Teaching to Transgress Empire

Session Submission Type: Skills- and Resource-Sharing Session

Abstract

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, both an incisive critique of the U.S. education system and a pragmatic guide to equip educators with the tools needed to challenge dominant, colonial pedagogical paradigms that structure teaching and learning. Building on—and departing from—hooks’ work, this roundtable is a conversation that explores ways to navigate pedagogical challenges in and beyond the era of Trump. As educators trained in Black Studies, doing work in Black feminisms, gender and sexuality, and abolition, the very existence of our classroom spaces and scholarship have been casted into national debates and the popular imagination as threats to the nation state project and national body politic. This framing has most often been expressed in anti-DEI initiatives, including a recent attempt to freeze all federal grants and loan programs to evaluate them for supporting “DEI, woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal” and a ban on transgender athletes from women’s sports. Rather than leaning into or salvaging liberal “DEI” discourses and frameworks intended to render our work less threatening, roundtable participants instead offer alternative models for transgressive teaching, models rooted in Black radical, anti-imperial pedagogies—pedagogies intent on embracing the promise of our threatening presence. Drawing on experiences teaching in the contexts of higher education, K-12, and community-based learning environments, panelists consider the challenges and possibilities of decolonial, anti-imperial education with the goal of inviting audience members to co-create liberatory curricular practices.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jeffrey McCune, University of Rochester

Panelists

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Marcia Watson-Vandiver, Towson University

• Terrance Wooten, Davidson College

• Michael R Casiano, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Comment

• Jeffrey McCune, University of Rochester

Biographical Information

Marcia Watson-Vandiver, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at Towson University. As a former teacher for Atlanta Public Schools, Marcia taught alternative middle school students and mentored adjudicated youth and teen parents. Her research focuses on intersections of Black education, including Afrocentric schools, resistance pedagogy, emancipatory learning, and educational equity for marginalized students. Marcia’s recent books, The Healing Power of Education [Teacher’s College Press] and Unbleaching the Curriculum [Rowman and Littlefield], explore corrective history and decolonial knowledge for today’s students. She currently serves as Assistant Department Chair in the ELED department at Towson University and Inclusion Advocate [IA] for faculty hires in the College of Education.

Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, affiliated with the Curriculum and Instruction and Education Policy Studies departments. Her research sits at the intersection of Black Studies and education and partners with Black community organizations. Her most recent research, in collaboration with the Black Teacher Project in Oakland, CA, explores how Black teachers create fugitive spaces to combat antiblackness at school sites. Jessica is published in English Journal, Equity & Excellence in Education, Phi Delta Kappan, Journal of Negro Education, Philosophy of Education, and Race Ethnicity and Education, among others. Before her doctoral studies, Jessica taught high school English for 11 years in the Chicagoland area.

Terrance Wooten is the Lester D. Coltrane III Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Davidson College. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Registered: Homelessness, Sex Offense, and Carceral Sexuality (under contract, University of California Press), which examines how those who register as sex offenders and homeless in the DC metropolitan area are regulated through racialized social control. His secondary project considers the social construction of vulnerability and its role in determining housing outcomes for those experiencing homelessness. He has published articles in differences, Feminist Formations, The Black Scholar, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, American Psychologist, and Kalfou.