Reviews

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks

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kendra_maris's review against another edition

5.0

incredible

Adding the quotes I noted for my own reference here (private notes section was too small).

(xv) definition of dialogue: "both sides are willing to change" - Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhan Hanh

(22) "my commitment to radical openness and devotion to critical thinking... was at odds with the demands that I uphold the status quo if I wanted to be rewarded"

(27) "It is as though the very act of thinking about the nature of race and racism is still seen as 'dirty' work best suited for black folks and other people of color..."
On 'playing the race card': "(note how this very expression trivialized discussions of racism, implying it's all just a game)"
"White folks who talk race... are ... patrons, as superior civilized beings."

(35) "Of course the irony is that we are not actually allowed to play at the game of race, we are merely pawns in the hands of those who invent the games and determine the rules."

(37) "Anti-racist work requires of all of us vigilance about the ways we use language. Either/or thinking is crucial to the maintenance of racism and other forms of group oppression. Whenever we think in terms of both/and we are better situation to do the work of community building."

(44-45) "Whereas vernacular speech may seldom be used in the classroom by teachers it may be the preferred way to share knowledge in other settings. When educational settings become places that have as their central goal the teaching of bourgeois manners, vernacular speech and languages other than standard English are not valued. While acknowledging of standard English the democratic educator also values diversity in language."

(72) "Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self-esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously."

(76) "... to intervene in dominator culture, to live consciously, we must be willing to share with anyone knowledge about how to make the transition from a dominator model to a partnership model."

(80) "Significantly, anti-racist educational settings not only protect and nurture the self-esteem of all students, but also prepare students to live in a world that is diverse."

(81) "...teaching students to unlearn racism is an affirmation of their essential goodness, of their humanity."

(91) "politics of shame and shaming"

(94) "The self-segregation black folks do in integrated settings, particularly those where white people are the majority group, is a defense mechanism protecting them from being the victims of shaming assaults."

(107) NARRATIVE! "I rely on the sharing of personal narratives to remind folks that we are all struggling to raise our consciousness and figure out the best action to take."

bethandunlop's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful inspiring reflective

3.5

dmichb's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

5.0

I adore bell hooks and her pedagogical work. Incredibly important for all those interested in feminist praxis.

yellowcloudintrousers's review against another edition

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Educazione come pratica di libertà, connessione.
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.
Understanding that there are times when we “must work for money rather than meaning, educator Parker Palmer describes in The Courage to Teach the way continuing to work at any vocation, but particularly teaching, when we are no longer positively engaged does violence to the self “in the precise sense that it violates my integrity and identity . . . When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is, their true work.”
The value of dislocation, like the value of disillusionment, is in the way that it moves us beyond illusion, so we can see reality in the round—since what we are able to see depends entirely on where we stand.
Cutting my secure ties to academic institutions, I faced the challenge of finding and creating spaces where teaching and learning could be practiced outside the norm.
CAPITOLO 3
Just as many unaware whites, often liberal, saw and see their interactions with people of color via affirmative action as an investment that will improve their lives, even enhance their organic superiority. Many people of color, schooled in the art of internalized white-supremacist thinking, shared this assumption.
Yet before he (King Jr.) was assassinated he was beginning to see that unlearning racism would require a change in both thinking and action, and that people could agree to come together across race but they would not make community. To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails . . . Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life.
Learning would then serve to educate students for the practice of freedom rather than the maintenance of existing structures of domination.
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.
One of the powers of subordinate groups is the power to demonize those who are in dominant positions. This demonization may serve to manage the fear and anxiety that usually abounds in situations where dominator culture is the norm, but it is not useful if our goal is to intervene and change structures and individuals.
If we want change, we must be willing to teach.
Still, I believe it is difficult for any of us to continue to do what we think is right when we do not receive affirmation and support.
Now he understands better that “learning to live and work in a diverse community” requires a commitment to complex analysis and the letting go of wanting everything to be simple. Segregation simplifies; integration requires that we come to terms with multiple ways of knowing, of interaction.
As a black teacher who works most often in predominantly white educational settings I know that teaching students to unlearn racism is an affirmation of their essential goodness, of their humanity.
“Shame is an inner sense of being completely diminished or insufficient as a person. It is the self judging the self. A moment of shame may be humiliation so painful or an indignity so profound that one feels one has been robbed of her or his dignity or exposed as basically inadequate, bad, or worthy of rejection. A pervasive sense of shame is the ongoing premise that one is fundamentally bad, inadequate, defective, unworthy, or not fully valid as a human being.” One of the ways racism colonizes the minds and imaginations of black people is through systematic shaming. The primary vehicle for this shaming is the mass media.
Rage serves a vital self-protective function: it shields the exposed self. At certain times, rage actively keeps everyone away, covering the self. We refuse further contact because rage has shut us in and others out. But at other times rage in response to shame may make us invite or seek direct contact with whoever has humiliated us.
We can allow them to experience their vulnerability among a community of learners who will dare to hold them up should they falter or fail when triggered by past scenarios of shame—a community that will constantly give recognition and respect.
Creating trust usually means finding out what it is we have in common as well as what separates us and makes us different. Lots of people fear encountering difference because they think that honestly naming it will lead to conflict. The truth is our denial of the reality of difference has created ongoing conflict for everyone. We become more sane as we face reality and drop sentimental notions like “We are all just human, just the same,” and learn both to engage our differences, celebrating them when we can, and also rigorously confronting tensions as they arise. And it will always be vital, necessary for us to know that we are all more than our differences, that it is not just what we organically share that can connect us but what we come to have in common because we have done the work of creating community, the unity within diversity, that requires solidarity within a structure of values, beliefs, yearnings that are always beyond the body, yearnings that have to do with universal spirit.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth (J. Baldwin)
The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived.
Within a utopian world we would be able to dismiss class on such days because educating anyone when they are not present is impossible. Since we cannot leave we try to work with the reality that we have to produce the conditions for learning. We work with our absence to become present.
Parker Palmer urges teachers to transform education so that it will honor the needs of the spirit. Telling teachers “to see a transformed way of the being in the world,” he gives voice to spiritual yearning: “In the midst of the familiar trappings of education—competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credits, and credentials—what we seek is a way of working illumined by spirit and infused with soul.”
Schooling that does not honor the needs of the spirit simply intensifies that sense of being lost, of being unable to connect.
It is essential that we build into our teaching vision a place where spirit matters, a place where our spirits can be renewed and our souls restored. We must become as articulate in naming our joys we are in naming our suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: “When you have suffered you know how to appreciate the elements of paradise that are present. If you dwell only in your suffering, you will miss paradise.” To me the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility, a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and know leads us into greater connection.
More often than not, the demands of academia were at odds with intellectual life.
M. Scott Peck defines true community as the coming together of “a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and ‘to delight in each other’ and make the conditions of other’s our own.” Certainly, sharing laughter is necessary when we dare to enter the dialogues around difference that often evoke in us remembered woundedness or present pain.

sadiecatherine's review against another edition

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4.0

I loved many parts of this book and will probably reread it at least once. However, I really disliked Chapter 12 (the one that argues student/faculty sex is okay) which is the only reason I didn’t give the book 5 stars.