Introduction
This essay explores the liberatory pedagogical legacy of bell hooks by mapping the ways her work informed the development of the Empowering Bystanders Against Anti-Black Racism (EBAAR) open online course: a course that was developed in the context of a global ‘racial awakening’, significant political and social unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ever-evolving digital landscape of 21st-century education. This collaborative, community-centered project featured multimodal engagement with technology, informed by the historical and current effects of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and pervasive systemic inequities on students’ experiences in higher education. Foregrounding education as a means to transgress systems of domination, EBAAR reflected bell hooks’s emphasis on education as “the practice of freedom” and as fundamentally political. The EBAAR project builds a nuanced framework for digital instruction that opens new shared spaces for collective liberation. In embracing hooks’s emphasis on teaching to transgress, the course centers Black ways of knowing, and in so doing, resists the salience of White supremacy in education. In this way, we establish our approach as a form of intellectual activism and anti-racist education, which positions knowledge in service of social justice (Hill Collins 2013).
We contend that an engaged and holistic pedagogy that emphasizes well-being (hooks 1994, 15) is essential for anti-racist education. A holistic pedagogical approach disrupts the Cartesian mind/body split to privilege “experience as an active, sensuous, conscious human activity, [whereby] experience is always embedded within thinking and being” (Carpenter, Ritchie, and Mojab 2013, 66). This commitment allows educators to appreciate the ways in which race, gender and class “are features that arise in human interaction. That is, they are relational properties located in time and space” (Ng 2003, 209). An interactional and relational approach to social difference or otherness within the classroom provides a framework for how dominant and subordinate relations intersect to produce inequality and marginalization within our education system (our emphasis, Ng 2003, 214). In an effort to affirm learners’ lived experiences, our implementation of holistic pedagogy created new possibilities for equitable and transformative learning in the EBAAR course. This necessarily informed the approach to design, the curriculum content, teaching methodologies, and how technology was integrated throughout the EBAAR course, which created educational spaces that challenged dominant systems of knowledge and celebrated multiple ways of knowing (i.e., emotional, experiential, and practical). Anti-racist education thus becomes more inclusive, and meaningful, especially for historically marginalized learners who are excluded within predominantly White educational contexts. We contend that these relational pedagogical strategies such as holistically engaged pedagogy (discussed below) are especially well suited for engagement with political movements for racial justice, given that they empower learners, foster collaborative engagement, and facilitate the co-construction of knowledge by challenging dominant frames of reference.
Societal Apathy to Institutional Action: The Broader Ecology of EBAAR
In January 2021 we were invited by a group of Black colleagues to collectively apply for funding through the eCampusOntario Virtual Learning Strategy grant, which was supported by the Government of Ontario, Canada, to improve access to open and online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following an idea that was conceived a few months prior, our application was to develop an innovative open online course that integrated the work of bystander intervention and anti-racism—specifically, building capacity around anti-racist, prosocial bystander interventions. A review of the literature by Nelson, Dunn, and Paradies (2011) highlights the strong and largely untapped potential of bystander anti-racism in political projects that disrupt interpersonal and systemic racism. The grant for our project created an opportunity to integrate the content expertise from various academic units and disciplines with the open and online pedagogical expertise from the university’s Office of Open Learning, which was responsible for managing these grant-based projects. Additionally, the funds we received helped to provide financial resources that EBAAR needed to succeed and position it as a valuable resource and model for instructors and course developers across Ontario and beyond.
Importantly, the opportunity to develop this course occurred in the context of great social upheaval, and economic and political unrest, that was further exacerbated by the pandemic, which disproportionately affected Black and Brown people. In addition, the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmad Arbury, and Breonna Taylor, in the United States, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet and D'Andre Campbell in Canada further exposed the blatant anti-Black racism pervasive in our society. It is in this context that Canadian universities found the political will and resources to finally address the historical waves of Black student organizing and Black resistance, anti-racism recommendations, and well-documented calls to action (see for example: Toronto Metropolitan University 2020; Western University 2020; University of Windsor 2021; Scarborough Charter 2022). Although this significant institutional shift holds promise for widespread systemic change within the Canadian academy, it is vital to note that Black colleagues, who struggle against exclusion within the culture of Whiteness that pervades higher education in Canada (Ibrahim et al. 2022), were now being unfairly asked to take on and lead this monumental work. It is within this context that we committed to demonstrating our allyship and mobilizing our expertise in the interest of formalizing a course grounded in anti-racist praxis.
Holistic Engaged Pedagogy and Education as the Practice of Freedom
In her book Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks explored her lived experiences as both student and teacher. Recalling the grief and loss she experienced in the shift from all-Black schools to White schools with racial integration, hooks described the mission of her Black teachers who were “committed to nurturing intellects” (2) and to knowing their students (3) teachers who believed that to educate Black children rightly would require a political commitment to anti-racist struggle (3). hooks notes, “[t]hough they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial” (2). In contrast, desegregated White schools, and eventually her experiences in college and graduate school reinforced the hegemonic narrative that education was only about learning information and obeying the authority of that information (3). She draws the comparison of an educational system designed to empower and free (Black) students, versus one designed for domination (4). hooks and her fellow Black students were always tasked to respond to whiteness, which left little room for creativity or critical thinking (5).
hooks longed for a return to the transformative education of her early childhood, finding fertile ground within the liberatory approach of Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy, discussed in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). This work profoundly influenced hooks, enabling her to weave together critical and feminist pedagogies that informed her text, Teaching to Transgress. Teaching students to transgress against boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and gender to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks and for us, the teacher's most important goal.
Yet, in the predominantly White educational system that persists today, the focus is largely on the curriculum. A hyperfocus on the type and amount of content a teacher uses for both instruction and assessment dictates and limits the possibilities of knowledge to test scores and learning outcomes. Freire (1968) and hooks (1994) criticized this as the "banking system" of education: a metaphorical representation of traditional, hierarchical educational practices that treat learners as passive recipients of knowledge. It is based on a one-way transmission model, where teachers deposit information into students' minds with the expectation that they will absorb it. hooks argues that this banking model reinforces oppressive and political power dynamics at work in Western society by marginalizing learners and leaving the teacher’s authority unquestioned. This approach expects students to accept and reproduce knowledge without critical thinking, creativity, or active participation. It also reinforces a game-like dynamic by treating knowledge as a commodity to be acquired and exchanged for rewards such as grades. In the EBAAR course, we directly examine these unspoken norms, expectations, and values that tend to reinforce oppressive power dynamics and dominate the culture of the academy.
Introduced by Philip Jackson (1968) as the hidden curriculum, this highlights how students are taught to acquiesce to the status quo, by setting normative standards about what it means to be a student—how to look, how to behave, and how to demonstrate their learning. This hidden curriculum is fundamentally rooted in White colonialism, reproducing inequalities in the classroom when students challenge dominant ideologies and well-established educational structures. Recognizing and challenging this is required if we are to empower and transform students through their learning experiences. We must necessarily examine the methods and methodologies employed within our classrooms to make visible and challenge these hegemonic narratives. We accomplished this within EBAAR through both the course content, which directly introduces the concepts of colonialism and White supremacy in education, as well as the pedagogical approach to collaborative learning, wherein students are empowered to find their voice and are valued as co-creators of knowledge. We also interrogated the default usage of educational technologies and historical pedagogical approaches like the banking model hooks critiques.
Given the lessons of hooks, we understand what she called engaged pedagogy as necessarily holistic. Considering her greater body of work, and Teaching to Transgress in particular, we use the term holistic engaged pedagogy to describe our approach to teaching and learning that nurtures a reflexive and critical stance on the status quo. A holistically engaged pedagogy empowers students to take an active role in their learning, to contribute to a community of learners, and to transgress social norms of education.
Soloman (et al. 2011) further contributes to this pedagogical orientation of a holistically engaged pedagogy, by suggesting we seriously consider who the curriculum is designed for, who our students are, and the goals for teaching. Only after can we thoroughly explore how to effectively facilitate our students’ learning experiences and identify methods, content, and technologies that serve our purpose. These questions and steps supported our commitment to creating inclusive, engaging, and transformative learning experiences that can challenge conventional educational practices, promote justice, and disrupt traditional structures of knowledge production and consumption rooted in White colonialism.
De-centering Whiteness and Elevating Black Ways of Knowing in EBAAR
The holistically engaged pedagogical approach used to develop the EBAAR course sought to strategically elevate Black community and Black students’ voices with the expressed aim of challenging White normativity and disrupting dominant White knowledge-production structures within Canadian post-secondary education. As Patricia Hill Collins (1989) notes, all scholars are affected by biases embedded within dominant knowledge systems: “their knowledge claims must [therefore] satisfy the epistemological and political criteria of the contexts in which they reside” (751). Further, Dei (2021) asserts that we know educational institutions routinely impose colonial systems of knowing, White credibility, White dominant frames of analysis, and in so doing reward proximity to Whiteness and support White power and privilege. Accordingly, “Black knowledges and ways of knowing disrupt dominant, Eurocentric ontology, epistemology, and bodies of knowledge that are taken for granted” (Ibrahim et al. 2022, xiv).
Given these arguments, we contend that both de-centering Whiteness and centering Blackness are fundamentally transgressive to normative course design approaches in education. In positioning Black people as experts on ‘the Black experience in Canada’, we recognize and appreciate the inherent diversity of these experiences, given that Blackness is lodged in intersecting and nuanced identities (e.g., class, gender, and sexuality) (Dei 2022; Ibrahim et al. 2022). The lived experience of anti-Black racism, and the perspectives, insights, and contributions of Black faculty, scholars, students, and community members were purposefully foregrounded throughout the curriculum. As noted by McKittrick (2022), this “willful Black knowledge-making centres Black lives in order to learn from Black people vs. learning about Black people.”
Thus, the pedagogy of the EBAAR course intentionally centered Black speakers, voices, embodied knowledge, and lived experiences throughout the entirety of the project. This was accomplished by integrating Black students’ voices and perspectives at every step of the iterative course design process, solidifying the value of their knowledge and expertise.
Students as Partners in Course Design
We started by recruiting Black students (undergraduate, graduate, and recent graduates) with demonstrated records of leadership and existing networks within the local Black community who would provide integral guidance for our approach to community engagement, the overarching learning objectives, and the course content for EBAAR. They were hired in the role of curriculum consultants who were empowered to take ownership of their contributions–to act as true partners rather than replicating dominant structures that would have students act as assistants to course designers, and passively complete the tasks as assigned by an authority. Verma (2010) states that unlearning and deconstructing dominant forms of oppression requires fostering the voices of students in both curriculum content and delivery. In the spirit of holistically engaged pedagogy, we also recognized that any efforts to foster student voices necessarily depend on a relationship of mutual recognition between students and teachers. Accordingly, co-author Frankie Cachon commenced her work with the student curriculum consultants with one key objective: relationship building.
Given pandemic-related restrictions, we were only able to meet online, so it was even more important to begin with informal dialogue, developing relational trust and establishing rapport in a manner that humanized our online environment. We talked about what shows or podcasts we were bingeing, how we were managing online classes, and how we were coping with COVID restrictions. These initial meetings grew more intimate and connective, at which point Frankie felt comfortable sharing her early childhood experiences of ‘otherness’ as a Mexican immigrant in a White school in Ohio. She described how teachers often assumed she was ‘stupid’ and how when a students’ school uniform sweater went missing—it was automatically assumed that she, the only Mexican kid in the class, was presumed guilty and punished without cause. She shared how these painful lived experiences informed her perspectives on education and how they had shaped her lifelong interest in racism and racialization (the process by which race is made to matter). Frankie’s decision to share this was rooted in her appreciation and previous pedagogical application of hooks’s insistence that “empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (1994, 21). From hooks’s work, Frankie had learned the value of narrating her experiences and modelling vulnerability in order to invite a holistic approach to engaged pedagogy, which not only includes intentional action taken to disrupt power dynamics but encourages more reciprocal student-teacher relationships that recognize the value of diverse voices. This was reciprocated by the student curriculum consultants who went on to narrate their experiences of navigating their own racial identities. They discussed their persistent encounters with microaggressions and exclusion in predominantly White educational institutions, such as the necessity of code switching, the tokenization of Blackness within the confines of ‘Black History Month,’ and their frequent encounters with racial slurs such as the ‘N-word.’ This dialogue about racialized experience enabled Frankie to ask our consultants the following question about their past learning experiences: “What do you wish you would have received as a Black student but did not?” This served as a rich point of departure for co-constructing the syllabus of the EBAAR course.
The students shared their desire for a course that addressed the historical erasure of Black people, Black content, and Black ways of knowing. They wanted a course that recognized that Black history is Canadian history. They longed for their non-racialized peers to understand the systemic nature of anti-Black racism, past and present, and its tangible and profound impacts on their everyday lives. Finally, they wanted a course that would inspire students to take action in their communities. But they also lamented, as did bell hooks, about the overreliance on Black students to teach them and others about “the Black experience.”
These themes were identified through a series of online dialogue sessions using Zoom, a popular web conferencing platform often used during the pandemic. The students provided insights that were documented on the virtual whiteboard, which allowed for comprehensive records of student contributions as a rich source of data that would serve as the foundation for the course units. These units were then presented back to the students for their feedback and approval, resulting in each student being responsible for the content creation of one unit. This ensured that they were given agency over curriculum content and learning objectives. After an orientation to open access licensing, which democratizes access to academic and creative works, they searched for and collected content which was then vetted by our team and a librarian (for copyright purposes). Finally, when the units were ready for initial review, we hired Black students from various disciplines to provide feedback on the units and the structure of the course.
Daniel et al. (2013) proposes that the best approach to facilitate youth development is through leadership training in collaborative learning environments to enable participants to accomplish goals that may be unattainable on their own, which also informed our partnership and advanced goals that were unattainable to us on our own. This is not to suggest that the collaborative process was not, at times, fraught or conflict-free. Real tensions emerged around the roles and responsibilities of team members, as we navigated the power dynamics inherent in any collaborative endeavour. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that we were working remotely, acknowledging that a lack of physical proximity can make the affective dynamics of communication more challenging. For example, when tensions arise online, individuals are more prone to disengage by turning off their cameras. In our work, the student curriculum consultants provided their expertise in the collection of curriculum materials and resources (i.e., content), and we determined how they would be integrated, taught, and best utilized (for example, some PowerPoint presentations were transformed from lecture slides into online quizzes or interactive activities using H5P, an open online tool for creating and adapting interactive HTML5 content). At times, this led to a discrepancy between the student partners’ empowerment as co-developers, and the final decisions resting with the faculty members who were accountable to the funding agency as well as the institution. Despite these challenges the process was still profoundly generative, and we were able to co-create an innovative anti-racist course.
Transgressing Educational Technology for Transformative Learning
Some educators have directly considered what bell hooks’s use of educational technology might look like. For example, in 2017, pedagogues Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris gave a conference presentation about, and subsequently posted on their respective websites, one main question: what if bell hooks made a learning management system? In short, they decided that she wouldn’t. However, they continued to interrogate their premises and conclusion, expanding on the thought that learning management systems, and much of educational technology, has been created for the express purpose of reinforcing hierarchies and structures of domination (e.g., Ross, Eastman, Laliberte, and Rawle 2022). In fact, many educators do not realize the direct influence of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism—a psychological theory focusing on how behavior is shaped and controlled by emphasizing the role of reinforcement and punishment—on modern classrooms and the current digital environment. His contributions have led to iterations of shiny new technologies that promise to innovate, but which continue to be rooted in the passive “training” of individuals to engage in “correct” behaviours and give “correct” answers, in exchange for reinforcements (e.g., Watters 2018). If you ask us, we train our pets, not our students. These tools and approaches, when left unexamined, are antithetical to hooks’s engaged and transformative pedagogies, and our holistically engaged pedagogy. How then, could we develop a course meant to empower students within systems and with tools that were designed to keep them compliant?
Although bell hooks did not specifically write about educational technology, her work continues to inform pedagogues and the educational landscape as it rapidly evolves and is directly impacted by advances in digital technology and online learning. Technological advancements are nothing new, but the exponential speed at which they are being developed and their impact on our role as educators is still noteworthy. As Neil Postman (1998) explains, culture always pays a price for technology, and the advantages and disadvantages are never distributed evenly among different groups (1, 2). He uses examples such as the automobile and modern medical technology as having both obvious advantages, and demonstrable disadvantages, which are often divided along lines of class, race, gender, and sexuality. In line with critical pedagogy, we are challenged to think about the sociocultural contexts in which technologies are used. Questions such as ‘who benefits from various forms of educational technology and who is thereby harmed?’ were relevant for the design of EBAAR.
An argument often made in critical pedagogy is that we must challenge the default, whatever that may be. In our course design, we not only challenged the defaults of White knowledge production and hierarchical pedagogies, but also the use of various educational technologies such as learning management systems (LMSs). Beyond the initial resistance, frustration and growing pains associated with learning a new technology, many educators will acquiesce to the default usage of LMSs to manage their students’ learning experiences due to their ubiquitous nature across education (directly related to the colonial power of the tech industry), and the top-down approach to enforcing the use of these tools at the institutional level. After all, these systems generally do serve to make the instructor’s job more efficient, faster, and formulaic with content blocks, scheduled communications, and metrics that show us exactly how our students interact with components of our LMS course site. The LMS can do a lot; but, as Tressie McMillan Cottom (2019) suggests, we must think beyond how we can use technology in our classrooms, to how we should use technology in our classrooms. Current technology solutions should not dictate how we teach. Rather, our pedagogical values should underpin the technological decisions we make for our classes.
Although restricted by the tools available at our institution (a common struggle across education), we were able to find ways to leverage the use of three key platforms outside of our institutional LMS; namely, Pressbooks, WordPress, and Spotify. By merging the transformative ideas of hooks, and more recent critiques of educational technology by scholars such as Audrey Watters, Jesse Stommel, Sean Michael Morris, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, we aimed to create a dynamic learning environment that (a) fosters equity and inclusion in the classroom community, (b) enables meaningful dialogue, (c) engages students with diverse content, and (d) empowers students to transgress societal norms and systemic racism. Importantly, the use of multiple digital tools, rather than the consolidation of all course components into a singular LMS course site, supported digital literacy skills such as open scholarship, digital citizenship, and online identity. And our curriculum design does not assume that all students will inherently know how to use these tools, or the implications of doing so (e.g., how their data is collected and used). In response, we explicitly included support for students as they used these technologies by leveraging resources and support from experts in our Office of Open Learning. Further, the supplementary resources offered to instructors specify how this is supported at our institution and makes recommendations for how one might go about implementing similar strategies within their own institutional contexts (e.g., if their institution does not have a unit that directly supports WordPress or other technologies).
Elevating Black Voices through Pressbooks and Podcasts
Developing this course as an open educational resource allows for the amplification of a Black-centred curriculum, which can then be accessed, used, and modified by educators who wish to further this anti-racist work. The Pressbooks platform is often used to create and adapt openly licensed materials such as digital textbooks, interactive course guides, complementary course resources, or digital repositories, which advances North American efforts to minimize barriers to education (e.g., the cost of print textbooks, and limited access to educational opportunities). For example, our Pressbook (and the course package as a whole), licensed as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) resource, can be adapted by course developers and others across the world, who could change or update content on an ongoing basis to reflect current events and political developments. With authorship credited to the student curriculum consultants, we are able to further mobilize Black knowledges, while enhancing their professional portfolios.
Specifically, the Pressbook created for this course served as both a course guide and an open content repository that was designed around a set of units that scaffold students’ learning and prepare them for in-class discussions. We were able to create a more engaging experience by leveraging the wealth of resources available, such as academic articles and blogs, videos, podcasts, poems, and visual art, which could all be embedded within the Pressbook. In this way, we were not constrained by a single source of information or a prescribed curriculum; we curated a set of diverse materials that reflect Black voices, lived experiences, and ways of knowing. This inclusivity also fosters a rich and comprehensive learning environment, enabling students to explore a variety of viewpoints and develop a broader understanding of the subject matter, and is a direct result of the current digital ecosystem of abundance.
Something our team was quite proud of was the creation of a 4-episode podcast series made available on Spotify—a platform chosen because of its ubiquity and the ability to access it without a subscription. Knowing the multitude of ways students prefer to engage with course material, and recognizing the popularity of podcasts, we wanted to encapsulate core themes that would represent each unit via this platform. This also presented an opportunity for us to showcase our team through student-led interviews with our academic collaborators. Consistent with the ethos of centering Blackness, we hired a local Black artist and musician to create and record the accompanying music for the podcast intro and interludes. In fact, podcasts were integrated throughout the course, to provide greater ease of access, noting that the learners could listen to them while commuting or performing other tasks. This directly relates to the holistically engaged pedagogical approach of the course, to which we now turn.
Holistic Engaged Pedagogy in an Online Class
Holistic engaged pedagogies recognize that power dynamics are inherent in all classrooms and communities. Accordingly, we must consider how students are positioned in relation to the curriculum. For example, for White students, learning about anti-Black racism and structural oppression may provoke defensiveness, resistance, and denial—otherwise known as ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018). For students from racialized, marginalized, and equity-deserving communities, this learning will be more relevant, vulnerable, and challenging in light of their lived experiences. We therefore intentionally included opportunities for community care and connection throughout the course as a strategy of resistance to anti-Black racism.
Consistent with a Black feminist ethic of care we combined an educational focus on learning with empathetic engagements that consider relationships, human needs, and well-being (Keeling 2014). Within the Pressbook and other course materials, we provided content forecasts (that might be understood as previews), to prepare students for their engagement with course content. This was complemented by self-care reminders as well as campus and community mental health resources that served to model a culture where self-care is prioritized and valued. While the EBAAR course makes visible the historical and present-day trauma experienced by Black people in Canada, it promotes strategies that can challenge systemic oppression and ways of being beyond the pain of anti-Black racism. Specifically, celebrating Black joy and rest as resistance by integrating Black poetry, Black music, Black excellence and explicitly documenting and valorizing Black joy. In fact, there is a long intellectual and cultural Black theorizing about the importance of joy and laughter as resistance in the face of trauma and oppression (Wood 2021). The inclusion of “Celebrating Black Life” sections at the end of each unit further contributed to the dynamic community we sought to establish by bringing common experiences of Black joy into the learning environment, which counters a historical focus on Black pain.
hooks understood the communal nature of transformative learning in light of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the beloved community” (hooks 2003, 35–36) and what Parker Palmer describes as “knowing that community, feeling that community, sensing that community, and then drawing your students into it” (hooks 2003, xvi). For hooks, transformative education enables students to think critically, to be active and engaged, where there is a shared responsibility to contribute within a democratic setting (1994, 39). This is predicated on deconstructing the hegemonic notion that the professor is the sole authority responsible for what is learned (1994, 8). This is echoed by David Takacs, who underscores the importance of respecting students’ unique life experiences, and empowers them as knowledge-makers, which allows them to contribute their individualized knowledge and advance collective understanding (2003, 28). To this end, hooks insisted on a climate of mutuality and free expression, emphasizing the goal of building community to create a “climate of openness and intellectual rigor” (1994, 40).
Audrey Watters (2022) further reinforces this idea by emphasizing the importance of shared social experiences. She says, “we need to spend more time sitting with one another, understanding how each other is thinking about the world … thinking through things together … [and] learning how our ideas coincide and develop together.” This idea is further substantiated by Buchanan, Wilson, and Gopal (2008, 678), who explored experiences of students within an online course that regarded issues of racism. Their students explained the need for a space to “explore the context of where people are coming from,” and to willingly and openly understand the lived-experience of racism from the perspective of other students. These insights were echoed by our student partners who insisted on the need for both independent learning and reflection, as well as the opportunity to gather as a community of learners. We therefore dedicated the first class each week to asynchronous engagement with course content and the creation of ePortfolio submissions, which is a high-impact practice that provides an opportunity for students to cultivate their own digital identity and document their academic work. The second class of each week was dedicated to group discussions, which provided opportunities for collaborative learning and capacity-building around anti-racist praxis (e.g., bystander intervention). This approach also mirrors students’ real-life experiences of accessing content on the internet and then having conversations with others about their learning experiences. The incorporation of asynchronous engagement respects students’ autonomy and enables them to spend some of their pre-scheduled class time completing what is typically assigned as “homework.”
To facilitate independent learning and reflection, we sought to transgress the norms of education and educational technology by having students develop ePortfolios using WordPress—a free and open-source platform used to build and manage basic websites. However, the tool was selected only after agreeing on our pedagogical values and determining how we wished for students to engage in the course and with the platform. Rather than treating the ePortfolio as a different form of LMS (e.g., a public assignment repository), it was meant to be a personal space (and public, if desired) for the learners to reflect on and document their learning experiences. And they would be able to keep this site (ostensibly) for as long as the institution will host and maintain the WordPress domains.
Importantly, students were not simply asked to complete task-based assignments and post them to their ePortfolios. Instead, we offer students the opportunity to decide how they would like to respond to a prompt. As Andrew Rikard (2015) stated, “promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.” The latter is a new way of reinforcing the teacher-student power dynamics, while the former is a demonstration of holistically engaged pedagogy, where students are empowered to cultivate their digital and academic identities. “By putting their work online,” says Audrey Watters (2022), “it shows students that they’re scholars and it helps them understand that’s how scholarly networks and scholarly knowledge is built.” This does not imply that our approach here is revolutionary, but in reimagining the classroom around public scholarship, student agency and experimentation (Rikard 2015), we highlight our holistically engaged pedagogy, and how it informs our decisions for technology.
In creating their ePortfolio submissions, students have the option of contributing written academic responses much like they would in any discussion board or assigned paper, but they may choose to represent their learning through poetry, prose, art, music, video, or something completely unexpected. The only caveat was that they would need to provide a brief explanation of how their entry represented their learning, which is not graded for spelling, grammar, or use of English language. These inclusive strategies signaled to students that their unique perspectives and ways of knowing belong and have value within curriculum and society.
The first ePortfolio reflection, for example, asks students to reflect on their own racial experiences, their own racial history or “racial narrative” (White 2023), which they are then asked to bring to class and share what they feel comfortable sharing (with the option of passing, if they do not feel comfortable). The racial narratives of some of our student curriculum consultants were shared as examples and the EBAAR course instructor is invited to purposely share their own racial narrative in order to model reflexivity and risk taking, which is a nod to hooks. As hooks notes, “[p]rogressive professors working to transform the curriculum so that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination [must be willing to] take the risks that engaged pedagogy requires” (1994, 21). By empowering students to share their stories and perspectives, we sought to create a learning community that values diversity, and recognizes the power of listening to diverse voices.
Importantly, in bell hooks’s view (1994), education functions as one potential site for cultivating critical thinking and living for both teacher and student, enabling them to confront domination in all its forms (racism, sexism, elitism, imperialism). For hooks, to educate as the practice of freedom is dependent on a relationship of mutual recognition between student and teacher, where “students are seen in their particularity as individuals” (1994, 7) and everyone’s presence is acknowledged (1994, 8). The essence of the EBAAR teaching philosophy then, is intellectual activism: the myriad ways that people place the power of their ideas in service of social justice (Hill Collins, 2013).
Conclusions
bell hooks states that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (1994, 12). And if we agree, which we do, we must critically interrogate our approaches to course design, our pedagogical values, and the ways in which we incorporate educational technologies in a growing digital ecosystem. We argue that the use of technologies should always be considered in light of our pedagogical values and a consideration for equity and inclusivity. We resist the default use of institutional LMSs in favour of a multimodal digital approach that serves to build digital literacies and empower students to take ownership over their learning and their digital identity. By distributing course content and engagement over multiple tools or platforms, and offering both independent and communal learning experiences, we mimic the real experiences of navigating technology in students’ personal and academic lives. Particularly, our use of open tools such as Pressbooks, WordPress, and Spotify allow anyone to access, whether they seek them for teaching, learning, or scholarship. We must note, however, that artificial intelligence was not addressed at the time of the design or dissemination of our EBAAR project. Although we may now see this as a potential gap in our application of educational technologies, Chat GPT and other generative AI tools were introduced after the initial development of this course. Exploring the affordances of AI may be a direction to take future adaptations of EBAAR, whether by our own team or by other scholars who wish to adapt the course.
We also challenge and disrupt dominant (White, male, colonial) knowledge production and consumption structures by elevating Black voices and ways of knowing that intentionally disrupt those structures throughout the curriculum, while empowering students as partners in the course design. Throughout the EBAAR project, our student curriculum consultants guided our approach to engagement with our local Black community, critically informed the content and structure of course units, and developed instructional materials such as podcasts. We further draw the comparison between what is traditionally thought of as “curriculum” (i.e., content), and what has historically been enforced as a “hidden curriculum” that serves to reinforce subjugation of learners, as well as scholars and practitioners from racialized or otherwise marginalized groups. By bringing these injustices to light, we give students the insight and the opportunity to transgress the norms of their post-secondary education, as well as the racist norms of society in general.
By combining the transformative ideas of bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy, online and open course design, and anti-racist praxis, we can transform the educational landscape and create a learning experience that empowers students to critically engage in a community of learning that values their expertise. As we continue to strive for a more equitable academy, such courses serve as catalysts for change, building a collective of informed and engaged individuals committed to transgressing societal norms and dismantling anti-Black racism in all its forms.
About the Authors and This Work
We believe it is essential to locate ourselves as authors and teachers because we recognize that our social identities (the intersections of our race, gender, sexuality, class, for example) shape our worldview, our place in anti-racist work, and our pedagogy. For us, bell hooks’s work has been nothing short of transformative, impacting our lives within and outside of the academy.
For Ashlyne (Ash), the work of bell hooks irreversibly transformed their pedagogy, educational praxis, and ways of being as a White, queer woman and scholar situated in a Canadian university. Long before reading Teaching to Transgress, Ash’s teaching philosophy centered on supporting and valuing students as whole human beings, although they lacked the language to articulate these values in a meaningful way. Ash completed an undergraduate, post-graduate, masters, and most of a PhD program before being introduced to bell hooks—a testament to the “White supremacist capitalist patriarch[al]” state of the academy (a phrase hooks used throughout her work). But upon reading An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (Morris & Stommel 2018) during a PhD internship in open education, Ash had begun to see their educational values as being centered on student empowerment and social justice. In finally reading Teaching to Transgress, Ash was able to give theory and language to their practice, emphasizing hooks’s intersectional attention to pedagogy, humanization, and social justice, through the lens of the inextricable link between class, race, and gender. This continues to inform Ash’s philosophies of teaching and educational development, as they endeavour to make higher education more inclusive, equitable, and just.
Frankie is a racialized visibly White and White proximate, cis, hetero woman. Her sister, Elissa, introduced her to bell hooks, explaining that she “just HAD to read Eating the other: Desire and resistance.” In hooks, she discovered a prolific thinker and cultural critic. Enamored by hooks’s ability to make social theory accessible, Frankie especially valued how hooks’s feminist theory interrogated systemic oppression and subjugation, making visible the intersections of race, class, and gender. It is not surprising that when she struggled to connect with her students, she returned to hooks’s work. Reading Teaching to Transgress she was completely absorbed, staying up till the early morning hours to finish the book. From that point on, Frankie sought to develop a teaching philosophy grounded in praxis (informed committed action) for social change. Her teaching has been shaped by Black feminist scholars and is in accordance with the traditions of intellectual activism (Hill Collins 2013). Frankie’s feminist activism and teaching, then, are interrelated—together they constitute her intellectual activism for social change. As a feminist sociologist with a specialization in social justice, Frankie designs her courses around one core objective: cultivating a transformative learning environment—whereby students become empowered to take personal and social responsibility for transformative social change.
Our complementary areas of expertise, coupled with the increased demands for labour from our Black colleagues, led them to determine that we (Frankie and Ash) ought to be the primary facilitators of this project. As the Coordinator of the University of Windsor’s Bystander Initiative to End Sexual Violence, a nationally recognized and institutionally supported bystander intervention program aimed at addressing campus sexual violence (Forrest and Senn 2017; Senn and Forrest 2016), Frankie was approached for her expertise in relation to social justice, social change, and bystander intervention training. As an educational developer specializing in online course design and open education, Ash jumped at the opportunity to contribute to this meaningful initiative. As White women we worried about the implications for the project if we were positioned as the leads. However, our colleagues assured us that our labour, expertise, and allyship was needed. Despite our trepidation, we agreed, under the condition that we would recruit and hire a team of Black students to lead the development of the curriculum. The foundation for the project, then, was that we would work with and for Black students.
