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

by bell hooks

Often black women do not respond to friendly overtures by white women for fear that they will be betrayed, that at some unpredictable moment the white woman will assert power. This fear of betrayal is linked with white female fear of exposure; clearly we need feminist psychoanalytic work that examines these feelings and the relational dynamics they produce.

Her actions confirmed for me both the power of solidarity and sisterhood. She did not play it safe. To challenge, she had to separate herself from the power and privilege of the group.

It may very well be that some black female rage towards white women masks sorrow and pain, anguish that it has been so difficult to make contact, to impress upon their consciousness our subjectivity. Letting go of some of the hurt may create a space for courageous contact without fear or blame.

Producing this work is not the exclusive task of white or black women; it is collective work. The presence of racism in feminist settings does not exempt black women or women of color from actively participating in the effort to find ways to communicate, to exchange ideas, to have fierce debate. If revitalized feminist movement is to have a transformative impact on women, then creating a context where we can engage in open critical dialogue with one another, where we can debate and discuss without fear of emotional collapse, where we can hear and know one another in the difference and complexities of our experience, is essential. Collective feminist movement cannot go forward if this step is never taken. When we create this woman space where we can value difference and complexity, sisterhood based on political solidarity will emerge.

Confronting one another across differences means that we must change ideas about how we learn; rather than fearing conflict we have to find ways to use it as a catalyst for new thinking, for growth.

He responded by calling attention to the reasons it is difficult for black men to deal with sexism, the primary one being that they are accustomed to thinking of themselves in terms of racism, being exploited and oppressed. Speaking of his efforts to develop feminist awareness, he stressed limitations: “I’ve tried to understand but then I’m a man. Sometimes I don’t understand and it hurts, ’cause I think I’m the epitome of everything that’s oppressed.” Since it is difficult for many black men to give voice to the ways they are hurt and wounded by racism, it is also understandable that it is difficult for them to “own up to” sexism, to be accountable. More and more, individual black men—particularly young black men—are facing the challenge of daring to critique gender, be informed, and willingly resist and oppose sexism.

Overall, the feeling of the group was that studying feminist work, seeing an analysis of gender from a feminist standpoint as a way to understand black experience, was necessary for the collective development of black consciousness, for the future of black liberation struggle.

“once you learn to look at yourself critically, you look at everything around you with new eyes.”

I was disturbed that the white female professors and students were ignorant of gender differences in black life—that they talked about the status and experiences of “women” when they were only referring to white women.

experience, I was stunned by either the complete lack of any focus on gender difference in black life or the tacit assumption that because many black females worked outside the home, gender roles were inverted.

Scholars usually talked about black experience when they were really speaking solely about black male experience.

Significantly, I found that when “women” were talked about, the experience of white women was universalized to stand for all female experience and that when “black people” were talked about, th...

To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences.

If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate. This does not mean that they are not subjected to critique or critical interrogation, or that there will not be many occasions when the crossings of the powerful into the terrains of the powerless will not perpetuate existing structures. This risk is ultimately less threatening than a continued attachment to and support of existing systems of domination, particularly as they affect teaching, how we teach, and what we teach.

My critical perspective on her work, especially Beloved,

I feel I’ve benefited a lot from not being attached to myself as an academic or professor. It’s made me willing to be critical of my own pedagogy and to accept criticism from my students and other people without feeling that to question how I teach is somehow to question my right to exist on the planet. I feel that one of the things blocking a lot of professors from interrogating their own pedagogical practices is that fear that “this is my identity and I can’t question that identity.”

As a traditional white male French intellectual. It’s important that you add that because we can’t even name any black male French intellectuals off the bat. Even though we know that they must exist; like the rest of Europe, France is no longer white.

Like the way she called in

precisely the challenge to that mind/body split.

Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space. The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body. I remember as an undergraduate I had white male professors who wore the same tweed jacket and rumpled shirt or something, but we all knew that we had to pretend. You would never comment on his dress, because to do so would be a sign of your own intellectual lack. The point was we should all respect that he’s there to be a mind and not a body.

about the presence of the teacher as a body in the classroom, the presence of the teacher as someone who has a total effect on the development of the student, not just an intellectual effect but an effect on how that student perceives reality beyond the classroom.

We were talking about how, in a way, our work brings our selves, our bodies into the classroom. The traditional notion of being in the classroom is a teacher behind a desk or standing at the front, immobilized. In a weird way that recalls the firm, immobilized body of knowledge as part of the immutability of truth itself. So what if one’s clothing is soiled, if one’s pants are not adjusted properly, or your shirt’s sloppy. As long as the mind is still working elegantly and eloquently, that’s what is supposed to be appreciated.

Our romantic notion of the professor is so tied to a sense of the transitive mind, a mind that, in a sense, is always at odds with the body.

Liberatory pedagogy really demands that one work in the classroom, and that one work with the limits of the body, work both with and through and against those limits: teachers may insist that it doesn’t matter whether you stand behind the podium or the desk, but it does. I remember in my early teaching days that when I first tried to move out beyond the desk, I felt really nervous. I remember thinking, “This really is about power. I really do feel more ‘in control’ when I’m behind the podium or behind the desk than when I’m walking towards my students, standing close to them, maybe even touching them.” Acknowledging that we are bodies in the classroom has been important for me, especially in my efforts to disrupt the notion of professor as omnipotent, all-knowing mind.

When you leave the podium and walk around, suddenly the way you smell, the way you move become very apparent to your students. Also, you bring with you a certain kind of potential, though not guaranteed, for a certain kind of face-to-face relationship and respect for “what I say” and “what you say.” Student and professor are looking at each other. And as we come physically close, suddenly what I have to say is not coming from behind this invisible line, this wall of demarcation that implies anything that from this side of the desk is gold, is truth, or that everything said out there is merely for my consideration, that the only possible way I can respond is by saying “good,” “right,” and so on. As people move around it becomes more evident that we work in the classroom. For some teachers, and especially older faculty, there is a desire to enjoy the privilege of appearing not to work in the classroom. It’s odd in and of itself, but it’s particularly ironic since faculty members congregate outside the classroom and talk endlessly about how hard they’re working.

The arrangement of the body we are talking about de-emphasizes the reality that professors are in the classroom to offer something of our selves to the students.

The erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information. We are invited to teach information as though it does not emerge from bodies. Significantly, those of us who are trying to critique biases in the classroom have been compelled to return to the body to speak about ourselves as subjects in history. We are all subjects in history. We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others. By recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, we disrupt that objectification that is so necessary in a culture of domination.

If professors take seriously, respectfully, the student body, we are compelled to acknowledge that we are addressing folks who are part of history. And some of them are coming from histories that might be threatening to the established ways of knowing if acknowledged. This is especially the case for professors and teachers who, in the classroom, come face to face with individuals they do not see in their own neighborhoods. For example, in the urban university settings, on my own campus, a good number of the professors don’t live in New York City; some don’t live in New York state. They live in Connecticut or New Jersey or they live on Long Island. Many of their communities are very isolated, not reflecting the racial mixture of people that are on their campus. I think that this is why so many of these professors see themselves as liberal, even as they maintain conservative positions in the classroom. This seems especially so with issues of race. Many of us want to act as though race doesn’t matter, that we are here for what’s interesting in the mind, that history doesn’t matter even if you’ve been screwed over, or your parents were immigrants or the children of immigrants who have labored for forty years and have nothing to show for it. Recognition of that must be suspended; and the rationale for this erasure is that logic which says, “What we do here is science, what we do here is objective history.” bh: It is fascinating to see the ways erasure of the body connects to th...

professors may attempt to deconstruct traditional biases while sharing that information through body posture, tone, word choice, and so on that perpetuate those very hierarchies and biases they are critiquing.

But it devalues the significance, the impact, of a work by Toni Morrison, or by yourself, if it is not taught in a manner that goes against the grain. In philosophy classes today, work on race, ethnicity, and gender is used, but not in a subversive way. It is simply used to update the curriculum superficially. This clinging to the past is mandated by the profound belief in the legitimacy of all that has come before.

I want to reiterate that many teachers who do not have difficulty releasing old ideas, embracing new ways of thinking, may still be as resolutely attached to old ways of practicing teaching as their more conservative colleagues. That’s a crucial issue. Even those of us who are experimenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change.

The urge to experiment with pedagogical practices may not be welcomed by students who often expect us to teach in the manner they are accustomed to. My point is that it takes a fierce commitment, a will to struggle, to let our work as teachers reflect progressive pedagogies.

many students confuse a lack of recognizable traditional formality with a lack of seriousness.

the negative critique of progressive pedagogy affects us—makes teachers afraid to change—to try new strategies. Many feminist professors, for example, begin their careers working to institutionalize more radical pedagogical practices, but when students did not appear to “respect their authority” they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and returned to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expected that students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers.

To acknowledge student responsibility for the learning process is to place it where it’s least legitimate in their own eyes. When we try to change the classroom so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, students get scared that you are now not the captain working with them, but that you are after all just another crew member—and not a reliable one at that.

To educate for freedom, then, we have to challenge and change the way everyone thinks about pedagogical process. This is especially true for students. Before we try to engage them in a dialectical discussion of ideas that is mutual, we have to teach about process.

They accept the shift in the locus of representation but resist shifting ways they think about ideas.

‘Your students seem to be enjoying themselves, they seem to be laughing whenever I walk by, you seem to be having a good time.” And the implication is that you’re a good joke-teller, you’re a good performer, but no serious teaching is happening. Pleasure in the classroom is feared. If there is laughter, a reciprocal exchange may be taking place. You’re laughing, the students are laughing, and someone walks by, looks in and says, “OK, you’re able to make them laugh. But so what? Anyone can entertain.” They can take this attitude because the idea of reciprocity, of respect, is not ever assumed. It is not assumed that your ideas can be entertaining, moving. To prove your academic seriousness, students should be almost dead, quiet, asleep, not up, excited, and buzzing, lingering around the classroom.

It is as though we are to imagine that knowledge is this rich creamy pudding students should consume and be nourished by, but not that the process of gestation should also be pleasurable.

As a teacher working to develop liberatory pedagogy I am discouraged when I encounter students who believe if there’s a different practice they can be less committed, less disciplined. I think our fear of losing students’ respect has discouraged many professors from trying new teaching practices.

I tell students not to confuse informality with a lack of seriousness, to respect the process. Because I teach in an informal way, students often feel like they can just get up, walk out, and come back. They are not comfortable. And I remind them that in their other classes where the teacher says if you miss one class you’re out of the class, they are docile, willing to comply with arbitrary rules about behavior.

These revelations made me see how deeply ingrained is the student perception that professors can be and should be dictators. To some extent, they saw me as “dictating” that they engage in liberatory practice, so they complied. Hence when another teacher entered the classroom and was more authoritarian they simply fell into line. But the triumph of liberatory pedagogy was that we had the space to interrogate their actions. They could look at themselves and say, “Why didn’t we stand up for what we believe? Why didn’t we maintain the value of our class? Do we see ourselves simply acting in complicity with her vision of liberatory practice, or are we committed to this practice ourselves?”

It’s very important to emphasize habit. It’s so difficult to change existing structures because the habit of repression is the norm. Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom.

So many of us have critiqued the individual white male scholars who push critical pedagogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who assert race, class, and gender privilege without interrogating their conduct.

In the way that they talk to students, call upon students, the control that they try to maintain, the comments they make, they reinforce the status quo. This confuses students. It reinforces the impression that, despite what we read, despite what this guy says, if we really just look carefully at the way he’s saying it, who he rewards, how he approaches people, there is no real difference. These actions undermine liberatory pedagogy.

more radical subject matter does not create a liberatory pedagogy, that a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the curriculum.

That is why there has been such critique of the place of experience—of confessional narrative—in the classroom. One of the ways you can be written off quickly as a professor by colleagues who are suspicious of progressive pedagogy is to allow your students, or yourself, to talk about experience; sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really enhances our capacity to know.

Focusing on experience allows students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of my writing on pedagogy is the emphasis on voice. Coming to voice is not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically—to come to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects.

In the privileged liberal arts colleges, it is acceptable for professors to respect the “voice” of any student who wants to make a point. Many students in those institutions feel they are entitled—that their voices deserve to be heard. But students in public institutions, mostly from working-class backgrounds, come to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing of value to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of ideas.

Professors, even those who view themselves as liberal, may think that it’s good for students to speak, only to proceed in a manner that devalues what the students say.