EDUCATION AS A PRACTICE OF FREEDOM AND THE CREATION OF LEARNING COMUNITIES

Drawing on bell hooks' educational trilogy, this paper explores education through a critical, decolonial, and intersectional lens. Our goal is to understand how a liberating education, grounded in engaged pedagogy, can be incorporated into teaching practices to build learning communities. Inspired by the ideas of Freire and hooks, we reflect on bell hooks pedagogy can help reshape educational experiences through collective approaches. The theoretical-methodological framework of this study was informed by the work of teacher Sahmaroni Rodrigues de Olinda (2024) in the study group “bell hooks, engaged pedagogy and teacher education,” as well as academic articles by scholars who engage with hooks’ work, including Marinho (2023), Silva & Pontes (2023), Carreiro, Rodrigues & Palhano (2023), and Silva, Souza & Antunes (2022). These sources, published between 2021 and 2023, were selected based on a broader research effort using the descriptors: Engaged Pedagogy, Learning Communities, and bell hooks. The research reveals that, inspired by the legacy of Paulo Freire, bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy calls for a break from traditional banking models of education and points toward a horizon of collective transformation. Both authors demonstrate that through liberatory education, it is possible to challenge structures of domination, foster critical thinking, and build authentic learning communities.