To Oppress and To Be Oppressed

Grad school is hard.

What has made it so much harder is my continuous realization of my positionality within academic settings, specifically in my classroom. Reading bell hooks this week has opened my eyes to my positionality in the classroom in many ways. My own embodiment of a Hispanic woman carries weight. Even so, I still carry my own set of privileges to “pass” in most settings – I can very much hide aspects of my ethnicity if I need to or want to. In many ways, this embodiment has been a point of struggle and freedom for me.

As a Hispanic woman, graduate school has been a bit of a bizarre experience. Drawing on Freire’s concept of the oppressors and the oppressed, I have found it uncomfortable, to say the least, to operate in a position of a teacher and student. I hold a position of authority as the teacher of my students while simultaneously holding a position of a student, who are often the people on the margins through their own silence and oppression. Throw some gender and racial marginalization into the mix and you have a tangled, complicated intersectionality cocktail!

bell hooks brought up some important questions for me as a teacher:

Am I creating a classroom environment where each student and their individual experiential knowledge is acknowledged, affirmed, and valued?

Am I doing  enough to resist the traditional oppressive systems of education as a teacher and a student?

Am I acknowledging, affirming, and valuing my own positionality as a teacher and a student?

Man, bell hooks really knows how to create an existential crisis.

bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress has given me some insight about how to navigate through my positionality as a teacher and a student. Freire and hooks dialogue with the idea of education as a practice of freedom, this idea of engaging in critical awareness and active participation in the classroom. By entering the classroom as Subjects, we can create an identity of resistance to the traditional oppressive systems of education, such as the banking model of education. I mean, come on. What a revolutionary idea, right?!

As I reflected on this, I was thinking about how I could go about creating a classroom where education is a practice of freedom for both my students and me. The idea of “authority of experience” resonated with me as a critical strategy that can bring awareness and active participation in the classroom. hooks described the “authority of experience” as a way to “value her own experience as a way of knowing and understanding” (p. 90). In my classroom, I can teach with my “authority of experience”. I want to be able to share my own awareness of my positionality as a teacher and a woman of color, along with the struggles and freedoms that my positionality entails. Our individual experiences are not only valid, but important to share in the classroom. We should be able to teach while acknowledging the experiences of others, to ignore our experiences would be detrimental to our students’ liberation.

It can be difficult to be a part of a city or institution that does not represent you. In the words of bell hooks, it can be painful. I grew up in El Paso, TX. If you have never visited, El Paso is a border town to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. It is a huge city with a deep history, rich culture, and loving connection to its sister city, Juarez. It is a place where nearly 80% of the population is Hispanic. When I moved away from home for the first time at 18 years old, I experienced culture shock in the small college town of Denton, TX. In an odd way, I felt like a marginalized person for the first time in Denton, TX and UNT. For the first time in my life, I lived somewhere where statistically, I was the minority. I became hyperaware of my embodiment, particularly my ethnicity.

Throughout my undergraduate career, I can count on one hand the number of Hispanic professors that I have taken courses with. In our own department, I do not see myself in my mentors. Maybe the oppressive systems of education have failed us. Maybe it is easier to be complacent in this failure. But I don’t think bell hooks would allow for that. Instead, I think hooks would be particularly interested in how we can work to collectively resist the oppressive systems of education and engage in a transformative pedagogy. An engaged pedagogy that can not only empower myself as a teacher and student, but my own students as well.

To fighting the good fight.

#eyeswideopen