The lessons that the students shared with me throughout the duration of the course — in their written assignments, classroom and office hour discussions, at their many campus-based events and activities including the encampment and in these essays— will remain with me for a lifetime. As these essays reflect, our communal learning journey was accompanied by a personal one for many of the students. They shared how learning about the Palestinian struggle has (re)established a path for them to explore and make sense of their own familial and national histories with forced displacement, imprisonment, genocide, occupation, racist state violence, sexual and gendered violence, land alienation, (settler) colonialism, imperialism, and class warfare.
Throughout the semester, some days included emotional testimonies from students who were processing the weight of the current genocide and the very real psychic, spiritual, emotional, and physical wounds it conjured for them and the toll it had — and continues to have — on their relationships and lives. Some days, students processed deep senses of helplessness and anger. And, on other days, students tried to find short-sighted solutions for the discomfort they were experiencing.
Oftentimes, profound lessons on life, love, care, steadfastness, survival/survivance, movement, and future/world-making can be found in discomfort, grief, rage, and heartbreak. I asked the students to explore that notion — and what might be generative from the place of feeling — rather than evading it. They accepted the challenge with open minds and hearts, many of whom write from that place of feeling in this collection of essays.
As the Black feminist luminary bell hooks exemplified, educational content that does not speak to our interior world and our everyday lives does not allow us to feel connected to it, ourselves, and one another. Without being willing to engage in this kind of connection ourselves–we as teachers cannot encourage the unrequited love of ideas and the passion required to engage them, both of which are necessary for education to hold its transformative and liberatory power for students. This kind of transformation is not only cognitive, it is also emotional (and sometimes spiritual as well) . Teaching to Transgress, according to hooks, recognizes that for education to be transformative–and perhaps restorative–we as teachers must seek self actualization; that which requires us to be open and willing to form meaningful relationships in the classroom and to embark on the transformative journey in learning alongside our students.
The students’ creative genius, passion, and care for the subject material, for each other, and the Palestinian struggle, restored my desire and commitment to live, learn, and teach more deeply and fully in the most tragic chapter of my people’s history. I am humbled by and indebted to these students for reminding me what it means to experience what hooks has called “education as a practice of freedom,” as a teacher.1 I am thankful to them for inspiring me to come to class with an open heart, eager and excited to co-learn in community, and to feel and learn from the place of feeling alongside them.
Palestine and the World
My pedagogical approach, which encouraged learning in/while feeling, opened a comparative exploration of distinct but interconnected histories, causes, and communities, while simultaneously revealing crucial lessons on the intimacy that undergirds people-to-people and movement solidarities across geography and time. These were among the most rewarding discussions the course yielded, precisely because lessons from the Palestinian struggle opened portals for understanding how structural oppression operates at world levels, and how forces of empire collude to form and profit from shared structures of oppression.
The geographies, histories, ancestors, and kin that our learning community brought into the classroom–and in these essays–were vast. Students recalled the genocides in Cambodia, Vietnam, Bosnia, as well as the occupations of Kashmir and Korea. They examined the settler conquests of the Kingdom of Hawaii and Turtle Island, French colonialism in Algeria — the land of a million martyrs — and the colonial afterlives of partition in India and Bangladesh. The torture chambers and expulsions of Pinochet’s Chile, the townships of apartheid South Africa, the ghettos of Nazi Germany, as well as the life — and afterlife — of racial chattel slavery and the Jim and Jane Crow South, were all relationally engaged through a study of the Palestinian struggle as well.
These explorations opened deep senses of the connectedness of the students to one another, and therefore to each other’s freedom struggles, serving as fertile grounds for co-dreaming new modes of solidarity that challenge ethnocentric and nationalist dogma, and the senses of scarcity of time and resources toward joint-struggle that the imperialist and capitalist world-system has conditioned us to internalize. By examining the historical and world material conditions of possibility that gave rise to the Palestinian struggle, many students came to an understanding that their solidarity is not only for Palestine and Palestinians, but is rather a part of the process of revolutionary world and future-making for us all.
Their essays offer a glimpse into the reflections shared inside our collective learning journey and the possibilities for relationship, future, solidarity, movement, and world-building that Palestine and the Palestinians have given the students and the world.
Theory and Practice: No Transformation Without Action
Irrespective of the portals opened to history and the world that our class engaged and these essays illustrate, throughout the semester, I was aware that what was moving the students — emotionally, intellectually, and politically — toward action was the revolutionary education they were receiving outside the classroom, by bearing witness to the genocide and partaking in the movement for Palestinian liberation, both on and off-campus. As young people developing consciousness in their formative years — and as members of a student movement who were learning about politics, ethics, history, and the world in community with one another — the essays reflect the profound lessons, questions, and challenges, on movement-building, organizing, and the capacity to achieve transformative change.
The kind of revolutionary education provided to students outside the classroom was an embodied one, which they learned through practice. But it was dialectically pressed, challenged, and augmented through an engagement with theory and history inside our class. As critical pedagogist Paolo Freire noted, “It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis” (Freire 2005, page 65). This dialectical relationship between theory and practice was one that we reflected upon inside the classroom. But outside of class, what was happening on our campus — and in the wider world — served as the space in which students were experimenting with ideas, histories, and their own power as students and young people.
While the end of the semester was accompanied by exhaustion, fatigue, and confusion for some, it was undeniable that the embodied experience served as a touchstone moment in the transformation of students on personal and collective levels. For that reason, I asked them to share reflections on what lessons they are walking away with from our learning journey in the classroom: from the Palestinian struggle across time and place, from the genocide in Gaza, and from their own participation within and/or observation of the Brown student movement. Their essays demonstrate how engaging Palestine through revolutionary education — both within the classroom and in our embodied practice outside it — is a practice of freedom that opens new ways of knowing, feeling, and thinking, and strengthens the desire and preparedness for revolutionary relationship, future, and world-building.
As many of their essays illustrate, study of the Palestinian struggle has taught them instructive lessons on life. Their acceptance of that gift — with love, care, and responsibility — taught me that an otherwise world is not only possible, but inevitable.
1 In March of 2024, I was invited to take part in the Teaching to Transgress Retreat, organized by Charlene Carruthers, at the Highlander Education and Research Center in New Market, Tennessee. I am indebted to Charlene and this community of brilliant — mostly Black — movement intellectuals and teaching practitioners, for providing me the opportunity to return to the lessons in bell hooks’ 1994 book and for offering me comradeship, instructive lessons in transformative pedagogy, and space for breath and reflection in these catastrophic times.
