79. 👟 warming up 👟

thinking about critical thinking

Hello, and happy Monday.

Well, Saturday brought one hell of a storm to New England. Considering that “cozy” is my favorite state of being, I was more than happy to burrito blanket myself on the couch and watch how fast the winds were able to get. Sunday, however, I spent over an hour digging my car out of the snow. Who knew that one could be so cold and so hot at the same time?! You know that I followed these shenanigans up with a PIPING HOT POT OF TEA. 🫖

Hope you all had a lovely weekend, and—for those of you in cold climates—stayed warm and safe! Giving you virtual hugs from my burrito-ed self.

✏️ Still processing.

Photo by Gez Xavier Mansfield on Unsplash

Last week’s discussion during book club has managed to stay in my mind, more so than usual. We were talking through Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What, which I think can be effectively described as a self-help book for creatives. Pickens unpacks many of the most pressing factors that creatives may need help managing, and she gives really sound advice to work through those issues. There are chapters on fear and grief and how they manifest our creative practice, but there are also chapters that have to do with the very practical matters of time and money. So, last Tuesday, we all sat down in our respective homes over zoom and thought about the ways we can incorporate self-sustaining practices into our creative lives. (A big shout-out to the tiny driver book club members for always helping me think more deeply. If you’re interested in joining us as well, please feel free to register for a meeting whenever you’d like! 🥰)

A remnant of the discussion that I began to mull over the next day was the idea of warming oneself up to work. In her chapter on Time, she comments:

I ask artists to develop a series of warm-up exercises to get them into their creative work. Dancers and musicians often do this without prompting because their training has warm-ups built in. Other artists may not have learned this habit, but it’s impractical to expect your brain and body to turn right on and get cracking. An artist in any discipline can benefit from creating warm-up rituals and practices; warming up doesn’t have to be correlated to your practice at all! Painters might listen to loud music and dance alone before they start working. Writers might draw or do a few writing prompts unrelated to their project.

This, for me, was revolutionary when I read it. When I was little, I took ballet classes. I remember the classes being about 1.5 hours long, and I remember spending 45 minutes of the class at the bar warming up through the sequences of exercises until we were ready to move to the center of the room and really take up space dancing. At the bar, we would begin with pliés (essentially bending your knees) and end with batements (very large movements of the legs). Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. The exercises would progressively get more intense physically, taking into account the importance of having a warm body before doing any big moves. Before moving to the center to really begin ✨ dancing ✨.

Last week was the first time in a very long time that I thought about ballet and the process of warming up that I would do so meticulously for a whole half of the allotted class time. When I think about it in conjunction with my writing process and Pickens’s passage above, I found that these days, my process journal serves a similar purpose. As I see it, my process journal allows me to being writing sideways. I’m not writing in a document, but I’m writing about it, and that’s what gets me to chip away at the wall that is at times quite intimidating.

You know what else is intimidating? Hurling yourself across a room by leaping into the air multiple times with stiff muscles. Why would I plunge into my writing in a similar fashion, then?

I feel like much of my undergraduate and early graduate writing sessions were done in this fashion—I would have a deadline, so I would just have to write. Sure, I would have an outline, but I would start every writing session diving head first into that opened word document without really thinking about it.

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer as young as I used to be (lol), or maybe it’s because I feel like the stakes of my writing seem much higher than they were before, but I’ve found that intentionally calling the time in my process journal a way to “warm up” has changed my writing for the better.

So now, I’m wondering: What do you do to warm up before writing? Let me know by hitting reply (private) or leaving a comment (public).

📚 Still reading.

Part 1 of 3

hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010.

In this final installment of her books on teaching, bell hooks rounds out her commentary by writing thirty-two self-contained, brief essays. Each essay takes on a different aspect of teaching—either one that she has ruminated on before, or one that was requested by fellow teachers for her to touch on. Because this last text has so much wisdom pouring out of it, I thought that I’d break up my reflections into three parts, with this first part focusing on teachings 1-10.

1. Critical Thinking: hooks sees that so much of our childhood reflects passive learning practices that ascribe dominant truths onto us. We must re-learn what it means to think critically through the practice of engaged pedagogy—an interactive process between teacher and students that encourages a “mindful thinking about ideas,” (9). A really important moment came for me on page 10: “So much academic training encourages teachers to assume that they must be ‘right’ at all times. Instead, I propose that teachers must be open at all times, and we must be willing to acknowledge what we do not know.”

2. Democratic Education: Even though this was published twelve years ago, so much of its insights are relevant to today’s political landscape. The essay is an extended meditation on how education connects with democracy—a practice that encourages openness to changing opinion as time passes. “Progressive educators continue to honor education as the practice of freedom because we understand that democracy thrives in an environment where learning is valued, where the ability to think is the mark of responsible citizenship, where free speech and the will to dissent is accepted and encouraged.”

3. Engaged Pedagogy: Within the first sentence of this essay, hooks establishes that engaged pedagogy involves an interactive relationship between student and teacher. Each classroom is different because the students are different, and we as teachers must take time to recognize our students for who they are and what they need from the course. In keeping with this premise, it is critical that whatever we ask students to do in a course or share in the course, we must also be willing to do and share.

4. Decolonization: hooks astutely shows how education has been an instrument of colonization, and that it continues to manifest in the paternalistic structures of our institutions of higher education. She also brings up a conundrum that I am still thinking about in terms of being a college professor: “Our major difficulty is sharing knowledge from an unbiased and/or decolonized standpoint with students who are so deeply mired in dominator culture that they are not open to learning new ways of thinking about knowing,” (27).

5. Integrity: Following the chapter on decolonization, this essay on integrity also describes the fallout that has come with education being used as a tool of colonization in the past and present. To educate through a colonized lens would be to operate without integrity, as much of the world operates for hooks. “Integrity is present when there is a congruence or agreement between what we think, say, and do,” (32).

6. Purpose: Defining our purpose in the classroom is deeply important to the way in which we operate our larger lives. Through her own joyful and painful experiences in the classroom, hooks decided to commit herself “to teach in ways that were humanizing, that would lift my students’ spirits so that they would soar toward their own unique fullness of thought and being,” (34-35).

7. Collaboration (written with Ron Scapp): I think that it is in hooks’ conversations with her colleague Ron Scapp that she marries theory and praxis right on the page. On their friendship, hooks states, “ Our mutual dialogue is both public and private. Our effort has been to translate our vision of solidarity into reality so that we can provide a model to everyone that solidarity across difference is not only possible but necessary,” (40).

8. Conversation: When I was in college, I remember taking lecture courses and absolutely hating them. Seminars were where my thinking grew, and I do think that this is because of the power of conversation to build on and refine our own thoughts through dialogue with a community. I think one of the most “wow!” moments for me, though, in reading this essay on conversation was hooks’s thoughts on how silence is patriarchal and manifests in the classroom: “Much feminist theory that critically examines constructions of masculinity shows that to make boys into patriarchal men, society trains them to value silence over speech. They may find themselves becoming people who either cannot talk or, when they talk, can only engage in a monologue. These are the people who talk at us, who by refusing to converse, promote and maintain a hierarchy of domination wherein withholding gives one power over another person,” (45). Whew! What a formulation!

9. Telling the Story: Last year when I began teaching, I remember being concerned about how much to share with students of my own life. Given that we were all going through intersecting and overlapping crises due to the circumstances of the time, I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to let students know that I was going through similar struggles as them. After much reflection, I realized that if I was practicing vulnerability with my students in an effort to cultivate and show solidarity, it would signal strength to my students. I see this essay as putting forward a similar sentiment—that vulnerability in the classroom that comes from both the students and teacher creates powerful avenues of illuminating the world in connection to one another.

10. Sharing the Story: In continuation from the previous essay: “When students learn about one another through the sharing of experience, a foundation for learning in community can emerge. It is always the task of teachers to ensure that using experience as a learning tool does not usurp assigned reading. Usually, through paragraph writing that relates to assignments, I encourage students to share personal experience by reading what they have written to their classmates. Reading a short paragraph does not take as much time as spontaneous moments of personal confession. When I learn more about students, I know better how to serve them in my role as teacher,” (56).

🌀 Still consuming.

In the bookshop:
Currently Reading: Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
On Deck: The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Kris Klein Hernández @krisakh90

first time teaching in person since the pandemic started! Warren Fellows @idyalz representing #racialization #transnationalushistory Come take our seminars in #compethnicstudies in EMR and @Harvard_History ✒️😷😷

• In love with my Baggu mask (pictured above).

• Historian Claire Potter on the value of writing publicly.

• Can someone who is cool please explain Are.na to me?

• I will literally read anything that cites Saidiya Hartman.

• The case for writing longhand. Really loved this piece and how it confirmed the value I see in writing my process journal longhand.

• Brain exercises!

📖 Book club corner.

Friends!! Rather than voting as we usually do each month, those that came to the January book club empowered me to go ahead with announcing the selection that I am most excited about. So, for February’s book club, we will be reading bell hooks’s All About Love: New Visions. I am so excited! Feel free to purchase the book here, and the details are below!

Here’s the event info:
Date & Time: February 22 at 5PM PST/8PM EST
Registration link!
Suggested Donation (for those able to donate): $3-10 through Paypal or Venmo (@idyalz)

If you'd like to learn more about the tiny driver book club, click here!

🐶 A pup-date.

This is my favorite picture of Girlie that has ever been taken on this earth:

As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!

Warmly,
Ida