hooks is right!

I have been a big proponent of bell hooks’ ideas and got really excited when I saw the reading for the week. Of course, I got so excited about it that I forgot that I had to post a blog on the reading. So here I am, a little late, but with my input on the article. I had read this article about 2 years ago, when I was teaching at a very rural community college, and the idea of a multicultural, diverse student body had seemed like a distant, utopian dream. Here at MU, I have the opportunity to make more use of hooks’ advise about “making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute to a central goal of transformative pedagogy” that is unavoidable in the 21^st century. Her idea of creating a learning environment that creates a sense of commitment and a common good that binds us is the ultimate ideal that we all should strive to achieve. The classroom for hooks’ seems to be more like a communal space where students should be open to share ideas that may not be considered non-threatening to classroom order, but this sharing of ideas, desire to learn, is what will enhance our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. I have noted in my classrooms that the practice of making students write out their ideas and then share it with the class does help in subverting some of the racial, gender or class related inhibitions that may be there at the beginning of the semester.