Love, community, and Quakertown: Guidance from bell hooks on teaching counterstories

As a course assistant to a professor of color at Texas Christian University (TCU), the predominantly white institution where I earned my doctorate, I first encountered bell hooks’s theory of engaged pedagogy as a path toward education as a practice of freedom. Several years later, I found myself reconnecting with hooks’s scholarship in an inverse scenario: as a white faculty member teaching students at a minority-serving institution (MSI) about the historical displacement of people of color in our local community. Intent on teaching this class as justly as possible, I found myself returning to the pages of Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community, and Bone Black. And after a long semester filled with laughter, playfulness, and much humbling dialogue, I learned of hooks’s passing on December 15, 2021. Although I never met hooks in person, her influence on my antiracist pedagogical development and the discipline at large feels significant as well as unfinished.