Sophia Greco | Independent Scholar

Editors’ note: Greco’s piece is part of the collaboration, “Remembering bell hooks: Teaching/Learning/Thinking/Writing in Desperate Times”.

I am using words here, tentatively, to share a little bit of story. I am using words here, deliberately, to transgress what Cherríe Moraga calls “a privatism which keeps us back and away from each other” (346).

I tell this story as an attempt to make meaning out of a wound; to make sense out of what my years of undergraduate study embody, and to situate myself within a new context as a middle school teacher. I write from a place of regret, yearning, and optimism; I write as a way of tracing back experiences from my own past in order to reimagine new futures. This story is about hurt—although somehow, I also know it as a story I would not be able to tell if it was not also rooted in hope.

bell hooks writes: “Accepting the teaching profession as my destiny, I was tormented by the classroom reality I had known both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power. In these settings I learned a lot about the kind of teacher I did not want to become” (Teaching to Transgress 5). A couple of years ago my senior thesis began to take form with these words at the forefront of my mind. hooks’ sentiment somewhat painfully echoes my own experience, both as a student and as an aspiring teacher, as I chronicle in the entries below. And although I must take heed of the positionality from which hooks writes as significant and markedly different from my own, the fact that we both shared this sentiment made me start to wonder: what does it mean for such a cavernous emptiness in one’s own educational experience to serve as a motivating factor for new teachers? How does one find guidance to navigate the contradictions of engaging in critical pedagogy and liberatory praxis within structurally oppressive institutions and classrooms? What does it mean to be a teacher—or for that matter, a student—within spaces that reproduce existing relationships of power and oppression?

I hoped that my thesis would provide guidance—maybe a road map of some kind—going into the fields of teaching, education, and working with youth. Instead, I started to realize the lifelong nature of this process. Here, as I continue developing the parts of my thesis that served as a starting point for a “blueprint for my own pedagogical practice” (hooks, Teaching to Transgress 3), I think of the classrooms and organizing spaces I have seen that embraced grief, love, and resistance. Here, I reflect on these spaces, where I learned “the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination” (hooks, Teaching to Transgress 4). As Aneil writes in the post that follows mine, “the university, as constituted presently…will not save us, although it can be a site of revolutionary possibility.” Here, inspired by bell hooks, I share a little bit of story that stems from my own educational existences, snippet-like, in the form of vignettes: I find vignettes not only lend power to analysis in the unique way that only storytelling allows for, but also capture what is felt, embodied, and remembered. 

February 28, 2020

I could tell you what student mobilizations on campus taught me.

I could tell you that a board of trustees wields power in cowardly manipulative ways.

I’ll tell you what is grounded in my memory instead:

a group of fourteen-or-so students blocked the middle of the road on a chilly night. they did this in the face of a Board that wanted to ignore them. they refused to be ignored. while the Board members were finishing their dinner, we sat ourselves up to sit on the asphalt, blocking the only way cars could leave. sharing blankets and snacks and warmth. waiting. sitting with our collective anxious energy. 

the night followed a long day, after students repeatedly asserted themselves through various forms of protest throughout campus. a silent protest where we stood and stared; signs held up to windows; a die-in. all day, students said: “i’m here. we’re here. you can’t ignore us.” 

by sitting on the street, they said: “we’re still here.”

my memory is grounded in feeling: my heart hitting hard against my ribcage, my body tired, my head pounding. when a faculty member approached us while campus police stood nearby, we stood up. when cars lined up to get by us, we lined up in the road and held hands. when these powerful men and women left on foot, avoiding our eyes, we stared. the hand i held gripped mine tightly; as best as i could, with my breath held high in my throat, i squeezed back.

hours later, i returned to my room. i felt simultaneously heavy and small. thinking back, i now know what that feeling was. it’s the feeling that comes after standing as witness to violence.

I could tell you that a board of trustees wields power in cowardly manipulative ways. That a group of wealthy, well-connected, highly educated men and women in positions of power are startlingly fearful of students of color, particularly those who dare to challenge the university. That their fear is racially and historically coded in a way that makes me pause and stare.

Fall 2021

one time, a professor notices that a classmate of mine has fallen asleep. we are going on hour two of his lecture, with another hour to go; my head, my eyes, and my back all hurt from trying to pay attention to him and his off-hand comments about “your generation.” 

he stops mid-powerpoint to single her out.

his comment and dry laughter is mean-spirited. nobody knows how to respond, even as he looks to us for agreement. yet he takes this in stride.

i find this gesture cruel, and i am unable to stop thinking about it. for the remainder of class i sit and think about other professors who have pointed a privileged finger in our direction, using their captive audience as an outlet for their hatred. i think about expressions of power and how they fill a room; i think about how in other spaces, other worlds, this moment could have been an opportunity to express kindness instead. 

on days he does not lecture, this professor frowns down at our work. he asks why we do things messily, why we are unwilling to slow down and pay attention. these words would not necessarily be unkind coming from someone who has taken the time and care to build trust, but from a man who expects us to be vulnerable in our creative expression while subjected to his condescension and judgment, these words only cut.

in his classroom, time tends to pass painfully. as Trinh T. Minh-ha says, “the dis-ease lingers on” (124).

as i sit in that windowless room, i often daydream of someplace better.

October 2020

bell hooks writes: “Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion…. As we speak our hearts in mourning we share our intimate knowledge of the dead, of who they were and how they lived” (All About Love 201). 

All I seem to feel is grief. I mean, this is part of living through a pandemic, a time that reveals how callous our governments and societies can be with human life, when our priorities show little care for the consequences on vulnerable bodies. This is a disembodied time, when our human interaction is limited and largely filtered through computer cameras and screens. I rarely see my classmates’ faces; I can only imagine the ways their lives have been impacted. Staring at my computer for hours makes me dizzy. My mind wanders, and my chest hurts. Sometimes it feels worse to learn about history in abstraction at the same time new history is taking place around you. 

News of a classmate’s passing reaches me through the text box of a group chat, where someone sends a link to an article. He is someone I spent countless hours with: training in the swimming pool, on our long drives in the van to competitions, and in the weeks leading up to his passing while enrolled in an online class together. Though he is someone I first butted heads with, I had developed a deep, begrudging appreciation over time, for his sincere nature and willingness to learn. 

In the week that follows, our professor acknowledges the shock of this sudden loss. Instead of our usual discussion, she says, we can talk about how we are processing it all. Few show up to class; those of us that do struggle to find words. (It is worth noting that our student body is so small that everyone in our 100-some-odd graduating class knew him to some extent). She speaks to how little time she had to know him, how his impact is felt profoundly regardless. It feels surreal to experience collective grief on Zoom, to later attend a virtual memorial. In this disembodied time, the space she offers for mourning is a small comfort.

May 2020

our writing group is quietly born in the spring. it starts small and stays small. we are three writers who come together to write for ourselves again. we are three moving images on a small screen, talking animatedly for hours at a time; we are three people writing with our microphones muted, sharing tender space carved out of our busy shared households. we each share our writing, create collaborative poems, lead each other in loosely guided prompts. we talk and write about origin stories, plural pronouns, the weight and space carried in words, the things we embody and inherit, memory, mothers, and myths. we discuss power and history. we write, using all the languages we know.

we are three writers who learn. we are three writers who come to trust each other with our earliest, messiest drafts.

we are three writers, writing. writing is a salve; not a cure, but part of the process of muddling through.

Spring 2021 & Fall 2021

sometimes, i am in awe of how learning with others can bring joy even when it is HARD. WORK. in these spaces, we arrive, taking a moment to ground ourselves before we dig deep. we often choose our own readings, bring our own questions. we collaborate on syllabi, change it as we go. our discussion is dynamic in that it follows the current of what goes on in our lives, in the world. we “honor all capabilities, not solely the ability to speak” (hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking 22).

the handful of professors that also resist the university, that make space for this learning are some of the most compassionate, humble, and caring people I have ever met. (aneil is one of them. so are Gesa, Tomás, and Ryan.) they engage with us as peers, guides, co-conspirators. they engage with vulnerability in a shared process of ceding-taking-sharing-examining power. they do not fear conflict. when i go back for evidence of their teachings, i see their curiosity, questions, and encouragement embedded in my own work. to me, these traces represent resistance, an alternative imagination in contradiction with the structures around us.

February 16, 2023

There is really nothing—no one—that can prepare us to teach. All we can do is make ourselves ready and open to learning through mistakes. When we teach with a willingness to be vulnerable, a willingness to wrestle with uncertainty, maybe then we can navigate the contradictions of teaching transgressively within structurally oppressive institutions and systems.

I am here: rooted in that uncertainty. I am here: realizing that nobody is truly taught how to teach, that the guidance I seek lies in the mentors I witness teaching authentically, passionately, with what bell hooks refers to as ‘radical openness’. I am here: in awe of those teachers who tend to the well-being of their students. I am here, admiring their commitment to that care for others, striving to build and nurture trust in the ways that they do. I am here: realizing that teaching transgressively within the context of oppressive systems involves rejecting dehumanizing practices and structures, facilitating connection and critical thought, inviting the challenge of teaching as a process that requires continuous re-evaluation.

I am here: understanding that as bell hooks says, this vocation is sacred.

IMAGE: a passage from Teaching to Transgress, page 13.

Works Cited

hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking. Routledge, 2010.

—. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Moraga, Cherríe. “Refugees of a World on Fire: Foreword to the Second Edition, 1983.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 3^rd ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, SUNY Press, 2002.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Indiana University Press, 2009.