Our Pedagogical Principles

Teaching to Transgress

The late and great bell hooks wrote extensively on teaching as a gateway to freedom and liberation. It is on the foundations of her work, and that of many thinkers she was in conversation with, such as Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed), that the pedagogical praxis of the Free Black University emerges. Here at the Free Black Uni we are concerned with creating conditions and knowledges that support in the collective mission of getting free, in other words liberation for all.

bell hooks wrote:

an aspect of our vocation [as teachers, is] sacred; …our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin. – Teaching to Transgress, p.13

A radical pedagogy in practice does not suggest a single source of truth, but guides students to embrace knowledge in all the forms it appears. The rationalist paradigm has generated a body of knowledge that has taught us to neglect the Self as a whole; knowledge production that does not centre rationality is excluded from the research process and, with it, a multiplicity of knowledges are exiled.

Radical pedagogy in praxis must be liberating in order to teach liberation: it must, with compassion and love, ask students to engage with and explore every aspect of their Self from the spiritual, to the emotional, and those aspects that can never be defined, quantified or classified. It is in those aspects a space of fugitivity arises, and we are able to begin exploring the ways that alternative knowledges give way to new worlds.

The mission of the Free Black University is to create conditions for people to imagine and speculate about the possibility of another world, so that we can collectively draw that world in. In this, we aim to bring the radical theories and belief systems of our ancestors to life. From indigenous philosophies to contemporary theories that are disrupting the social sciences and arts today, we aim to take what the Western academy can only hold as theory or ethnographic and bring it into practice and truth.

Through this pedagogical approach we seek to begin doing just that as we explore the sacred art of teaching and learning. Our Pedagogical Principles underpin all that we offer – both for the community, creatives, and activists, as well as radical imagination-led workshops with organisations and charities.

The Four Key Pillars of Our Pedagogical Principles:

1. Imagination

At the Free Black Uni we dare to imagine a different world is possible, that there are no ceilings nor restrictions to the world we can collectively create. We aim to create the conditions for folks to feel safe enough to engage the deepest parts of their imaginations and child-like dreams of another world. We offer a home to dream and speculate about a future we can collectively bring into being. Engaging the imagination is a foundation of the work of the Free Black Uni.

2. Alternative Ways of Knowing

We firmly believe that there are multiple and infinite routes to producing knowledge outside of the evidence-based Eurocentric rationalist model. We are less concerned with the knowledge itself that is created in concrete terms but more so the routes through which we go about producing and validating knowledges. We learn from our ancestors in bringing light and validity to knowledges born out of the unseen realm such as spiritual knowing’s, emotional knowing’s, and embodied knowledges. Equal validity and exploration are given to knowledges that arise from all parts of the self and community. Education has for too long dislocated the mind from all other aspects of the self, we aim to collectively work to bring those lost parts back together.

3. Breaking the Teacher/ Student Dichotomy

We believe in autonomous learning, that every person within the classroom is both a teacher and a student. With this, the ‘teacher’ acts more as a facilitator of learning as opposed to the sole guardian of knowledge within the space. This is approached with the intention of co-creating knowledge through dialogue and communication as the foundation of the learning that takes place. The ‘teacher’ is always in service of the classroom as opposed to in control of it.

4. Healing

‘I came to theory because I was hurting – the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory a location for healing’

– bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Here, I will speak from a personal perspective. I founded the Free Black Uni because I resolutely believe in the power and possibility of education as a tool of healing and liberation. Theory has healed me time and time again, and I believe it has the possibility to heal so much of the broken-heartedness and pain each of us encounter. For me, theory is the process of giving language to the knowledges which may have become knotted-up within us and that which we may try and push down and hide because if we allowed it to escape into the light, we would be confronted by a world that denies our truth. In giving our truths language and having that truth witnessed by others – healing and freedom becomes more possible. That is the final principle our pedagogy rests on – there is no freedom without healing.

Authored by

Melz Owusu, Founder of the Free Black University