Why is School So Boring?! 3 Ways Black Feminist Pedagogy Can Radically Improve Our Learning
I am currently immersed in a wildly exciting learning experience: AAAS/WGS 136: Black Feminist Thought with Professor Johnson at Brandeis University. The classroom is a haven of joy and excitement as well as rigorous learning. In an effort to understand what makes the class so effective I researched Black Feminist Pedagogy.
It is easier to to comprehend the importance of Black Feminist Pedagogy when compared to the pervasive Eurocentric Masculinist Pedagogical norms that dictate most institutionalized learning in the United States. Dr. Patricia Hill Collins identifies four criteria for validating knowledge under a Eurocentric Masculinist Pedagogy: 1) Distance yourself from the object of study; 2) Remove your emotion from your reasoning; 3) Avoid personal ethics and values in the research process and 4) Withstand adversarial debates. This is a dehumanizing framework for learning. It leaches joy, pleasure and excitement from the classroom. It breeds individualism and competitiveness. It white-washes history. Eurocentric Knowledge Validation criteria, “ask African-American women to objectify them-selves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront, in an adversarial relationship, those who have more social, economic, and professional power than they” (Collins 754–755). Black Feminist Pedagogy on the other hand, utilizes (1) “Dialogue in assessing knowledge claims; (2) personal expressiveness; (3) personal accountability; (4) concrete experience as criterion of meaning; and (5) the ethic of caring” (Henry 98).
In “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in White Capitalist America,” Dr. Gloria Joseph writes, “Black Feminist Pedagogy as a philosophy of liberation for humankind, is designed to enable students, through the social, economic, cultural, moral and religious history of Third World people, to reexamine and see the world through a perspective that would instill a revolutionary, conscious, liberating ideology.” While the traditional Western classroom teaches conformity to institutional power, A Black Feminist praxis educates to free the mind.
What follows is not an exhaustive exploration of Black Feminist Pedagogy. It is a small glimpse at the ways Black Feminist Pedagogy can radically improve our learning.
1. Black Feminist Pedagogy Validates Student Voices!
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom bell hooks writes, “as a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence” (8). A classroom incorporating Black Feminist Pedagogy will have a reciprocal exchange between student and teacher. The teacher must strive to validate student’s personal experiences as a base for knowledge and incorporate their language into the teaching. This allows students to learn from their peers and develop a belief in their voice. In AAAS/WGS 136 this was embodied in the affirming, respectful way Johnson listened to students and the incorporation of weekly “clapbacks,” from students.
2. Black Feminist Pedagogy Rejoins the Mind and Body
Traditional classrooms champion a “mind/body split,” that separates a speaker’s physical embodiment (and thus their relationship to power) from their ideas. However, hooks clarifies, “We are all subjects in history. We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others” (hooks 138). Traditional classrooms erase embodiment by demanding “neutrality” and “objectivity.” Promoting “neutrality” actually favors white, male perspectives because white men write and publish the materials in most U.S. classrooms. Just by acknowledging the body, a Black Feminist Classroom sets off a wonderful wave of learning through interrogating the self and the sources of our learning.
3. Black Feminist Pedagogy Centers Black Women’s Perspectives
The traditional classroom treats Black Women’s writing as a sociological object of study or peripheral inquiry, but rarely as central material. Centering Black Women’s Writing privileges students with a uniquely valuable perspective from which to understand the world. Because Black Women experience the interlocking oppressions of sexism, heteronormativity, classism and racism they offer “a different view of material reality than that available to other groups” (Collins 747). A Black Feminist Classroom honestly and rigorously engages Black Women’s written and oral wisdom.
I hope this tiny glimpse into Black Feminist Pedagogy inspires other students and educators to learn more about Black Feminist Pedagogies in order to transform their learning environments.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.4 (1989): 745–73. Web.
Henry, Annette. “Chapter Four: Black Feminist Pedagogy: Critiques and Contributions”. Counterpoints 237 (2005): 89–105. Web…
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Joseph, Gloria. “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in White Capitalist America.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New, 1995. 462–71. Print.
