2019 Annual Conference

Research to Practice

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

This presentation is a dialogue between a Black doctoral student from the American South and a South Asian American professor regarding their experiences reading bell hooks in graduate-level adult learning class. This dialogue addresses how hooks transformed the class and the lives of enrolled students via engaged pedagogy.

This presentation will be helpful to adult and higher education researchers, teachers, practitioners, and graduate students who are interested in using engaged pedagogy in their curriculum.

The participants will be able to understand what engaged pedagogy is; participants will have an understanding of the importance of using curricular materials that speak to student experiences and evaluate what texts they use in their curriculum that contextualize and build on student experiences.

hooks, Freire, and Vella call for engaged pedagogy that connects and builds on learner experiences. They argue that when learning is relevant and contextualized to learners’ lives and includes spaces for dialogue, students engage and want to learn. At the same time, in the institutional space of higher education, student persistence and success are mandates for all educators today. So how do we bridge these two seemingly separate and dichotomous calls for educators?

Using hooks’ Teaching to Transgress in a graduate online class transformed students and professor. American South Black students commented that “this was the first time in their higher education experience that they had seen themselves and their lives in a text.” Meanwhile, White students commented on their struggles to understand hooks’ educational experiences as a Black woman. This, in turn, made them examine and reflect on their own prejudices and privileges.

Based on this experience, we will undertake a research study to survey graduate-level curricula in the American South and examine if and how texts like hooks’ are included and used in a geographic region that has historically struggled with race-related issues. We argue that engaged pedagogy will bridge and increase student persistence and student success.

This session will start with a warm-up activity in which participants can reflect on their lived experiences and if and how their higher education curriculum connected and built on those experiences. A dialogue between a Black doctoral student and a South Asian American professor will follow. This dialogue will center on how using hooks’ Teaching to Transgress in a higher education class impacted the curriculum as well as students’ and professor’s experiences in the course. It will end with a small group discussion on what texts educators use in their classrooms that connect students’ lived experiences with the curriculum.