By: Dr. Darius Phelps, member, NCTE’s Committee on Global Citizenship
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
—bell hooks, All About Love
When I first read bell hooks’s Love Song to the Nation trilogy—All About Love, Salvation, and Communion, I wasn’t looking for a pedagogical framework. I was grieving. I was searching for language to understand loss, rupture, and the slow unlearning of inherited silences. But as I read, I found not only validation and healing for my personal wounds…I found a vision for the classroom.
While bell hooks is best known for her critical and theoretical works, what often gets overlooked is her lyrical heart—her poetic voice. It pulses underneath every paragraph of the Love Song to the Nation trilogy. In All About Love, her prose is meditative, full of repetition and refrain; in Salvation, she writes with the rhythm of a Sunday morning sermon; and in Communion, she opens the page like a diary, letting vulnerability spill through the seams.
For me, these books were not just theory—they were poetry in practice. They affirmed that storytelling is scholarship. That reflection is rigorous. That love is worthy of study.
bell hooks taught me that poetry is a way of knowing. A way of grieving. A way of remembering who we are beneath the scars of schooling. Her work gave me permission to write my dissertation as a series of poems, reflections, and testimonies that speak in the language of the spirit, not just the academy. Her commitment to love as a radical force—and to language as a vehicle for liberation—is the foundation of my work in poetic inquiry. When I ask my students to write “Where I’m From” poems, or excavate their identities through metaphor, I’m really asking them to do what hooks asked of all of us:
To go deep.
To be honest.
To love in public.
bell hooks shows us that poetry doesn’t need to rhyme to be revolutionary. Sometimes, all it needs to do is tell the truth. She teaches us that love is not sentimental; it is political. It is rigorous. It demands accountability. In All About Love, she writes of the power of care, commitment, and community as radical acts. In Salvation, she calls upon the Black church and Black communities to nurture spaces where Black children can imagine themselves whole. And in Communion, she wrestles with the complexities of intimacy, longing, and emotional growth. Each book in the trilogy reads like a pedagogy of hope and liberation.
In my doctoral dissertation Embracing Every Hue: Using Our Narratives to Cultivate Healing, written at Teachers College, Columbia University, I explore poetic inquiry as a methodology rooted in this very ethic—what I call “teaching as testimony.” Like hooks, I believe that classrooms can become spaces of healing when we center voice, vulnerability, and the radical work of witnessing one another. For the preservice teachers I work with, that means learning to write not only about curriculum but about the deep interior work required to be culturally responsive, justice-centered educators. bell hooks’s trilogy gives us the language to talk about this. She writes about love as an ethic of care, as a site of resistance, and as a liberatory practice. These aren’t abstract ideals—they are pedagogical strategies.
When I teach All About Love, we read it not as a self-help book but as a guide for reimagining educational spaces. We ask:
- What does it mean to love our students—not as saviors, but as co-creators of knowledge?
- What structures do we need to dismantle in order to cultivate love, joy, and justice in our pedagogy?
- How can love act as a shield against burnout, against anti-Blackness, against apathy?
In poetry circles and narrative reflections, my students write about the people who first taught them to love—mothers, mentors, missteps—and then ask how that legacy shows up in their own teaching. We talk about failure, about harm, about repair. We read hooks not as a static theory but as a living, breathing call to action. As teacher educators, we must honor hooks’s legacy not only by citing her work but by embodying it. To love in a system built on surveillance and standardization is a revolutionary act. To teach as if our students’ lives matter—fully, deeply, unconditionally—is to respond to hooks’s love song with one of our own. bell hooks taught us that love and justice are inseparable. So, too, are teaching and healing. As educators, may we carry her wisdom into every syllabus, every circle, every classroom.
I Did Not Come Here to Whisper.
I came with my grandmother’s voice carved into my throat,
with broken syllables stitched in my palms like prayer beads.
I am the trembling before the “teach,” the quiver in the chalk,
the breath you hold when you ask a child to name their pain
& they look away.
I teach because I was once:
unseen, unheard, until someone said, “I see you.”
& so I say it now—again and again—
until every student believes it.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is a poet, writer, and scholar whose work centers the liberatory possibilities of poetic inquiry, culturally responsive pedagogy, and critical literacy. A former elementary school teacher and now professor, he mentors preservice educators in reimagining classrooms as spaces of resistance, restoration, and radical love.
The Committee on Global Citizenship works to identify and address issues of broad concern to NCTE members interested in promoting global citizenship and connections across global contexts within the Council and within members’ teaching contexts.
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