Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

bell hooks’s collective body of work focuses on the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture. In Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom she shows how this intersectionality impacts the classroom. hooks argues that dominator culture—which she perceives to be an extension of white supremacy and patriarchal ideologies—has shaped traditional educational models. In a classroom defined by dominator culture, the teacher is an authoritarian and disciplinarian who presents material in lecture-style presentation. Students are submissive and passive receivers of information. They have no personal connection to the material, and they are taught only about white, and primarily male, writers and thinkers. hooks argues that this model leaves students out of the learning process entirely. They have no personal connection to the material, and they are forced into a system of colonization of mind.

For Black students and other students from marginalized groups, dominator culture classrooms are especially challenging: “Imagine what it is like to be taught by teachers who do believe that they are racially superior” (2). hooks describes her own experiences in these types of classrooms. As a child, she had teachers who believed in her ability and intelligence, but when she first arrived at college, her professors repeatedly reinforced the idea that she was not on the same academic and intellectual level as her white male peers.