Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

Unlike public school teachers, graduate students who will one day become university professors are not trained in pedagogy. Therefore, they never learn the nuances of how student self-esteem impacts thinking and learning. Although public schools try to instill in students a sense of self-esteem, many students are wounded by insufficient educational settings and home lives. When they reach the university level, they encounter educators who teach through humiliation and shame. This is especially true for students who were considered among the brightest in their earlier educational experiences. They find themselves dissolved into the college crowd, rendered invisible to their teachers.

hooks combats negative self-esteem by showing her students appreciation for their strengths and encouraging them to build their confidence. She teaches them how to monitor their progress so that they are setting personal goals rather than working to please a person in a position of authority.

Both of hooks’s parents were avid readers and instilled in her the joy of reading. Her father saw reading as a pathway to obtaining civil rights, and he believed that learning to read and think critically took precedence over a college education. As a teacher, hooks encounters many students who do not enjoy reading, and she is often surprised when those same students try to dominate classroom conversations. The introduction of technology to education devalues and destroys reading and imaginative thinking in students.

hooks admonishes the American attitude toward reading as bookstores continue to close and books themselves are treated like trash: “Books are as disposable a commodity as toilet paper. A culture that does not value the book as artifact will not value reading” (130). The loss of independent bookstores and libraries is a threat to radical thought, creating space for others to gatekeep the availability of works. hooks upholds teachers as the promoters of reading and public libraries. 

In this chapter, hooks reflects on her life as an intellectual. She knew from a young age that she wanted to be a writer, but she did not feel that she had the skills needed to be a teacher. However, she was told that there were only two career paths for Black women: teacher or service. In college, hooks discovered that she had a passion for critical thinking and reading. She fought back against the criticism of her students and colleagues and hoped she served as a model for her female students who were wary of academic work out of fear of being disliked. Early in her teaching career, hooks was bothered by the number of students who disliked her. Later, she learned that confronting bias and the colonization of the mind is an uncomfortable experience and that her students’ dislike was born out of this misdirected discomfort. Intellectual work is undervalued and isolated, yet hooks maintains that it is a meaningful and transformative livelihood. 

When educators teach outside of the classroom, they expand the influence of learning. hooks explains that there are many ways to teach outside of the classroom; she found the writing of children’s books to be a restorative and meaningful practice. She began thinking about writing children’s books when parents approached her, asking for reading material for their young students that would introduce them to the decolonizing ideas hooks advocated for in her academic work.

One night, while thinking about her childhood, hooks remembered how her mother would spend one day a week washing and plaiting her five daughters’ hair. hooks wrote Happy to be Nappy to help young Black girls develop their self-esteem. Later, hooks wrote Be Boy Buzz to combat stereotypical representations of Black boys and to challenge patriarchal culture. 

Since hooks teaches at a Christian college, the question of spirituality often emerges in her discussions with her colleagues. Some educators argue that spirituality has no place in the classroom, while others argue that it transforms learning into a profound experience. hooks explains that she thinks of spirituality as a practice of developing an inner life. She believes that learning is sacred, and that education and the inner life are intrinsically connected: “Teachers must have the courage to connect the inner work of becoming a self with the outer work of learning” (149). Critical thinking is one practice that cultivates the inner life and leads to both self-determination and self-actualization. hooks asserts that spirituality has the transformative power to lead students toward radical openness.

hooks examines the role of touch in the classroom. Teachers and students bring their bodies to the classroom and are often aware of one another’s bodies before words are ever spoken. However, they are not taught what to do with the inevitable passion and need that accompanies the presence of a body. hooks sees touch as a tool that can be harnessed to affirm students and make them comfortable. She describes a white colleague who teaches Black students who often ask her for a hug. She sees their request as a dismantling of a history of racist unwillingness for Black and white bodies to touch. Male teachers worry most about their touch being misinterpreted, and hooks argues that there needs to be more understanding about the difference between healing and sexual touch.