Teaching to Transgress

A Teaching & Learning Speaker Series

This speaker series is inspired by scholar, educator, and activist bell hooks’ critical work on liberatory practices and pedagogy. In her book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice for Freedom,” bell hooks encourages us to think of the classroom as a space to transgress boundaries, a space that connects “the will to know with the will to become.” To her, engaged education was a practice for freedom, and the classroom, a space where liberatory practices can be imagined and rehearsed.

Inspired by her work and her legacy, the Teaching to Transgress Speaker Series seeks to feature radical thinkers, practitioners, and pedagogues, and to foster the exchange of critical and innovative pedagogies and teaching practices. With a focus on I-EDIAA (Indigenizing- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-racism, Accessibility) the invited speakers will enrich existing programming at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Queen’s University and engage the teaching community in emerging, effective, and novel approaches to teaching and learning.

Fall 2022

Decolonization in Education and Global Engagement

with Dr. Clelia Rodriguez
October 20, 2022; 1:30 – 2:30pm EST, Zoom

Registration Form

External to Queen's Registration Form

Dr. Clelia O. Rodríguez is a global scholar, author, mom and auntie, born and raised in the ancestral lands of the Nawat, the Chorti-Maya and the Lenka Peoples, what is presently El Salvador. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Before holding a Human Rights Traveling Study Abroad Professorship across three continents, United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Ghana. Prior to teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto about Decolonization in Education, Settler Colonialism, Pedagogies of Liberation, Popular Education, Social Action and Anti-Discriminatory based curricula, she was a Gender Academic University Advisor in Bolivia, as part of a partnership between CECI and Global Affairs Canada. Recently, she has collaborated with the University of Fort Hare teaching postgraduate workshops. She is currently developing a gender-based training program in Kenya working along side the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology and Eco Green. She is the founder of SEEDS for Change, a learning transnational collective bringing together Black, Indigenous and people from the Global Majority to co-create pedagogies of liberation. She is committed to ancestral sustainable pedagogies, decolonizing approaches to learning and teaching beyond the binary, critical race and cultural theories, anti-oppressive transnational cooperation and learning in community. Her work has been published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Journal of Popular Education, Critical Pedagogy and Militant Research in Chile, the Black Youth Project, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching, Postcolonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education and the Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She recently received the 2022 ACPA Latinx Network Community Advancement Service Award for her support and encouragement towards the needs of Latinx students and professionals in higher education and has been nominated twice for awards in excellence in teaching.

Dr. Clelia O. Rodríguez’s Book: Decolonizing Academia

Seeds for Change: Learning Without Borders Initiative

Registration Form

External to Queen's Registration Form

Coming in Winter 2023

Dr. Jeff Preston

Assoc. Professor, Disability Studies, King’s University College, Western University

Jeff Preston, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Disability Studies at King's University College at Western University where he teaches classes on disability, popular culture and policy. A long-time advocate and motivational speaker, Jeff's work focuses on the intersection of disability, subjectivity, biopower and culture. Jeff's first book, The Fantasy of Disability, was published in 2017 by Routledge.

Dr. Özlem Sensoy

Dr. Özlem Sensoy's primary field of research is social justice education. Social justice education seeks to reveal how social inequities become embedded in the fabric of society, and to identify strategies for socially just change. Her research examines the opportunities and barriers inherent in advancing a more equitable society, through social justice education. In doing so, Dr. Sensoy studies a dual track: analyzing how inequities are reproduced in social institutions (such as schools, media, policing), and identifying constructive interventions to interrupt them (such as thinking critically about knowledge, pedagogical approaches, and political activism).

Her scholarship draws on and contributes to fields that include: social justice education, multicultural education, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, Islam & Middle East studies, popular culture, critical media literacy, feminist postcolonial theory, and visual research methods.