Immersed Zine

Teaching Community: a Pedagogy of Hope – bell hooks 

Teaching Community is a heartfelt and intellectually rich call for educators to create classrooms that are sites of liberation, not domination. Taking her perspective as someone who has taught in the most elite of educational sites, hooks removes herself from the gilded halls of academia to explore how liberatory studies can reach those at the margins of society most in need of a liberation pedagogy. bell hooks urges us all, in our many capacities as teachers and students, to lead with hope, love, and an unwavering belief in the transformative power of education.

Takeaways from our discussion

1. Education as a Practice of Freedom: hooks follows the tradition of Paulo Freire, both examining, critiquing, and broadening the liberatory capacity of teaching, both inside the traditional classroom setting but in a broader sense of importance, in our community settings as well. Transformative learning happens when students are encouraged to question, reflect, and engage the world around them.
2. Community in the Classroom: The classroom should be a place where all voices are heard and valued. Building community helps the student within us all feel safe, seen, and invigorated to learn in deeper ways.
3. The Role of the Teacher: Teachers must be authentic, vulnerable, and willing to learn alongside their students. Teaching is not just a job—it’s a calling that requires passion, commitment, and love.
4. Intersectionality and Inclusion: hooks emphasizes the importance of acknowledging race, gender, and class in educational spaces. Ignoring these factors can silence marginalized voices and maintain systems of oppression.
5. Hope and Love in Pedagogy: Love is a radical and necessary force in education. Hope gives both teachers and students the energy to keep pushing against oppressive systems.
6. WE ARE ALL STUDENTS, WE ARE ALL TEACHERS

Borders & Immigration 

For our second meeting we chose to revolve the selections around a broader topic so that we all had a chance to give and receive recommendations from others. In light of the current wave of deportations, attempted erasures and arrests we wanted to revolve our discussions around the establishment of borders and their existence in the modern world as places of violence and brutality. From the selection of books brought by our book club members we were able to identify the colonial legacy that drew the modern borders of African nations alongside their aims of exploitation of both life and land that have left entire regions underdeveloped and still grappling with imperialism intentions. From the 38th & 17th parallels in Korea and Vietnam, to the gerrymandering of US political districts, to the ICE detention camps littered throughout our country; the conquest of earth is mapped by the borders drawn by the dominant.