‘Dancing the fine line’: developing critical agency with transgressive social pedagogy?

We explore bell hooks’s perspectives on transgressive learning and discuss the potential for a social pedagogical practice by changing its scope and material context through the concept of the common third. We apply hooks’s points on student–educator mutuality and the necessity of dynamically repositioning educator–student relationships. We explore how research findings from different educational contexts can relate to the tension between an individual qualification on society’s terms and the development of critical agency. We begin with recent research on youth experiences of transitioning through the Danish lower to upper secondary school system, and unfold analytical findings from the research on pedagogical practices in a youth empowerment programme situated within the American food justice movement. Similarities and differences between the radically different contexts are put into perspective by applying hooks’s understanding of transgressive learning, as well as scholarly discussions of pitfalls in the performance of emancipatory education as dialogic and classroom-based. Transgressive potentials depend on the dynamic organisation of a pedagogical framework around a common third with material, embodied and social dimensions. We suggest a conceptualisation of a transgressive social pedagogy that gradually develops critical agency. The common-third activity enables a kind of mutuality that transforms educators’ power positions and opens new ways for youths to develop their agency. We wish to contribute to a rethinking of the common third as a social pedagogical core concept of relevance for Denmark’s education system.