Progressive professors most often risk engaged pedagogy as resistance

Evidence

The decline in public education challenges critical pedagogues inside and outside the academy to continuously pursue pedagogical approaches vital to building educated resistance and reflective praxis in concert with student-teachers, community activists, and social movements to the neoliberal attack on our public institutions. As university-based scholars, therefore, our intellectual project is the development of a cadre of critical foundation phase2 pedagogues committed to education for liberation and the struggle for substantive democracy. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 169 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

My commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of political activism. Given that our educational institutions are so deeply invested in a banking system, teachers are more rewarded when we do not teach against the grain. The choice to work against the grain, to challenge the status quo, often has negative consequences. And that is part of what makes that choice one that is not politically neutral. In colleges and universities, teaching is often the least valued of our many professional tasks. It saddens me that colleagues are often suspicious of teachers whom students long to study with. And there is a tendency to undermine the professorial commitment of engaged pedagogues by suggesting that what we do is not as rigorously academic as it should be. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 403 (#expands, via linked claim)

For years, I envied those professors who taught more conventionally, because they frequently had small classes. Th rough out my teaching career my classes have been too large to be as effective as they could be. Over time, I’ve begun to see that departmental pressure on “popular” professors to accept larger classes was also a way to undermine engaged pedagogy. If classes became so full that it is impossible to know students’ names, to spend quality time with each of them, then the effort to build a learning community fails. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 404 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A resisting minority can outweigh a professor’s will to build learning community; Professors can adopt progressive theory while reproducing the domination they denounce — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 48; Professors unconcerned with inner wellbeing feel most threatened by liberatory pedagogy demands (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Researchers frame their pedagogy as resistance to a neoliberal attack on public education. #exemplifies (0.86) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 169
• Academic institutions structurally reward conventional teaching and punish engaged pedagogy #expands (0.79) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 403
• Departmental overloading of popular professors covertly undermines engaged teaching #expands (0.78) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 404
• Professors can espouse liberatory theory while practicing domination in class #complicates (0.77)
• Progressive change is resisted when it unsettles classroom authority and safe harmony #qualifies (0.74) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 73
• Teacher deskilling under management pedagogies weakens education as a democratic force #expands (0.73) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 196
• Faculty resist naming pedagogy’s politics more than the biased teaching itself #complicates (0.72) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 82