Feminism is for Everybody
It draws on what I have learnt from bell hooks in Feminism is for Everybody, where bell hooks focuses on inclusive and transformative education. At the Smithsonian Jefferson Education Fellowship, integration is the key and Hooks champions the idea that education should be more than that — it should include educating a sense of justice, empathy and social responsibility. This is something that I try to do in what I do at UC Berkeley where I am an Environmental Science and Education major at UC Berkeley and another thing that I do is I try to make my learning environment more inclusive. As I created my initiative, Language and Life, I adopted hooks’ vision in providing spaces where the task of building literacy skills is merged with exposure to concepts of equality, cultural diversity and mutuality of respect. She writes about the need for 'feminist education for the critical consciousness' that involves unblincifill go[ing] the biases, knowing the various perspective[s], and tackling the ways which we thought about social justice and just equality. Following some of these thoughts, I attempt to equip young learners to question systemically unjust practices and identify ourselves as contributors to a more inclusive society. By enabling me to infuse feminist values of inclusion, and empowerment; dismantling biases and creating opportunities for children who are from different backgrounds, hooks' work has made my education to come (at Berkeley) about not only acquiring knowledge but about transforming and empowering communities.​
Imagination and passion
Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination has been incredibly important to me developing my view of literacy as the work of a dynamic and multifaceted process. For Bakhtin, meaning is created as a dialogic and interaction of many voices and perspectives, which he calls heteroglossia. The experience of my work tutoring bilingual students from various cultural backgrounds provides me with evidence that literacy is created as a result of the interplay of different linguistic and cultural understandings. According to Bakhtin language is not only a neutral medium but “socioideological”, every utterance is saturated with both ‘centripetal’ forces – those forces which centralise and unify language and the ‘centrifugal’ ones which diversify and fragment it. The resulting tension speaks to the wealth of my tutoring sessions with their array of diverse viewpoints and cultural layers layering our conversations with what they mean to us. If I find independence in Bakhtin’s idea of language as "heteroglot," as an opportunity to participate and engage in a contradictory yet open dialog with others, then I seek to employ that as a pedagogical practice, creating a space in which students and I chart this literacy as a shared path through dialogue, negotiation of the other’s perspectives, and the discovery of new meaning from our "heteroglot" voices. In addition to deepening students’ linguistic skills, this approach expands students’ understanding of 'literacy' as an inclusive, collaborative adventure.
Reflect on our school
Moll et al’s "funds of knowledge" idea has the potential to transform the value of the cultural and experiential knowledge that students bring into learning environments. Moll and his colleagues argue in their study that household knowledge — often formed by the economic and social dynamics of communities — offers powerful resources for supplementing classroom instruction. They stress that teaching should not only cover a limited point of view of notions related with the academia but also based on students' various experiences and skills they developed in their own house. This philosophy is the foundation of what I do at Language and Life – recognizing each child’s unique background, and not his family knowledge as peripheral, but as central to his learning. Like Moll et al., I think about this as transforming education from a ‘thin’ teacher student dynamic into a ‘thick’ one, one that acknowledges the whole person behind each student. I aim to offer a reciprocal learning environment where children’s lived experiences and home skills contribute to their literacy journey and a classroom that is, using Moll’s terms, more relevant, respectful, and transformative.
work cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
edited by Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.
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Hooks, Bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press, 2000.
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Moll, Luis C., et al. "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and
Classrooms." Theory Into Practice, vol. 31, no. 2, 1992, pp. 132-141.