Teaching for liberation: The Manifesto Assignment as an example of bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy

Diversity and inclusion, decolonising the curriculum, and intersectionality have become buzzwords in higher education, with questions raised about what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts in teaching contexts. Despite efforts being made to democratise the curriculum through reading lists and lecture content, pedagogy itself remains largely unchanged. In this article, I provide a theoretical reflection on my experiences of teaching an introductory gender studies unit at an Australian university at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The pandemic intensified existing inequities amongst students, not only outside but also inside the classroom. It is against this backdrop that I swapped the initially set research essay in the unit for a manifesto writing assignment. In this article, I explore the ways in which the manifesto assignment provided an opportunity to take seriously bell hooks’ vision of engaged pedagogy that views education as the practice of freedom and discuss the ways in which it came to represent an example of feminist praxis that assists in fostering a more inclusive classroom, grounded in feminism’s liberatory project.