The Pedagogical Legacy of bell hooks

On December 15, the Black feminist scholar, writer, and teacher bell hooks died at her home in Kentucky. She was 69.

The author of more than 30 books on subjects from teaching to love to popular culture, hooks is best remembered for developing a feminist vision that insisted on the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her loss has been mourned by thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Roxane Gay, Ibram X. Kendi, Cornel West, Min Jin Lee, and Sara Ahmed, whose lives and writing were shaped by her work.

I too am indebted to hooks. Though we met each other only on the page, she taught me how to teach. When I hear her name today, my mind conjures a shade of yellow — not a muted mustard or a sallow goldenrod, but the hue of a freshly cracked egg yolk — the cover of her 1994 essay collection, Teaching to Transgress. I first read her words on New York City’s Q69 bus, commuting from Midtown Manhattan to the suburban campus of Queens College. It was 2013, and I was a second-year Ph.D. student teaching my first class in literature and composition. After brushing my fingertips across the book’s matte cover, I gently opened it, revealing that the collection was dedicated to her students. Paging through the essays, I read that education should enhance “our capacity to be free” and help students “live more fully in the world.” My skin prickled. My pulse quickened.

In a moment when my shelves were filled with Kant, Derrida, and Foucault, here was a theorist who was also a storyteller. Her writing was blissfully free of jargon, a deep pleasure to read. I could imagine sharing these essays with my students.

At the time, the Black Lives Matter movement pulsed like a heartbeat through the city. The movement had helped me recognize that education could be complicit in maintaining a racist society. As a new professor, I wanted to create classrooms that would address injustice and empower my students. Yet conversations about teaching were relatively scarce in my Ph.D. program. My graduate seminars taught me to analyze the political and cultural work of literature, but had less to say about classrooms — which seemed to me as important as poems and novels in shaping how we view the world. When a thoughtful colleague pointed me towards hooks, I discovered a teacher who shared my obsession with learning and commitment to social change. Her words gave me a language and a vocabulary to describe something that I had sensed but could not yet articulate.

In the 14 essays that compose Teaching to Transgress, hooks raised critical questions about whose voices are heard in classrooms, curricula, and society at large. She argued that teachers should help students apprehend the unequal power structures — racism, patriarchy, and imperialism — that shape our everyday lives. Education, she wrote, was a “practice of freedom,” empowering students to resist and transform injustice. And yet, hooks also sensed that teachers could not challenge these practices of domination through hierarchical classrooms predicated on the tyranny of instructors over students. For hooks, challenging social hierarchies required remaking the classroom, too. Drawing on 20 years of teaching at places like Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York, she argued for the necessity of centering students’ voices, honoring their experiential knowledge, and involving them in determining the shape of their learning. Revisiting her work today, one finds a critical, politicized, and activist version of “inclusive teaching.” She called this “engaged pedagogy.”

This educational philosophy emerged, in part, from her own experiences as a student. Growing up in segregated Kentucky in the 1950s and early 1960s, hooks gained firsthand knowledge of how classrooms can function both as sites of liberation and domination. In the all-Black schools of her youth, her Black teachers understood that education was “fundamentally political because it was rooted in antiracist struggle.” But following integration, she was bused to predominantly white schools, where the Black women instructors who had nurtured her intellect and creativity were replaced with white instructors more interested in disciplining Black students into passive obedience. There, the classroom became “a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility.” Though she was not the first to acknowledge that education is often used to oppress, she was one of the most passionate and skillful writers to show us precisely how classrooms could do more.

Two aspects of her approach have been particularly formative for me: her commitment to building a classroom community, and her unbridled appreciation for joy. In contrast to philosophies of education that treat the classroom as the instructor’s domain, hooks advocated for collaborative classrooms in which students and instructors create the course together. As a professor, she aimed to create “a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute.” This framing paved the way for a range of contemporary teaching practices. Today, many professors ask students to join in developing classroom contracts, constitutions, or community guidelines. In my own class on multicultural literature, students have come up with guidelines including: “We will never make assumptions about someone’s identity,” “We will respect the perspectives of the texts we are reading,” and “We will avoid blanket statements that make claims about ‘all.’” This activity signals to students that ours will be a classroom in which their voices are valued, creating a foundation for difficult but important discussions about identity, difference, and structural inequality. And because students write these guidelines, they tend to respect them. Building a classroom community in this way is not merely to provide a feel-good experience for tuition-paying students, but, as hooks writes, to create the “climate of openness and intellectual rigor” that true learning requires.

Another reason hooks’s work has resonated so broadly is her conviction that liberation requires joy, humor, and pleasure. In the hallowed halls of universities, joy is often viewed with skepticism, seen as the antithesis of discipline and serious scholarship. Yet hooks insisted that joy and intellectual engagement were not antithetical but mutually reinforcing. Today, as the pandemic has squeezed both students and teachers into the deep reaches of exhaustion, excitement might feel hard to locate. Whither the classroom’s radical possibilities when perpetual burnout is the new norm? In a society structured for the flourishing of the few at the expense of the many, carving out space for joy is a step toward liberation.

If these insights now seem obvious, it’s a testament to just how influential hooks’s ideas have been. Her work transformed the fields of critical and feminist pedagogy. While scholars like Paulo Freire had emphasized the class politics of education, hooks insisted that race and gender were also key to educational philosophies and practice. Her essays foregrounded the ways that classrooms have historically shortchanged the intellectual lives of students of color, working-class students, and women — and advocated for inclusive, consciousness-raising teaching methods.

Although hooks attended college at a moment when women’s studies was gaining an institutional foothold, her professors had little interest in the work of Black feminists. Many were white women who saw gender as the primary axis of difference, resisting approaches that took seriously the power of race and class. Teaching to Transgress — along with Barbara Omolade’s “A Black Feminist Pedagogy” (1987) and Gloria I. Joseph’s “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in Capitalist White America” (1988) — was a foundational text of Black feminist pedagogy, which emphasizes how race, gender, class, and sexuality shape people’s experiences. Grounded in the lived experiences of Black women, this approach aims not only to teach students about the world but to help them transform it.

It’s no surprise, then, that hooks’s theory and practice draw on longstanding traditions of Black women’s activism. In the years since Teaching to Transgress was first published, Stephanie Y. Evans has recovered a genealogy of Black women’s pedagogical activism extending back to the 19th century and including educators like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Lucy Craft Laney. Evans demonstrates that these women developed innovative educational philosophies grounded in a demand for applied learning, recognition of cultural and social differences, critiques of American ideals, and a sense of communal responsibility. In the 1950s and 60s, Septima Clark built a network of “citizenship schools” and adult-literacy programs to counter the racist literacy tests that sought to curtail Black voting. In the 1970s, as Donna Jean Murch argues, Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown ran the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School using the hands-on, curiosity-based pedagogical approaches typically reserved for affluent, white students. In drawing on hooks’s work, teachers today also draw on this historical legacy.

In our contemporary moment, many professors want to know (in Ibram X. Kendi’s words) “how to be an antiracist” and (in Bettina Love’s words) how to prepare students to “do more than survive.” Here, hooks’s work offers guidance. She describes how well-intentioned efforts to teach “diverse” literature can reinscribe racism and sexism. She explains the different forms resistance to transgressive teaching might take, from both students and colleagues. She acknowledges how difficult, messy, and slow it can be to introduce students to new paradigms. And she affirms the importance of compassion and respect for students’ pain, especially as they engage in the process of detaching from a previously held worldview and begin reaching toward a new one.

Like many educators of my generation, I feel an immense debt of gratitude to bell hooks. As graduate students, many of us were told that focusing too much on teaching would harm our research and spell career suicide. But hooks gave us permission to take teaching seriously, then showed us how to do it well. Like a talisman, her writing restores my faith in the classroom whenever institutional policies, or a global pandemic, or the daily grind of living in an anti-education society, make me want to pull the covers over my head and do anything but teach. When I’m inclined to experiment with new methods that I believe will empower my students — but that might challenge conventional wisdom and educational orthodoxies — I have her words to cite and her legacy to build on.

As the recent outpouring of grief and gratitude on social media suggests, I’m not alone in this experience. Educators nationwide are reflecting on how her thought has influenced their teaching. Whether or not you have read, or even heard of, bell hooks, you’ve likely sat in a classroom that has been shaped by her ideas. Maybe you’ve had a teacher who involved students in the learning process, asking what they’d like to read and discuss. Perhaps you had a teacher who was genuinely concerned for you — as a person, not just a line in their gradebook — and who nurtured your intellectual and spiritual growth. If you’ve been fortunate enough to have such experiences, hooks probably had a hand in shaping that instructor.

Her writings on education influenced a generation of educators and transformed classrooms for decades to come, challenging the devaluation of teaching within the prestige economy of higher education. Against the notion that teaching is the “duller … aspect” of scholarly life, hooks insisted that “the classroom remains the most radical site of possibility in the academy.”