Teaching Tips

• Teaching through Community. One of hooks’ most notable lessons to educators was to challenge our own assumptions related to power dynamics and hierarchies in the classroom. To address these notions, instructors can work collaboratively with students to create community guidelines and regularly revisit (and revise) these agreements throughout the course. Having these discussions from the beginning of the semester helps to promote an inclusive and empowering learning environment regardless of the subject matter. Barnard College offers additional strategies for building a community of learning in a college classroom.
• Engaged Pedagogy. hooks encourages instructors to employ an “engaged pedagogy” approach in which classrooms are seen as spaces for the co-creation of knowledge between students and instructors. hooks’ scholarship and teaching practice always, “argued for the necessity of centering students’ voices, honoring their experiential knowledge, and involving them in determining the shape of their learning” (source). Providing voice and choice in assignments and activities allows for students who may otherwise feel marginalized or alienated to meaningfully contribute their knowledge and experiences to the classroom. Here are a few examples of integrating student choice into your teaching practice.
• Joy of Teaching. In this last teaching tip, we leave you with hooks’ own words from her 1994 publication Teaching to Transgress to be reminded of the joy and hope we can bring to our educational settings to make our campus more welcoming and inclusive for all: “All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions-and society-so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom” (p. 34).
  

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