Bell Hooks’ Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom

Throughout hooks’ powerful life she envisioned, described, and enacted a radical, engaged pedagogy and praxis rooted in love, rather than power, while simultaneously modeling transgressive modes of being in the world. bell hooks’ Radical Pedagogy is the first sustained collection of teachings and reflections that address the full scope of bell hooks’ teaching trilogy.

Organized into four parts covering: engaged pedagogies; pedagogies of hope and joy; pedagogies of the bodymindspirit; strategies of resistance and anticolonial frameworks, the book offers an accessible guide to hooks’ work for students, teachers and researchers. The chapters examine how hooks’ pedagogical framework resists antiblack, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, abled, and cisheteronormative patriarchal pedagogical praxes, while simultaneously calling for a deep and sustained commitment to the work of ＂educat[ing] people to heal this world into what it might become.＂ The book brings together the work of educators who are making visionary interventions in their fields of study and in their local and regional communities. They include scholars and teachers affiliated with universities, schools across k-12 levels as well as community education cooperatives. The book includes a foreword by the feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spellman College, USA).

Megan Feifer is Teacher-Scholar in Residence at the bell hooks center at Berea College, USA.
Maia L. Butler is Associate Professor of African American Literature at University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and LGBTQ Studies at the University of North Texas, USA.