ABSTRACT
I answered that to me “critical thinking” was the primary element allowing the possibility of change. Passionately insisting that no matter what one’s class, race, gender, or social standing, I shared my beliefs that without the capacity to think critically about our selves and our lives, none of us would be able to move forward, to change, to grow. In our society, which is so fundamentally anti-intellectual, critical thinking is not encouraged. Engaged pedagogy has been essential to my development as an intellectual, as a teacher/professor because the heart of this approach is critical thinking. (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as an Act of Freedom [New York: Routledge, 1994], 202)
In my development as a conscious person and engaged citizen I think bell hooks’ works profoundly impact my growth, but her work was able to challenge me because I was in an environment where being subversive was nurtured. If I were in a diff erent academic setting her works would have merely resonated with me. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to study her books and essays and attempt to apply some of her progressive ideas to my life. In my mind, this is theory meeting practice at the most basic and fundamental level: the individual. (Nicole S. Barden)1
Nicole S. Barden, and I are sixteen years apart-we are cousins and she attends my alma mater, Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the second quote above. We have many things in common, but perhaps the one I cherish the most is our love and respect for bell hooks. I was fi rst introduced to bell hooks’s work at Spelman. Th e fi rst time I read Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had never read anything like this before, where being black and female was centered, where the impact of socialization in America was critiqued. I chose Spelman as my undergraduate institution because I was the norm and not the exception and hooks’s work was further evidence of this. Aft er reading her work, I signed up for English and Women’s Studies classes that allowed me to read more bell hooks and other critical feminist theorists.
