Classroom Learning: A Radical Activity
Last week, at their final assembly for the term, I spoke to the Secondary students about some of Gloria Jean Watkins’ key thoughts regarding education. An American social activist and author, Watkins wrote on many subjects during her lifetime using the pen name bell hooks (deliberately lower case), including but not limited to race, feminism, social justice, love, art and gender.
I am particularly drawn to hooks’ ideas of education as a radical act. More specifically, in her 1994 work, ‘Teaching to Transgress’, she talks about the somewhat miraculous activity that occurs in classrooms.
Hooks believes that, despite the boundaries and structures of a typical classroom, students are nevertheless engaged in a social and collective act of imagining, critically thinking and hoping. Here at Hume, our teaching staff understand this collective endeavour. While we may impose our own structures, rules and boundaries within the walls of our classrooms, we also urge our students to think beyond them.
As we come to the end of Term 1, I wish to thank our students from Prep to 12 for their efforts in classroom learning during the past 10 weeks. They have demonstrated an enormous capacity to imagine, think, hope and prepare themselves for the year ahead and beyond. I thank our teaching staff, too, for fostering the radical act of thinking and learning within their classroom; for creating the ‘necessary conditions where learning can most deeply…begin’ (hooks, 1994).
Wishing all in the community a wonderful Easter break.