Supplementary Reading: Freire and hooks on Engaged Pedagogy
Ariel G. Mekler
About Engaged Pedagogy: Freire and hooks in Conversation
What happens when two radical thinkers—Paulo Freire and bell hooks—start asking the same big question: What if school was a place of liberation instead of control? You get the foundation of what’s now known as engaged pedagogy.
Both Freire and hooks believed that education isn’t neutral. It can either help people become more free and aware—or it can reinforce systems of inequality and silence. Their work, written decades apart but deeply connected, explores how classrooms can be spaces of transformation, not just information.
Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, introduced the idea that students should not be treated like empty containers to be filled (what he called the banking model of education). Instead, education should be a dialogue—a back-and-forth between teachers and students that starts with real-life experience and builds toward critical thinking and social action.
hooks took this idea and ran with it. In Teaching to Transgress, she expands on Freire’s work by adding a focus on identity, love, and care. Where Freire was focused on oppression and liberation through dialogue, hooks adds layers—especially around race, gender, and emotion. She insists that teachers and students must show up as whole people, and that healing and justice are inseparable from learning.
Both thinkers call for educational spaces that are humanizing, where students aren’t just learning about freedom—they’re experiencing it.
The article from Free Queer CUNY dives into how Freire and hooks intersect and build on each other, especially in today’s context of digital learning and social justice activism. It explores how their shared vision of education as a tool for liberation still speaks powerfully to classrooms, communities, and movements—online and off.
Before You Read
Take a moment to think about what makes a classroom feel meaningful. Is it the content? The teacher? The energy in the room? Freire and hooks would say it’s something deeper—it’s about creating a space where people feel seen, heard, and empowered to grow, both intellectually and personally.
This reading looks at how these two giants of critical pedagogy—Freire and hooks—both believed that education is never just about facts. It’s about freedom. But they approached that goal in different ways. Freire focused on liberation from social oppression, especially for poor and working-class people. hooks built on that with a feminist and intersectional lens, insisting that race, gender, and emotional well-being all matter in the learning process.
As you read, ask yourself: How can classrooms become more democratic, more caring, and more liberatory? What does it mean for a teacher to teach with love? What does it mean for a student to take ownership of their learning?
Guiding Questions
- How do Freire and hooks each define the purpose of education?
- What is the “banking model” of education, and how do both thinkers challenge it?
- How does hooks expand on Freire’s ideas with her focus on identity, love, and the whole person?
- In what ways can their ideas be applied to digital education or your own learning spaces?
The intersections of hooks, Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Teaching to Transgress and the Digital Commons
Expanding on Professor Brim’s post, and in light of our class discussion last week, I find myself contemplating pedagogy and pedagogical practice. Having recently read some of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I decided to seek out some OER recounting their pedagogical approach. Freire’s work, argues for a pedagogical approach that breaks the teacher-student contradiction and the inherent systems of oppression, or he refers to as “banking concepts,” embedded in education.
hooks, a student of Freire, expands pedagogical practices in her work, Teaching to Transgress, where she underscores the need to practice an “engaged pedagogy;” a pedagogy that is progressive, holistic, committed to well-being and processes of self-actualization.
With these approaches in mind, I circle back to the rhetoric I’ve experienced throughout my own education about moving from being a “consumer of knowledge” to becoming a “producer of knowledge.” These structures and constructs assume that one needs to consume before they produce. Utilizing the CUNY Commons as a platform for knowledge and learning between student and teacher has the capacity to disrupt this system. Having students digitally participate in an open format enables them to become producers while simultaneously being engaged in learning practices inside the classroom. It also has the capacity to enable teachers to learn from students prior to shaping the classroom experience. Despite these positive possibilities, questions still arise about the utilization of digital platforms. Does the CUNY Commons platform enable a true “engaged pedagogy?” Does it foster an experience that can grow in the classroom or does it obstruct learning gained from direct human engagement? Can true transgression be achieved digitally? Do these platforms enable a voice within the “banking system” that would otherwise be stifled or silenced? And last, is there a way to incorporate a platform like the CUNY Commons or WordPress in a way that advances active learning.?
In additions to the links above, I found a panel discussion celebrating the 20th anniversary of Teaching to Transgress hosted by the New School in 2014 available here.
About this reading
This blog post “The intersections of hooks, Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Teaching to Transgress and the Digital Commons” by Ariel G. Mekler. This work was shared with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY).
