Faculty resist naming pedagogy’s politics more than the biased teaching itself

Evidence

At the first meeting, Chandra (whose background is in education) and I talked about the factors that had influenced our pedagogical practices. I emphasized the impact of Freire’s work on my thinking. Since my formative education took place in racially segregated schools, I spoke about the experience of learning when one’s experience is recognized as central and significant and then how that changed with desegregation, when black children were forced to attend schools where we were regarded as objects and not subjects. … Again and again, it was necessary to remind everyone that no education is politically neutral. Emphasizing that a white male professor in an English department who teaches only work by “great white men ” is making a political decision, we had to work consistently against and through the overwhelming will on the part of folks to deny the politics of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and so forth that inform how and what we teach. We found again and again that almost everyone, especially the old guard, were more disturbed by the overt recognition of the role our political perspectives play in shaping pedagogy than by their passive acceptance of ways of teaching and learning that reflect biases, particularly a white supremacist standpoint. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core thesis and hooks’ broader argument in Teaching to Transgress that education is never neutral; also echoes Freire’s conscientizacao. — connects to: Progressive content does not suffice; pedagogical practice itself carries conservative class values — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 262; Scholars who advocate critical pedagogy often fail to embody it in their own classrooms — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 280; Progressive professors most often risk engaged pedagogy as resistance (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Academics are more disturbed by naming bias than by bias itself #corroborates (0.98) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 82
• Labeling criticism in advance with political names contradicts genuine critical inquiry #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 277
• Students and Politics camouflaged its political questions to avoid social-desirability bias #exemplifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2334