Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

“In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,” bell hooks writes, “It is rare that any professor […] can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an exciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort” ( hooks 8). And so teachers, by and large, are social engineers. This upsets the power-authority paradigm in the classroom, and in higher education, because it situates teaching-learning as an act of creation in and of itself; participants in this process work together to create knowledge and meaning. Using research in constructivist pedagogy, real-life praxis at a large state university, and insights from the discipline of creative writing, this paper delves into shifting space in the classroom, empowering learning groups, mindfully selecting model texts, connecting course material to students’ lives, and, most important, perhaps, the creation of the community agreement or class “contract.”