Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation)

by Bell Hooks

Henry Giroux, in his writing on critical pedagogy, suggests that “the notion of experience has to be situated within a theory of learning.” Giroux suggests that professors must learn to respect the way students feel about their experiences as well as their need to speak about them in classroom settings: “You can’t deny that students have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions. feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice. We can critically engage that experience and we can move beyond it. But we can’t deny it.”