Books like Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning

When I first read this book, I had just started teaching gender in university classrooms and was studying gender training for my PhD research. This book crystallized for me what I found so fascinating and important about teaching and learning as a feminist.

In this book, the late great bell hooks weaves together personal experience with academic engagement in a way that is accessible and engaging. In dialogue with the iconic Brazilian education theorist Paolo Freire, she lays out her vision for education as a practice of freedom, as opposed to education that reinforces systems of domination. I assign parts of this book in my courses every year and recommend it to everyone interested in thinking about how education can be a liberatory practice.  

Resistance by students is common in gender training, and I was grappling with trying to understand under what conditions we accept knowledge as true, and what logic we use to disavow other forms of knowledge.

This book was a revelation for me when I was working through these questions. Against the preconception that education is about a technical knowledge transfer, Megan Boler insists that we understand emotion as central to teaching and learning. She reveals that emotions are central to how we know and what we know. In particular, her notion of a ’pedagogy of discomfort’ helped me think about what an ethical engagement with resistance and difficult questions of complicity might look like.

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of those rare academic authors who comes across as incredibly likable in her writing. I never met her, but her text just exudes warmth, humour, and relatability, in addition to (or perhaps even in spite of) being erudite and insightful.

In this collection of essays, she attends to questions of pedagogy—how we know and learn things—but examines sites of pedagogy beyond formal education or training. She reveals to the reader that the cat who brings her owner small prey is actually trying to teach the former how to hunt, and shares how studying Buddhism rearranged for her the landscape of how to think about death.

I love this book dearly because it made me think about questions of pedagogy in a completely novel theoretical register, and because it made me both laugh and cry in doing so.

In a sense, Reitter and Wellmon’s book is an extended answer to Celenza’s question. It convincingly shows that there is nothing new about our perception of the humanities having reached a point of “crisis.” Ever since the nineteenth century, humanities scholars have been taking on defense postures. Moreover, in these defenses, they have often presented humanities education as a remedy to various other crises – be it a crisis of morality in a technological age or a crisis of democracy in a neoliberal era. But should we continue to play this card? Reitter and Wellmon don’t believe that the humanities should teach moral values. Rightly, I think, they prefer to see the humanities as a space for second-order reflection on “possible meaningful forms of life for this world.”

There has lately been an unfortunate tendency among educational observers and policymakers to reduce the value proposition of higher ed to purely measurable metrics: money spent; time spent; money earned. In this sort of analysis, the hard-nosed science and technology subjects tend to come out on top. Those who would speak for the humanities and arts, meanwhile, make the valid but sometimes unsatisfying point that there are benefits—perhaps less readily measurable but still very real and of significant personal and social value—to softer-edged subjects. The goal of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs is simple: to correct this asymmetry by measuring what was previously obscure. By the end of this book, readers will be convinced of the true and lasting value of the liberal arts tradition in higher education.

Before delving into the business and culture of college radio, I had to think through the complicated relationships between universities and their surrounding communities. Davarian Baldwin helped me do just that.

The FM signals emanating from inside the walls of the ivory tower occupied the public’s airwaves, and so surrounding residents not affiliated with institutions had legitimate claims to these signals, which usually operated on licensed signals requiring public service and educational functions. While these signals often did provide valuable culture and information for wide and diverse communities, they sometimes replicated the more complicated politics of these institutions and the destructive role they played in communities.

Baldwin’s engaging and enraging exploration of town and gown provides a critical lens to use when thinking through the relationship between universities, nearby music scenes, cultural service, and radio.

In Daniel Karpowitz’s book, he takes readers behind the scenes in college-in-prison classrooms to explore what a liberal arts education can offer people who are incarcerated, and the educators who facilitate them. Karpowitz was a mentor and a guide as I was building my own college-in-prison program. His steadfast belief in the human capacity for transformative learning shines through in these accessible, riveting pages of what it means to read the canon from a position of marginalization.

Ellis chronicles the history of how the university turned from an institution of open inquiry into a political monoculture that requires those in it to adhere to a particular ideology. Ellis is particularly good at showing how the strengths of the traditional university were turned into weaknesses and allowed it to be captured by the adherents of identity politics. Old-style independent scholars are hard to organize, Ellis points out, because they are just that—independent. But these truly independent scholars were no match for the politically organized groups that wanted to use the university to advance a political agenda.

I believe education (what economists call “human capital”) is the key to a more productive, equitable, and happier society. After all, many rich nations, like Switzerland, Japan, and Israel, have almost no natural resources but do have well-educated populations, and many poor nations, like the Congo, Venezuela, and Nigeria, have extremely valuable natural resources but do not have well-educated populations. Therefore, I am concerned about the state of education in America and am particularly troubled that our best universities may not be achieving as much for our society as they could. This book is a searing critique of their role and makes the case that we should expect so much more from them, given their huge resources.