ABSTRACT
Th e purpose of an epigraph is to provide readers with a sense of the central motif that is to be explored and engaged within the body of a piece of writing. Hence, my objective in this chapter is to delineate and highlight aspects of bell hooks’s critical pedagogy that frame the critical pedagogical ethos that I attempt to create and enact within the space of a classroom. I am specifi cally interested in how hooks’s critical pedagogy helps to frame my pedagogical engagement with predominantly white students within the context of teaching courses in philosophy where the central philosophical theme is race. What is clear from the above epigraph is hooks’s suggestion that there is an important bridge between modalities of teaching that respect and care for the souls of students and creating the necessary conditions where engaged learning has a profound and personal impact. Within the context of the classroom, hooks provides a succinct delineation of her critical pedagogy:
Th e classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that fi eld of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. Th is is education as the practice of freedom.1
