Bell hooks's Radical Pedagogy - by Megan Feifer & Maia L Butler & Joanna Davis-McElligatt

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Throughout hooks' powerful life she envisioned, described, and enacted a radical, engaged pedagogy and praxis rooted in love, rather than power, while simultaneously modeling transgressive modes of being in the world. bell hooks' Radical Pedagogy is the first sustained collection of teachings and reflections that address the full scope of bell hooks' teaching trilogy.

Organized into four parts covering: engaged pedagogies; pedagogies of hope and joy; pedagogies of the bodymindspirit; strategies of resistance and anticolonial frameworks, the book offers an accessible guide to hooks' work for students, teachers and researchers. The chapters examine how hooks' pedagogical framework resists antiblack, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, abled, and cisheteronormative patriarchal pedagogical praxes, while simultaneously calling for a deep and sustained commitment to the work of "educat[ing] people to heal this world into what it might become." The book brings together the work of educators who are making visionary interventions in their fields of study and in their local and regional communities. They include scholars and teachers affiliated with universities, schools across k-12 levels as well as community education cooperatives. The book includes a foreword by the feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spellman College, USA).

Review Quotes

"This deep engagement of the expansive, exacting and dissident work of bell hooks is diverse, exciting, thorough, and woven through with love. This is how we teach each other freedom." --adrienne maree brown, Author of "Emergent Strategy", "Pleasure Activism", "Octavia's Brood" and "Loving Corrections"

"I was blessed to participate and collaborate with bell hooks in all three of her ground-breaking books on education. And, now I am blessed again to have this important and wonderful anthology to guide and provoke me. The essays in bell hooks's Radical Pedagogy are thoughtful, rigorous and engaging. They not only pay tribute to bell hooks and her legacy, they inspire us to reexam and reconsider our work as teachers and advocates of embracing and affirming "education as the practice of freedom." Reading bell hooks's Radical Pedagogy is to engage in the very critical project initiated by bell hooks. The editors and contributors have produced an outstanding example of bell hooks' "engaged" pedagogy and scholarship. This is a book that should be read by every stakeholder involved in education today." --Ron Scapp, author of "Teaching Values: Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics and Culture"

"This is a fabulous collection of conversations with bell about her notion/s of pedagogy. For bell pedagogy was a life practice, with no borders, and is not contained in a classroom. Learning, experimenting, listening, wondering, imagining and then acting on this knowledge was life's activity. For bell the personal was political and public and so was her commitment to finding and creating the theoretical frames for action. The writers here will assist you in seeing the revolutionary practice that nurtured bell's brilliance." --Zillah Eisenstein, Author, Activist, Professor Emerita of Anti-Racist Feminist Theory, Ithaca College, USA

About the Author

Megan Feifer is Teacher-Scholar in Residence at the bell hooks center at Berea College, USA.
Maia L. Butler is Associate Professor of African American Literature at University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and LGBTQ Studies at the University of North Texas, USA.