LIBERATING FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY SPACES: Enacting Revolutionary Pedagogies by Invoking the Spirit of Che and Paulo

Faculty development programs can bring faculty from various disciplines together, allowing for synergizing pedagogical conversations across numerous teaching and learning contexts. These unique opportunities have the poten tial to positively impact the experiences of faculty hailing from under-tapped communities of color and difference and expand the practical application of student-centered techniques. However, these conversations too often reduce the possibilities of fundamental institutional transformation to small changes in syllabi or teaching practices around singular, specific events. With our Faculty Development Program Director’s support at our teaching and community- focused university, the three authors met through shared interest in a book entitled, Radical Hope, by Kevin Gannon (2020) to the classroom experience. However, we envisioned more revolutionary work outside of the constraints of a neoliberal project that attempted to sanitize the radical nature of the work into small tweaks to our syllabi. Through two months of bi-weekly conversations, we discovered shared interests in more fundamental shifts in how we engage pedagogical spaces. We initiated an experiment to rethink what might be possible in professional development spaces informed by revolutionary, praxis-oriented readings, and a motivation to transform teaching moral and political fabric to challenge higher education and social injustices writ large, selecting Peter McLaren’s (2000) book Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. As a group, we developed a plan to infuse radical hope around teaching with radical honesty in the classroom about the world in which we live. We committed to create and merge into praxis at least two ideas from these transformation-focused readings into classroom pedagogy, then share and archive our successes, challenges, and modifications specific to our institution’s first three years as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). This chapter documents what we discovered about “teaching to transgress’’ during that process.