in the classroom, the first step seems obvious...
Acknowledge every student as an individual.
This is where my nodding became vigorous. I reflected on how often I create groups and sub-groups in my mind about my students: informed by data, behavior, experience, and even archetypes and biases. These groups, though informal and mostly contained in my brain, directly oppose my commitment to critically conscious pedagogy. When I don't acknowledge all of my kids as individuals, with their own enigmatic and unique struggles, joys, interests, and needs, I lose the pieces of their identities that make any pedagogy "culturally relevant". hooks' point goes even further, though, noting how harmful it is when teachers "refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks". To refuse to acknowledge ourselves as whole humans, with similarly unique experiences and dreams and critiques of society, is to limit our impact. We're individuals that teach individuals, and classrooms are microcosms where we show our students what life can/should be. When we group them, re-group them, and shut ourselves off, we lose the whole point of empowerment and social justice that we seek. Or at least, I do. In the order of operations for promoting freedom in the classroom, acknowledging kids as individuals, and ourselves as the same, is the first step-- always.
"Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process."
I'm down for empowerment, too.
--Noel Price
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