Engaged Pedagogy in the Feminist Classroom and Yoga Studio

“Before words are spoken in the classroom, we come together as bodies. . . . Being comes from the body. And if we listen to our bodies inside the classroom and out we learn more ways to relate to one another.”

(hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 153)

2010 was a pivotal year for me. I celebrated a decade of university teaching, and I completed a two-hundred-hour Hatha yoga teacher training and began teaching yoga classes in the Kingston, Ontario, area. This seemed like a logical extension of my calling to teach and nurture students, and it opened up another venue to witness student transformation. During yoga teacher training, I was prompted to think about ethics. My yoga ethics statement closely paralleled my academic teaching philosophy statement. Regardless of the space—university classroom or yoga studio—I approach teaching as anti-oppressive praxis demonstrative of feminist, anti-racist principles, and metta, the Buddhist notion of loving-kindness. This essay ruminates on the connective tissue between teaching undergraduates and teaching yogis/yoginis. In the next few pages, I employ bell hooks’s work, particularly her work on love, compassion, and “engaged pedagogy” from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, to explore the relationship between teaching environments: what does an anti-oppressive yoga pedagogy look like and what does a yogic, heart-centered university pedagogy look like? To negotiate these questions, I employ the chakra system to organize my thoughts.¹ Chakra, a Sanskrit term, translates into “wheel” because, for energy to flow freely throughout the subtle body, the wheel must be turning at a reasonable pace.² Just as one attempts to turn the energetic wheel to promote spiritual growth through yoga, one attends university classes to energize, expand, and challenge the intellect. I begin the essay with the root chakra (muladhara), the desire for safety, and end with the crown chakra (sahasrara), the necessity of contemplation, to show how the needs of university students and yoga practitioners are very similar; hence, there can be an integrated, nurturing, mutually constitutive feminist, anti-racist, heart-centered yogic pedagogy that benefits all.

Engaged Pedagogy: bell hooks on Social Justice and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy

hooks’s pedagogy is challenging because it necessitates “present moment awareness,” a popular phrase in yoga circles. Two factors work against this type of engagement in academia. The first is demonstrated by technologically mediated distraction, evidenced through reliance on Facebook, cell phones, texting, iPods, and Blackberries. In his essay, “Solitude and Leadership,” William Deresiewicz warns, “Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube” (para. 24). The intersection between a desire to multitask and a perceived need to be connected to others serves to divide attention rather than keep one engaged in the learning environment. Second, conditions of precarity destabilize the ground needed for social justice and community engagement. Increasingly, contemporary neo-liberal academia features insecure and contingent teacher-laborers, growing class sizes, impersonal contact between teacher and learner, overcommitted educators who do not have time or energy to mentor students, and overworked students who seem to live in a constant state of stress and anxiety. Everyone is trying to “do more with less.” This is why bell hooks’s call to think critically, develop one’s analytical voice, realize talent, and live up to one’s potential is revolutionary; hooks’s pedagogy interrupts the dehumanization and disconnection that professors and students experience in their pursuit of “higher” education. So as academia transforms to rely differently on social-media technologies and contract workers, an intervention is required to bring teachers and students back to mutually beneficial relationships based on the love of learning.

Influenced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat...