This co-sponsored session will honor the life and work of bell hooks, particularly her influence on thinking about and teaching religion. In her book Teaching to Transgress, hooks examines education as the practice of freedom and argues for teaching students to transgress oppression. How do we structure our classrooms and our pedagogical strategies to use our power justly? How do we offer liberatory education that is inclusive and empowers students for critical consciousness and action? How might we broadly reimagine educational settings and strategies?
In Reel to Real: Race, Class, and Sex at the Movies, a collection of profound and paradigm-shifting essays on film, bell hooks writes, “And they do not want to hear it when I make the point that giving audiences what is real is precisely what movies do not do. They give the reimagined, reinvented, version of the real. It may look like something familiar, but in actuality, it is a different universe from the world of the real” (1). Hook’s compelling argument forms the theoretical backdrop of my course, “Muslims in Pop Culture,” which examines the ways in which popular culture and specifically, the genre of film, constructs an image of Muslims as an imaginary “Other” in the American public consciousness. This theoretical framework offered by hooks becomes the starting point of themes explored throughout the semester, including Orientalism, gendered Orientalism, Islamophobia, and their intersectionality with other forms of racism.
The Reading and Discussion Circle (RDC; name-changed for anonymity) is a 12-week reading and discussion program that uses circle pedagogy and a combined cohort model in which university students and incarcerated scholars study together as peers. bell hooks has a formative influence on program design. As hooks says, “When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the process of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” (p. 61). Among her teachers, hooks names Thich Nhat Hanh, who pioneered Engaged Buddhism. I will briefly discuss bell hooks’ influence on the design of RDC and then facilitate a guided reading and discussion of one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poems in order to draw on Engaged Buddhist teaching in pursuit of a deeper appreciation of hooks’ engaged pedagogy as a sacred vocation and form of soul care within her Black feminist commitment to collective liberation through education.
A revamped graduate course within a Master of Bio/Tech Ethics & Science Policy integrated a class session on ‘Religion & Spirituality’ (R&S). Inspired by bell hook’s aspirations for liberatory and engaged pedagogy as reflected in ‘Teaching to Transgress’ (2014), the instructor implemented coursework that included generative assignments, shared leadership, small group work, and critical reflection. A teaching strategy demonstration will revisit the R&S class activity, which assigned students to one of five faith perspectives and invited them to consider a little known and under-studied end-of-life option called Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking. Employing this teaching activity upheld and reinforced the elements of liberatory pedagogy by engaging students as active co-laborers in knowledge production, usurping traditional methods of learning in which a credentialed expert delivers a “right” answer to novice learners. Students were instead invited to mindfully imagine varying perspectives for and against this choice to hasten death.