Beyond Celebrating Difference: Why bell hooks Matters in Aotearoa’s Classrooms
I was recently introduced more deeply to the work of bell hooks during one of my lovely conversations with Professor Benny Wilson from the University of Canberra.
Our conversations tend to move easily between research, practice, people and the bigger questions sitting underneath education. In this particular conversation, Benny encouraged me to explore hooks’ work, especially her thinking about engaged pedagogy.
It was one of those recommendations that stayed with me.
The feminist and cultural theory of bell hooks was developed by American author, activist and intellectual Gloria Jean Watkins, whose pen name was intentionally written in lowercase. hooks’ work was first published more than 30 years ago, but it feels remarkably relevant to the conversations taking place in education today.
As I began reading Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, I found myself recognising many of the questions that have shaped my own work as an educator: Who gets to speak? Whose knowledge is valued? What helps learners feel that they genuinely belong? Are we teaching students to participate in education as it already exists, or are we allowing their presence to change it?
Education as a practice of freedom
At the heart of hooks’ thinking is the idea of engaged pedagogy.
Engaged pedagogy views education and teaching as tools for liberation and freedom rather than systems of rigid social control. It challenges the idea that students should simply sit quietly, receive information from the expert at the front of the room, reproduce it correctly and comply with established expectations.
Instead, hooks imagines education as something active, relational and transformative.
Students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They bring histories, languages, cultures, experiences, questions and knowledge into the classroom. The teacher still holds significant responsibility, but learning is understood as a shared intellectual and human endeavour.
For hooks, education is not only about what students know. It is also about who they are becoming, how they understand themselves and whether they develop the confidence to question, contribute and act within the world.
This does not mean abandoning explicit teaching, subject knowledge or high expectations. Nor does it mean the teacher withdraws from their professional responsibility. Engaged pedagogy asks something more demanding of us: to teach knowledge well while also noticing how identity, relationships, culture and power shape a learner’s access to that knowledge.
Multiculturalism requires more than representation
We often speak positively about multicultural classrooms. We celebrate cultural weeks, introduce books by diverse authors, display flags and invite students to share aspects of their heritage.
These things can be valuable, but hooks asks us to look beneath them.
A classroom can appear culturally diverse while continuing to operate according to one dominant set of cultural expectations. We may diversify the resources but leave the relationships, routines and definitions of success unchanged.
A Pacific learner may see a Pacific story in the reading programme, for example, but still discover that their ways of speaking and collaborating are treated as less academically valuable. A multilingual student may be encouraged to celebrate their home language during a special event but expected to leave it outside the learning process for the rest of the year. Māori knowledge may be included as an additional perspective while Western knowledge remains positioned as the central, neutral or authoritative one.
hooks reminds us that no curriculum and no classroom are culturally neutral. Choices about whose stories are taught, what counts as evidence, which language forms are considered correct and who is recognised as knowledgeable are all shaped by history and power.
Multicultural education, therefore, cannot be an “add-on”. It requires us to examine both what we teach and how we teach it.
Who is heard?
One of the ideas I find most compelling in hooks’ work is her insistence that every person’s presence must be recognised.
That sounds simple, but it asks us to look closely at classroom life.
Who answers most of the questions?
Whose ideas are extended by the teacher?
Who is interrupted?
Who is praised for being articulate?
Whose silence is interpreted as disengagement?
Who feels they must have a perfectly formed answer before taking the risk of speaking?
The opportunity to speak is not the same as having a voice.
In multicultural and multilingual classrooms, students may have very different relationships with public speaking, teacher authority, eye contact, questioning and group participation. Some may have learned that openly disagreeing with an adult is disrespectful. Others may be processing ideas across more than one language. Some may have experienced classrooms where their accent, name, knowledge or cultural identity was misunderstood.
As educators, we need to create multiple pathways into the learning conversation. That might include talking with a partner before whole-class sharing, oral storytelling, drawing, writing, signing, collaborative problem-solving, home-language discussion or time to rehearse an idea.
The question is not simply whether every student spoke. It is whether every learner had a meaningful way to contribute and whether their contribution had the potential to influence the learning.
Learners are not cultural representatives
hooks also warns against positioning students from minoritised communities as cultural informants.
A Māori learner should not be expected to explain all Māori perspectives. A Muslim student cannot speak for all Muslims. A child from a refugee or migrant background should not carry responsibility for teaching the class about displacement, conflict or migration.
Students may choose to bring their cultural knowledge and lived experiences into a discussion, but this should be invited rather than demanded.
This is an important reminder for teachers. Cultural responsiveness does not mean asking students to fill the gaps in our own knowledge. It requires us to undertake our own learning, build authentic relationships with whānau and communities, use credible resources and recognise the diversity that exists within every cultural group.
We need to know our learners, but we must also allow them to be complex individuals rather than representatives of a category we have assigned to them.
A good time for this conversation in Aotearoa
This feels like an especially important time to be talking about hooks’ ideas in New Zealand education.
Although bell hooks wrote from an American social and educational context, her concept of engaged pedagogy has strong connections with pedagogical thinking developed here in Aotearoa. Te Kotahitanga’s culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, the reciprocal principle of ako, Tātaiako, Tapasā and the relational foundations of Te Whāriki all challenge the idea that learners are passive recipients of knowledge. Together, they emphasise identity, language, culture, dialogue, learner agency and respectful relationships with whānau and communities. These frameworks also remind us that culturally responsive teaching is not simply about adding diverse stories to the curriculum. It requires us to reconsider who holds knowledge, whose voices influence learning and whether our pedagogical relationships enable learners to participate with dignity, agency and a strong sense of belonging.
These ideas also have strong connections with Australian educational thinking. Dr Chris Sarra’s Stronger Smarter Approach challenges deficit thinking and argues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners should be strong in their cultural identities and supported through relationships of high expectations. AITSL’s Indigenous Cultural Responsiveness Framework similarly asks teachers to move beyond the occasional inclusion of cultural content towards ongoing reflection, cultural safety, community relationships and learner agency. Country as Teacher pedagogy deepens this understanding by recognising Country not simply as a setting for learning, but as a living source of knowledge, identity, relationship and responsibility. It invites educators to learn with and from Country, in relationship with Traditional Owners, Elders and local communities. Alongside Both-Ways learning, Narragunnawali and the Early Years Learning Framework, these approaches emphasise reciprocity, belonging, community knowledge and the need for educational settings to be changed by their relationships with First Nations peoples, rather than simply adding Indigenous perspectives to existing programmes. Together, they provide a powerful Australian companion to bell hooks’ vision of education as a practice of freedom.
We are in a period of significant curriculum and pedagogical change. There is a strong and necessary focus on explicit teaching, curriculum knowledge, structured approaches and improving educational achievement. The refreshed English learning area, for example, places increased emphasis on foundational oral language and reading and writing knowledge while also recognising that language shapes meaning and that stories reflect diverse perspectives from Aotearoa and the wider world.
These priorities should not be positioned in opposition to culturally responsive or relational teaching.
In fact, hooks helps us see why we need both.
Students deserve clear teaching, carefully sequenced knowledge and access to the disciplinary tools that enable them to succeed. They also deserve classrooms where they are recognised as whole people, where their languages and identities are not treated as barriers, and where the knowledge being taught is connected to the world they inhabit.
Rigour without relationship can become control.
Relationship without strong teaching can leave learners without access to the knowledge and skills they need.
Engaged pedagogy asks us to hold these responsibilities together.
This conversation is also timely because Aotearoa is becoming increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse. ERO has noted that this change is occurring across the country, not only in Auckland, and that every school needs to be prepared to respond to growing diversity. It argues that this creates an opportunity to reconsider both what we teach and how we teach it.
At the same time, multiculturalism in Aotearoa must be understood within the context of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Māori are not simply one cultural group within a diverse population. They are tangata whenua, and the Crown has responsibilities to actively protect Tiriti rights and ensure education reflects the Māori-Crown relationship.
The current New Zealand Curriculum reflects this layered context. It includes knowledge connected to te ao Māori, our place in the Pacific and our multicultural society, while recognising the role of iwi and hapū in shaping local mātauranga.
This requires a more thoughtful understanding of inclusion than simply celebrating every culture in the same way. We must honour the distinctive status of tangata whenua while also creating classrooms in which Pacific, Asian, Middle Eastern, African, European, migrant, refugee and other communities are visible, valued and able to participate fully.
Difference may bring discomfort
Another important contribution from hooks is her rejection of the idea that an inclusive classroom must always be comfortable or harmonious.
When we introduce different histories, perspectives and ways of knowing, disagreement may occur. Students may encounter ideas that challenge what they have previously learned at home, through the media or within dominant cultural narratives.
Teachers may also feel uncertain.
That discomfort is not necessarily evidence that the learning has gone wrong. It may indicate that assumptions are being questioned and new understanding is developing.
The answer is not to avoid difficult conversations. It is to build the relationships, language and shared expectations needed to engage with them respectfully.
A strong classroom community is not one in which everyone agrees. It is one in which learners can question ideas without attacking the dignity of others, where prejudice is challenged and where uncertainty can become the beginning of deeper learning
The teacher is also part of the learning
hooks does not allow the teacher to stand outside this work.
We each bring our own cultural histories, preferences, assumptions and blind spots into the classroom. Our ideas about respectful behaviour, intelligence, family engagement, language and success have all been shaped by our experiences.
Engaged pedagogy requires us to reflect honestly:
Which learners do I find easiest to understand?
Whose communication style feels most familiar to me?
Do I interpret quietness as a lack of knowledge?
Which accents, dialects and language practices do I recognise as academically capable?
Who receives the most demanding questions?
Am I willing to let the knowledge and experiences of my students change my thinking and my practice?
This is not about creating guilt or suggesting teachers must become experts in every culture represented in their classrooms. It is about remaining open, curious and willing to learn.
bell hooks and The Telling Your Stories Project
With all this in mind, I am very proud of our ongoing work in the Telling Your Stories Project, which provides one practical vehicle for bringing bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy to life. Rather than positioning learners and communities as passive recipients of knowledge, the process invites everyone, students, teachers, governors, indigenous peoples, local communities, policy makers and more to contribute their voices, histories, languages and ways of knowing to the curriculum.
Local knowledge is not added as a decorative extra; it becomes a meaningful context through which literacy, inquiry and wider curriculum learning can occur.
Telling Your Stories helps shift the classroom from a place where knowledge is simply delivered to one where it is co-constructed through relationships, dialogue and shared authority. It enables learners to see themselves as knowledge holders and story-makers, while giving educators a structured way to listen, learn and teach with communities rather than only about them.
Allowing the classroom to change
My conversation with Professor Benny Wilson led me to bell hooks, but hooks has led me back to questions I have been thinking about for much of my career.
Belonging is not created simply by inviting learners into an existing system and asking them to adapt successfully to it.
Genuine belonging occurs when learners can see that their presence matters, their voice is heard, their knowledge is treated with respect, and their identity does not have to be set aside to gain access to academic success.
The challenge for us is not merely to make room for diverse learners within the classroom we have already designed.
It is to ask whether we are willing to allow those learners, their families, their languages, their stories and their ways of knowing to help shape what the classroom becomes. To shape the future of our places.
That, for me, is the power of bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy.
It reminds us that education can be more than the transmission of knowledge or the management of behaviour. It can be a place of intellectual rigour, human connection, agency and possibility.
It can be a practice of freedom.
Sources
Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. (2022). Belonging, being and becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (Version 2.0). Australian Government Department of Education.
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (n.d.). Building a culturally responsive Australian teaching workforce: Indigenous cultural responsiveness capability framework.
Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Cavanagh, T., & Teddy, L. (2007). Te Kōtahitanga Phase 3 whanaungatanga: Establishing a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations in mainstream secondary school classrooms. Ministry of Education.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum.
Ministry of Education. (2018). Tapasā: Cultural competencies framework for teachers of Pacific learners.
Sarra, C. (2011). Strong and smart: Towards a pedagogy for emancipation—Education for First Peoples. Routledge.
Spillman, D., Wilson, B., Nixon, M., & McKinnon, K. (2023). ‘New localism’ in Australian schools: Country as Teacher as a critical pedagogy of place. Curriculum Perspectives, 43(2), 103–114.
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