14 Workshop Eleven: Teaching Community by bell hooks
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. 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 soc