Florence, Namulundah. (1998). bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Reviewed by Caitlin Howley-Rowe

Florence, Namulundah. (1998). bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Pp. xxv + 246 ISBN 0-89789-565-7         $22.95 Reviewed by Caitlin Howley-Rowe Appalachia Educational Laboratory October 26, 1998             Students come to school in the morning wearing the social meanings associated with their various race, class, and gender classifications. They enter buildings, some rotting and others gleaming, in which many confront textbooks and teachers who overlook or undermine the lived substance of their social identities and struggles, and this is no accident. Moreover, they are schooled in deference to the status quo, whether or not it nurtures their burgeoning minds. At the same time, however, some classrooms are filled with passionate teaching and learning, with books and discussions that honor all students, with practices that empower students to become thinkers in their own right. It is to this dual nature of education that Namulundah Florence applies bell hooks' theory of engaged pedagogy.             Chapters 1 through 3 of Florence's book, bell hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness, describe hooks' thought on racism, sexism, and classism as they operate to limit the self-determination of various marginalized people in the United States. Florence offers a summary of how the interlocking oppressions by race, gender, and class together subjugate and garner persons’ complicity in their own domination, aided by the naturalization of white, middle-class, male values and norms via mass media, social myths, and education. Moreover, the author makes clear hooks' analysis of the ways race, class, and gender dominations pit various marginalized groups against one another rather than binding them together in "communities of solidarity in the struggle toward mutual growth" (p. xix).             In Chapter 4, the author reflects on the ways hooks' thinking accords or not with her own. She is sympathetic to hooks' contentions that black people internalize white norms, values, and aesthetics and thereby are not only alienated from themselves, but also experience self-hate, or a "negation of Blackness" (p. 64). Florence asks rhetorically, "since White' is about opportunity, privilege, and power, would not non-White people desire to be White?"(p. 64). Although the author places hooks' notions regarding "denial of subjectivity" and "separatism" under the subject heading "Issues hooks and the Author Agree Upon," she offers more critique than support for them (pp. 65-70). Florence argues that hooks is overly optimistic about the ability of marginalized people to attain subjectivity, that is, to move from being "objects" of domination to "subjects" of their own lives. Instead of offering "mere injunctions," she suggests that hooks might more usefully offer dominated folks "strategies to self- actualization" (p. 66). Florence then calls into question hooks' "self-proclaimed status of spokesperson for the marginalized," arguing both that hooks' professorship belies this and that objectivity (in the sense of fair and balanced analysis) is endangered when only marginalized people conduct scholarship about marginality (p. 69).             Florence makes two other critiques of hooks' social thought. First, she contends that hooks has not considered the possibility that, once dominations are eliminated, the previously dominated will become dominators themselves. Second, she suggests that hooks tends to essentialize the experience of racism, sexism, and classism by offering her personal trials as representative of all dominations. Therefore, Florence continues, hooks fails to address the myriad ways in which others experience and confront oppression, a lack which "is at variance with [her] proposition for cultural pluralism" (p.73).             Chapter 5 discusses similarities between hooks' engaged pedagogy and critical, multicultural, and feminist theories. Like critical theorists, hooks decries education where students are passive recipients of knowledge, masqueraded as value- free, that serves to reproduce social, political, and economic inequality. Florence aligns hooks' alternative vision for education with Freire's (1970, 1973) notion of "conscientization," in which students are liberated from domination by their own critical awareness. Resonating with multicultural theories of education, hooks' engaged pedagogy seeks to rewrite curricula that are monocultural and reinforce racial and cultural oppression. Last, Florence notes similarities between hooks' thought and feminist theory. Both, she writes, aim to nurture marginalized students as they "come to voice," as they claim their right to challenge privileged narratives.             The five major components of hooks' engaged pedagogy are elaborated upon in Chapter 6. These include a reconceptualization of what constitutes knowledge and how it is conveyed to students, linking theory more meaningfully to practice, empowering learners to think and speak critically, and committing to a multicultural perspective. hooks also, according to Florence, calls for passionate teaching that creates an exciting classroom, but more significantly queries the artificial separation of the affective and the rational--thereby challenging the hierarchical relationships that distort human interconnectedness.             Chapter 7 briefly discusses reasons teachers may not support an engaged pedagogy. According to Florence, hooks contends that such an approach is risky, demanding, and topples hierarchical arrangements in the classroom to which many teachers may be wedded. Florence adds that hooks has presumed that teachers are interested in challenging the status quo and are "self-actualized" (p. 133) enough to handle doing so should they wish.             Florence quite fleetingly discusses her sense of the limits of engaged pedagogy in chapters 8 and 9. Her main contention is that education is not a sufficient "lever for social transformation" (p. 136), and thus that hooks' prescriptions are unrealistic. Florence also argues that hooks simplifies the processes by which people confront their complicity in situations of domination. Finally, in a single paragraph entitled "Humanism over Standards," Florence makes the claim that public support for multicultural education is limited because students' growth as a result of such learning cannot be easily quantified for measurement. She writes, "despite charges of racial and cultural biases on various items, standardized tests are the most concrete measure for sorting' and selecting' students" (p. 141.). Her implication is that multicultural education will be viewed publicly as lacking "concreteness" (p. 140) until its worth can be assessed with conventional testing practices.             Chapters 10 through 13 attempt to illustrate the relevance of hooks' social and educational theory to an analysis of the third world country of Kenya. Focusing on hooks' analysis of the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender oppression, and using several sources of information about Kenya, Florence examines the ways in which Kenyan society is divided against itself. She first describes, however, the lingering effects of colonization on the country, which include cultural alienation, corruption, poverty, and political instability. Kenya, she notes, only gained independence from Britain in 1963.             hooks' contention that the social myth of white superiority supports the domination of non-white people in America is also true in Kenya, argues Florence in Chapter 10. But she points out that an often violent process of silencing those who challenge the status quo makes the Kenyan context quite different from the Western. Other myths legitimate the lack of public critique, including the myth of a pre-colonial "idyllic communal state" (p.150) and of tribal elders as pillars of wisdom whose judgment ought not be questioned. In such a context of suppressed political critique, racism, sexism and classism flourish. Racism operates through the use of degrading mass media images of blacks; differential distribution of privilege by race, tribal affiliation, and skin tone; and black internalization of white norms and values. Women in Kenya confront a sexism in many ways more powerful than that in America. Kenyan women generally have limited access to the means of production and few legal and property rights. In addition, Florence writes that polygamy, a common, if not legal, practice in Kenya, reinforces women's marginality because it reinforces conceptions of women as property. Citing several studies, Florence argues that Kenyan women's access to education is constricted both by socialization to conventionally undervalued feminine roles and by curricula that tend to exclude women. And classism, similarly to racism, operates via false consciousness, such that Kenyans emulate middle-class, Western behaviors, styles of dress, and norms. Like Fanon's analysis of the psychic impact of colonialism on black Martinique (1967), Florence contends that by equating freedom to material privilege, wealthy and middle-class black Kenyans strive to differentiate themselves from their impoverished countryfolk by adopting Western affectations. This process is exacerbated by tribal feuds over limited resources and transient access to power.             Four of the five major components of hooks' engaged pedagogy Florence deems to be moderately appropriate foci for rendering Kenyan education a pathway to justice and equity. In Chapter 11, she describes contemporary Kenyan curricula as Western, abstract, and irrelevant to the lived experiences of most Kenyan students. Thus, hooks' proposal for a reformulation of what knowledge is, how it is known, and who sanctions the knowing is germane to the Kenyan educational context, according to Florence. Likewise, she suggests that by linking liberatory theory to practice and empowering students to become full classroom participants, progressive educators may make education more meaningful to students. However, she notes that hooks' vision of education as the practice of freedom "takes on a totally different meaning in a Kenyan context. Freedom to most students promises relief from hunger, disease, and ignorance and not necessarily a critical interrogation of injustices embedded in prevailing social structures" (pp. 207-208).             Florence also sees hooks' call for education that honors pluralism as an important critique for Kenyan education, particularly given tensions between tribes. She points out difficulties in establishing a multicultural education, from the issue of how to include the more than 40 tribal languages in curricula to public perceptions of non-Western education as second-rate. As for incorporating passion into teaching, Florence suggests that this strategy is a luxury in Kenya because academic performance, as assessed by national exams, "has a tremendous impact on economic and social mobility" (p. 216). Her assertion is that the stakes are too high for students to spend time uniting the rational and the affective.             In her final chapter and epilogue, Florence distills her analysis of the relevance of engaged pedagogy to Kenya. She argues that hooks' notion of "talking back" to the oppressors "presumes the right of people to free speech" (p 225). Political oppression in Kenya, Florence writes, makes the act of critique far more dangerous than in America. She also notes that schools are not capable of effecting social transformation, that only organized political opposition can challenge systems of domination. Ultimately, however, her conclusion is that "commitment to bell hooks' engaged pedagogy and its primary aim of developing critical consciousness is both a challenge and hope for any marginalized group irrespective of location" (p. 227).             Florence's book, it seems to me, could have benefitted from more thorough editing. Typographical errors and inconsistencies in style strike me as minor blemishes, but disjunctions in flow, clarity and substance I find more troubling. In terms of substance, Florence's critiques of hooks could have been more fully elaborated. For instance, her implication that hooks' engaged pedagogy needs to be rendered accessible to conventional testing is addressed in a single paragraph, and her attendant claim that standardized tests are the best ways of " sorting' and selecting' students" (p. 141) made me question her proclaimed support of a pedagogy that sought not to classify students into hierarchies. Moreover, her concern with testing and accountability standards seems not to have taken into consideration the ways in which both serve the often narrow interests of politicians and profit-seekers; she fails to ask, "Accountability to whom?" But Florence does not expound on her claim, and I was left with an unresolved sense of dissonance.             Florence also occasionally misconstrues hooks' thought. For example, Florence's claim that education as the practice of freedom in Kenya may have less to do with challenging oppressive social structures than with providing relief from hunger, disease, and ignorance misses one of hooks' fundamental points: that education is a means to discover and confront the processes which create and sustain the hunger, disease, and ignorance of particular groups. Put another way, freedom from ignorance may support assaults on hunger and disease if education is conceived as having broad liberatory aims (as opposed to aims conflating economic privilege with freedom).             Similarly, Florence describes the way in which curriculum and pedagogy are kept in tight rein by pressures for students to perform well on national examinations. In Kenya, she argues, "empowering students takes the form of preparing them for exceptional performance on national exams as opposed to involving them in making and/or effecting a greater integration of subject matter to students' lives" (p. 210). While I found this information helpful for understanding the Kenyan context, it appeared to me at this point and at others that Florence confuses the relevance of hooks' thought to an analysis of Kenya with the palatability of hooks' thought to Kenyan practitioners. She does not, for instance, use hooks' thought to interrogate why Kenyan teachers might find themselves in such a stranglehold, but rather makes a quite broad claim about how Kenyan teachers might receive hooks' theory. The usefulness of hooks' engaged pedagogy is not as a prescriptive program, in my mind, but rather as an analysis of how education works as an arm of dominant groups. Given internalization of white, Western, middle-class, males norms and values, it should be obvious that many Kenyan educators would not find engaged pedagogy "relevant."             And this is what I find most troubling: many of Florence's criticisms are that hooks is idealistic or impractical (e.g., p. 137 & p. 215). While I certainly agree that schools cannot be a panacea for injustice, I read Teaching to Transgress not as an attempt to provide the critical silver bullet, so to speak, but as an effort to examine educational potential for liberation as seen from one of many possible critical perspectives. hooks' point, it seems to me, is that education will reflect the interests of dominant groups unless the dominated risk defining educational purposes oppositionally.             On the other hand, Florence's book is not without strength. She does a good job summarizing hooks' prolific work, and her respect for the author permeates her writing. Florence's use of hooks' analysis to examine Kenya was enlightening to this Western reviewer, but I found most valuable her elucidations of the ways hooks' thought is profoundly American. In sum, however, I finished the book knowing more about hooks' thought and wishing Florence had written more about her own. References Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: The Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Bergman Ramos, trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970). hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. About the Reviewer Caitlin Howley-Rowe Caitlin Howley-Rowe works in the evaluation unit of the Appalachia Educational Laboratory in Charleston, West Virginia. Her interests include critical race theory, sociology, and ethnography.