Community Colleges and the Future of the Humanities

This session explores how self-directed learning and facilitation practices in a democratic, progressive school can be applied to higher education settings. The session explores norms of traditional learning and contrasts these against other possibilities based on the panelists' training, observations, and applications drawn from organizations dedicated to self-directed learning.

In "Teaching to Transgress," bell hooks offers a revolutionary critique of passive modes of teaching which remains particularly relevant to the increasingly instrumentalized approaches to education that persist within community colleges today. hooks emphasizes the importance of encouraging students to challenge authority, to become active agents in the construction of knowledge, so that they may become fully actualized participants in a democratic society. However, this emphasis on transgression of hierarchies in the classroom, particularly within the historically left-leaning field of the humanities, has grown problematic as white supremacist ideologies have grown increasingly normalized. Due to the unique populations that they serve, community college instructors are often faced with the challenge of teaching a more ideologically and racially diverse population of students than instructors at so-called traditional colleges. At a time when challenging extremist ideologies might make one vulnerable to professional or even physical abuse, how can humanities instructors maintain a commitment to teaching inconvenient “truths” while also seeking to engage each student, regardless of political outlook, with a liberatory pedagogy? This presentation argues that a renewed focus on primary texts and a decentering of pedagogical authority remains crucial to maintaining such a commitment.