Expanding Minds: Schools as Liberatory and Healing Agents

Schooling has the potential to be expansive for both students and teachers. My project hopes to understand ways in which educators can come together and reimagine curricula to confront truth,  legacy and elevate the voices of those who are (were) oppressed and silenced by history. I hope to understand how exploring justice can manifest within education and be liberating and limitless, much like hooks (1994) experienced in her early education in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. She writes, "School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure, and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone" (p.3). Entering this danger zone was liberatory. The pedagogy that she was taught was rooted in the challenge, and non-conforming to norms -- ultimately decolonizing the educational space. Once schools became racially integrated, the notion of transforming minds was essentially gone, according to hooks, and in turn, there was a commitment to upholding white supremacy through discipline and domination -- reinforcing an unjust education system.  

Decolonizing pedagogies stand in opposition to the system we have inherited–and about which hooks writes with such honesty and outrage. Decolonizing pedagogies create learning environments where students can question their own identity and biases together in understanding their positionality in how they are impacted by "colonial power and privilege" (Styres 2011, p.3). In the process, new possibilities are opened for students to critically immerse themselves in an experiential engagement with course content, allowing them to shift toward a deeper, more critical consciousness. To have students confront truths of history and understand their own positionality, hooks explains that teachers should "teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students…" (p.13). This, she continues, "...is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin…" (p.13).

Teachers must be equipped with curricula to engage in critical conversations around the way in which we use knowledge and language to racialize and label people as inferior. In order to fully address course content and act as a healer, teachers will benefit from targeted support beyond a strictly academic level. Decolonization can only work if instructors are deeply aware of their own identity, positionality, assumptions, and biases on a cognitive and emotional level. To "...teach in a manner that empowers students…" requires teachers who are themselves "committed to the process of self-actualization that promotes their [own] well-being" (Specia and Osman 2015, p.195).  

Indeed, radical pedagogy heavily emphasizes collective well-being for all parties. hooks explained the importance of healing yourself before healing others, but that does not happen in a vacuum. In All About Love, she says, "rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion" (1981, p.215). The learning environment can create opportunities to commune with others -- to grapple with shared or differing experiences in response to true history. Teaching students to "transgress" is synonymous with the goal of self-actualization - to push against the boundaries of racial, class, and sexual systems of domination - in order to achieve liberation (Specia and Osman 2015, p.195). There can be a sense of "newness" when someone arrives at a different view of themselves through their own exploration, whether self-motivated or guided.