“Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy.”

Bell hooks’ manual for ‘transformative pedagogy’ begins with the idea that teachers and students should be active participants in the classroom, not passively consumed and that the teaching process itself should be a form of collective labour or an exchange.

So Our classrooms are the sites of community building. She suggest strategies for this- the main being that we allow our teaching to be shaped by personal experiences, both our own and the students.’ I order for this exchange to happen We as teachers need to prepare to make ourselves vulnerable. ‘it is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material.”

A prerequisite to this holistic teaching process is that as teachers we teach with our ‘whole selves’ and view the students too as whole complex beings who have experiences and frustrations just like us. The telling of experience is a way of threading connections between the abstract ideas of the classroom with the world beyond its walls.

I’m reading “teaching to transgress’ alongside my PG cert studies, and it keeps reappearing in various forms in seminars and class discussions- often not consciously but hooks’ ideas run through the sessions like a thread.

I noticed on our first day of introductions to one another that there seemed to be a pervasive theme or questions that my coursemates and I had been agonising over, and something we hoped this course would resolve for us.

The importance of experience was repeatedly cited, but accompanied by the caveat that this was at odds with a form of teaching that is dictated by adherence to learning outcomes.

 “How can we teach holistically (i.e radically) in a neoliberal art school?” was the question that kept reappearing in different forms.

This tension has defined my teaching process so far; that it is the shrinking space around the dictates of learning outcomes and assessment that allows for the kind of teaching I want to do, that accounts for the fact that both student and teacher are complete human beings with complex feelings and experience. It’s a constant balance between fulfilling my obligations to the institution which only appears to be concerned with quantifying the students’ output and doing the kind of teaching that I believe is meaningful.

I particularly loved this quote: 

“there are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the moutaintop and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”

I think in order to teach in a way that values experience in an institution that operates like a business, it’s like carrying a load over a mountaintop. Or maybe a juggling act, as it has to take place around the demands of your job.