“To Recognize the Narrow Boundaries”

Teachers and Adolescents in bell hooks’ Political Education

Abstract

Following a brief analysis of the Italian reception of bell hooks’ works, the paper will examine how the author’s critical reflections could provide potential responses to contemporary challenges in today’s increasingly multicultural and complex secondary school contexts. Building on hooks’ vision of the classroom as a radical space of possibility and education as the practice of freedom, the militant foundations of her proposal will foreground the ethical and political commitment that engaged pedagogy demands to counter the transmission of a single norm of thought and experience.