As a STEM educator for two decades, I have increasingly found inspiration and sustenance in bell hooks’s pedagogical approach, particularly as laid out in Teaching to Transgress. Amidst the upheaval of demagogic national leadership, the rise of social justice movements, the global pandemic, and the climate emergency, I’ve come to realize that a narrow approach to pedagogy is not enough to prepare students, particularly students from historically marginalized groups, with the critical consciousness they need to meet the challenges of today’s world. I’ve also come to realize that for all the ways that collegiate STEM programs have attempted to become more inclusive, many STEM programs, including some that I teach at, continue adhering to what bell hooks, via Paulo Freire, calls the “banking system” of teaching, which is “based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored, and used at a later date” (5). This year specifically, I used bell hooks’s pedagogical theory to revamp Diversity and Technology, an advanced writing seminar I teach for engineering undergraduates at NYU School of Engineering.
As an artist and engineer, I created The Great Tit is a Bird, a science fiction storytelling project that follows Black and Brown femmes and transfemmes, the losses they survive, and the ways they shape our high-tech era even as they are pushed to the margins. The project consists of an audio drama, 3D-animated narrative (fiction) films, and forthcoming animated documentary shorts, and immersive reality films. It was launched by Black and Brown women in the United States and Kenya as a way to creatively examine relationships between elite neoimperial academic spaces centered by the Global North, and women’s networks centered by the Global Majority. The project probes issues its creators have experienced firsthand, including techno-colonization, research misconduct, and threats to bodily/embodied sovereignty. In addition to gender and race, The Great Tit is a Bird explores vulnerability related to other marginalized identities its creators hold. These include disability, carceral status, socioeconomic status, and immigration status. While The Great Tit is a Bird is directly inspired by a range of real-world examples, from the East African women’s empowerment group Inua Kike to the male-dominated academic networks connected to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, its focus on low-income people of color supports its ultimate liberatory goal: survivors of neocolonial aggression affirming solidarity for each other and their community.
I originally launched The Great Tit is a Bird during the 2020 pandemic lockdown to process personal trauma—the death of a parent, a reckoning with childhood domestic abuse—as well as the professional challenges I’ve experienced as a student and teacher, conditioned by the banking system so prevalent in college-level STEM education. Since then, I have started to use The Great Tit is a Bird as a pedagogical tool amongst small groups of students. This feels like a genuinely transgressive act for three reasons: the project’s sensitive, personal themes; the sharing of such themes with STEM students conditioned to marginalize their own identities and experiences while in the classroom; and the cultivation of community within an engineering school. Like bell hooks, who originally regarded teaching as a job that would support her vocation as a writer (2) and eventually grew to realize that it was a vital part of her creative practice, I have grown to deeply value teaching as a time and space to cultivate creative community, particularly amongst underrepresented, underestimated, undervalued student technologists yearning to investigate, interrogate, critique and contribute to technical cultures.
What follows is a storyboard for The Great Tit is a Bird’s 2.5-minute animated trailer, annotated with resonant passages from Teaching to Transgress. I’m grateful for the opportunity to develop this new pedagogical tool, which I will use in sharing The Great Tit is a Bird with my students. Note that this is a trailer for Season 1, which introduces all the main characters in the story world of The Great Tit is a Bird. The next five seasons, which are currently in development as an animated anthology series, explore the backstories of the characters introduced in Season 1. To watch the materials, visit https://thegreattitisabird.com.
The trailer can be viewed here:
The Great Tit is a Bird Trailer Script
By Ar Ducao and Paula Hung-Palmer
Trailer by Ar Ducao, Susan Osiche, Brian Li, Joseph Beer and Paula Hung-Palmer
Season 1 synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Renella Mendoza grieves the loss of her mother, who died during a global pandemic. To help Renella recover, her school counselor encourages her to take an electronics internship with a prestigious academic group conducting a research study in the tropical city of Mayaaka. There, Renella stumbles on four things: an apparent cure for her debilitating skin condition, an immunity to electrocution, a mind-melding contraption, and a group of exploited girls. But when Renella tries to rescue the girls, all of whom have a similar skin condition, she learns that none of the girls want to be rescued. At least—not by her.
Throughout the script, timecodes refer to the Season 1 audio drama, also available at https://thegreattitisabird.com. Color codes are used to highlight the following themes: Establish Renella -> Conflict with Mamay -> Conflict with Tech/Tuka girls -> Struggle to find/discover herself -> Contextualize story
Scene notes & Images | Script | Resonant passages from Teaching to Transgress |
We begin at the airport: | MACHINE VOICES: Hi there! Hi there! Hi there! [repeats but fades to the background] | “Martin Luther King, Jr. … assured us that … [t]he stability of the … world … will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society” (hooks 27). |
RENELLA: Hey Mamay— (Episode 1, 00:38)
| “I came to theory because I was hurting … I came to theory desperate, wanting … to grasp what was happening around and within me” (hooks 59). | |
But you're the only one I could talk to about my crazy stuff. (Ep 1, 1:13–1:29)
| "I saw in theory then a location for healing … I came to theory young, when I was still a child” (hooks 59). | |
Cut to the “story world” of Mayaaka: | RENELLA: and pretend? (Ep 1, 1:13–1:29) | “In the Significance of Theory Terry Eagleton says: Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions’” (hooks 59). |
The set-up: research, media and surveillance in Nsiitu Over the Nsiitu background, a montage of phones slides by, with a different character talking on each phone’s screen. | EBC HOST: Renella, that's a great question. (Ep 1, 3:42–3:44) | “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” (hooks 159). |
PROGRAM AGENT: Phone calls, voicemails, commercials, even a radio show—all of it’s there on her phone. | “I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize” (hooks 168). | |
MWANAMYÉ: I also want to tell you about an opportunity — a research group that could use someone with Renella’s talents. (Ep 1, 7:12–7:25) | “Almost all our teachers [in primary school] were black women … committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers—black folks who used our ‘minds’” (hooks 2). | |
PROGRAM AGENT: Her story is full of clues when you listen. (Ep. 2, 0:16–0:19) | “We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization” (hooks 2). | |
MWANAMYÉ: It will study teenagers in Nsiitu, the largest settlement in Mayaaka. (Ep 1, 7:40–8:05) | “Though [our primary school teachers] did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial” (hooks 2). | |
Brain gadgets complicate things! On the Nsiitu background, each wireframe character pulses on, says their line while their brain pulses with points of light, then fades out. | MEDINA: We need to learn more about this IRUS-STIM gadget before we sign up all these kids. (Ep 3, 4:08–4:32) | “To commit ourselves to the work of transforming the academy so that it will be a place where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning, we must embrace struggle and sacrifice. We cannot be easily discouraged. We cannot despair when there is conflict” (hooks 33). |
KARIN: It can image a person's brain and output a representation of what the person’s imagining. (Ep. 2, 6:14–6:25) | “I am disturbed that [scholar Diana Fuss] never acknowledges that racism, sexism, and class elitism shape the structure of classrooms” (hooks 83). | |
NOLLE: That sounds like telepathy to me! | “In the institutions where I have taught, the prevailing pedagogical model is authoritarian, hierarchical in a coercive and often dominating way, and certainly one where the voice of the professor is the ‘privileged’ transmitter of knowledge” (hooks 85). | |
MEDINA: If we all wore helmets connected to this gadget, could you mass-electrocute us? | “Usually these professors devalue including personal experience in classroom discussion” (hooks 85). | |
Transition to Tuka Hotel: | [Voicemail message beep] VOICEMAIL: You've reached the voice mailbox for Tuka Girls Shelter. (Ep. 5, 12:18–12:22) | “What we are witnessing today … … is … a return to narrow nationalism, isolationisms, and xenophobia. These shifts are usually explained in New Right and neoconservative terms as attempts to bring order to the chaos, to return to an (idealized) past” (hooks 28). |
| [Voicemail message beep] | “The notion of family evoked in these discussions is one in which sexist roles are upheld as stabilizing traditions. Nor surprisingly, this vision of family life is coupled with a notion of security that suggests we are always most safe with people of our same group, race, class, religion, and so on” (hooks 28). |
Tuka girls (and their brains) in ever more despair: | ARJUNE: As long as there are money men and poor girls, nothing will change. (Ep. 7, 20:24–20:34) | “Black women highlight the negative aspects of working as servants for white women. Many of these women recognize the exploitative nature of their jobs, identifying ways they are subjected to various unnecessary humiliations and degrading encounters” (hooks 100). |
MAMAY: Don't ever be okay with people treating you like shit. (Ep 8, 5:05–5:12) | “Adrienne Rich’s poem, ‘The Burning of Paper Instead of Children’ … attempts to illustrate graphically that stopping the political persecution and torture of living beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books” (hooks 167). | |
ANGELIQUE: We didn’t have a choice! … (Ep 7, 9:30–10:02) | “One line of this poem that moved and disturbed something within me: ‘This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you’” (hooks 167). | |
MAMAY: They want to make you cry…That's what makes them the power people…Ep 6, 23:25–24:00) | “No matter how many statistics on domestic violence, homicide, rape, and child abuse indicate that, in fact, the idealized patriarchal family is not a ‘safe’ space, that those of us who experience any form of assault are more likely to be victimized by those who are like us rather than by some mysterious strange outsiders, these conservative myths persist” (hooks 28). | |
MWANAMYÉ: You've done a lot, Renella. Don't ever underestimate what you can do. (Ep 3, 5:16–5:23) | “It is apparent that one of the primary reasons we have not experienced a revolution of values is that a culture of domination necessarily promotes addiction to lying and denial” (hooks 28). | |
VOICEMAIL: If you are a girl in need, do not despair. (Ep 5, 12:27–12:29) | “I couldn’t come to class one day and I had a substitute come, a person who was much more a traditional thinker, a traditional authoritarian, and the students conformed for the most part to those pedagogical practices” (hooks 147). | |
MWANAMYÉ: Renella. What's wrong with the Tuka shelter? (Ep 8, 9:44- 9:49) | “When I returned and I asked, ‘Well, what happened in class?’ the students shared their perception that she had really humiliated a student, used her power forcibly to silence” (hooks 147). | |
On the Tuka interior background, girls’ faces appear faster and faster, growing into a crowd. Each new girl has more and more pulsing light in her brain. Audio: voices overlap more and more, gradually becoming louder and more cacophonous. This section has a lot of lines, but it will be short since they’ll overlap so much. | TK: Electro-whiz! Electro-whiz! (Ep 10) | “‘Well, what did you all say?’ I asked. They admitted that they had sat there silently. These revelations made me see how deeply ingrained is the student perception that professors can be and should be dictators” (hooks 147). |
MAMAY: You can overpower all the power people combined. (Ep 6, 23:25–24:00) | “To some extent, they saw me as ‘dictating’ that they engage in liberatory practice, so they complied” (hooks 147). | |
TK: You really are an electro-whiz! (Ep 10) | “Hence when another teacher entered the classroom and was more authoritarian they simply fell into line. But the triumph of liberatory pedagogy was that we had the space to interrogate their actions” (hooks 147). | |
LIGHTNING CLIMAX
Audio: Renella’s voice is loud with a lot of reverb. | RENELLA: We’re getting you out of here. (Ep 7, 23:16–23:18) | “They could look at themselves and say, ‘Why didn’t we stand up for what we believe? Why didn’t we maintain the value of our class? Do we see ourselves simply acting in complicity with her vision of liberatory practice, or are we committed to this practice ourselves?’” (hooks 147). |
The final images: Audio: rainstorm with soft thunder. The voices are still layered, but now soft. | MACHINE VOICE: The Great Tit is a Bird. | “Profound commitment to engaged pedagogy is taxing to the spirit” (hooks 202). |
RENELLA: Electricity discharged on their skin. (Ep 5, 10) | “It may be necessary for us to have spaces where some of that repressed anger and hostility can be openly expressed so that we can trace its roots, understand it, and examine possibilities for transforming internalized anger into constructive, self-affirming energy” (hooks 109). | |
MWANAMYÉ: You are making a real difference for these girls. | “Only when our vision is clear will we be able to distinguish sincere gestures of solidarity from actions rooted in bad faith” (hooks 109). | |
RENELLA: Eyes shone more luminous than any moon. (Ep 4, 10) | “Letting go of some of the hurt may create a space for courageous contact without fear or blame” (hooks 109). | |
Smaller flashes of lightning slowly illuminate the main poster image of “The Great Tit is a Bird.” Tiny birds fly through. | MACHINE VOICE: The Great Tit is a Bird. MWANAMYÉ: Bye bye. MACHINE VOICES: Goodbye.
| “Martin Luther King Jr. told the citizens of this nation: ‘When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy’” (hooks 27). |
Final Notes
In this time of increased constraints on education and educators, ranging from book bans (Friedman and Johnson 2022), to hate speech (Stechemesser et al. 2022, e714), to laws constraining curricula (Palmadessa 2023, 643), bell hooks’s liberatory pedagogy helps me to remember that teaching is a powerful act—an act so powerful that it can transgress dominant hegemonies, even as many, if not most, educational settings reinforce such dominance. This is particularly true of many postsecondary STEM education programs, where recent pushes to promote “entrepreneurship” and “startup culture” add only a seemingly new outer layer to old structures of inequity, injustice, and entrenched power (Arthur 2019, 80; Bandera et al. 2021, 636; Monroe-White and McGee 2023, 0; Pearson et al. 2023). The Great Tit is a Bird, much of which is set in such educational spaces, peeks under the hood of this new slickness and explores its far-reaching effects on Black and Brown femmes and transfemmes in STEM.
Beyond the classroom, bell hook’s larger body of work helps me remember that teaching can be an essential nutrient for a larger creative practice. From years of teaching, I’ve learned an enormous amount from my students, many of whom have become friends and artistic collaborators. Even inside of massive, oppressive structures, it’s these kinds of creative, liberatory relationships that give me hope.
—Annotation by Ar Ducao
