I’ve been looking back at my notes on my copy of bell hook’s classic text: Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. One of the many things she writes that is key to critical education for wicked problems is this:

“Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. This process cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.” (p.21)

This is a wonderful counterargument to neoliberal perspectives on higher education that ask us to behave like efficient human resources to achieve student satisfaction within the time alloted in our workload allocation models. hook’s work speaks to education that is actively decolonial and antiracist and that centres social justice. Doing this work asks us to make our teaching a deeply personal and reflexive process where we interrogate our own positionality and the structures of injustice that infuse the institutions we are part of. We need to do this in collaboration with our students welcoming them fully as they arrive with us and sharing the vulnerable work of shaping just responses to wicked problems. How much are we willing to transgress the rules and norms of neoliberal institutions to achieve this?