Inclusive Pedagogy

The idea that gender equality in education has been achieved is now a staple of public debate. As a result, educational policies and practices often do not deal explicitly with gender issues, such as sexual abuse, harassment or violence. Exaggeration of neoliberalism's successes in creating individual opportunity in education conceals ongoing problems and ignores the continuing need for a fair and equal education for all, regardless of gender or sexuality. In this manifesto for education, Miriam David rejects the notion that gender equality has been achieved in our age of neoliberalism. She puts the focus back onto issues such as changing patterns of women's and girls' participation in education across the globe, feminist strategies for policy and legal interventions around human rights, and violence against women and children. She discusses waves of feminism linked to school-teaching and pedagogies in higher education as well as an illuminating case study of an international educational programme to challenge gender-related violence. Revealing neoliberal education to be 'misogyny masquerading as metrics', Miriam David argues for changes in the patriarchal rules of the game, including questioning 'gender norms' and stereotypical binaries, and for making personal, social, health and sexuality education mainstream.

This essential resource helps educators tackle the most common and challenging dilemmas that arise in today's classroom - such as diversity, privilege, and intersectionality. This book examines common challenges that arise for educators teaching social justice and diversity-related courses and offers best practices for addressing them. Contributors cover issues such as the many roles instructors play, inside and outside of college and university classrooms, for example, in handling personal threats, responsibly incorporating current events related to social justice into classroom discussion, navigating one's own stigmatized or privileged identities, dealing with bias in teaching evaluations, and engaging in self-care. The authors' backgrounds offer unique perspectives from which to approach such complex subject matter; several contributors are feminist or intersectional scholars with the experience and expertise to address the pedagogical dilemmas that often arise in teaching social justice. Many of the issues discussed arise from the authors' own experiences as teachers in the current social climate; however, they also are verified by research on quality teaching in general and teaching about diversity specifically.

Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teachingto Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope- a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives. In Teaching Communitybell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Communitytells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

These essays, by one of America's leading black intellectuals, face squarely the problems of teachers who do not want to teach, of students who do not want to learn, of racism and sexism in the classroom, and of the gift of freedom that is, for Hooks, the teacher's most important goal.