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

by bell hooks

White women were more willing to “hear” another white woman talk about racism, yet it is their inability to listen to black women that impedes feminist progress.

White women who have yet to get a critical handle on the meaning of “whiteness” in their lives, the representation of whiteness in their literature, or the white supremacy that shapes their social status are now explicating blackness without critically questioning whether their work emerges from an aware antiracist standpoint.

One white woman said that she starts from the standpoint of accepting and acknowledging that “white people always have racist assumptions that we have to deal with.” Readiness to deal with these assumptions certainly makes forming ties with nonwhite women easier. She suggests that the degree to which a white woman can accept the truth of racist oppression—of white female complicity, of the privileges white women receive in a racist structure—determines the extent to which they can be empathic with women of color.

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.

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.”

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.

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. Teachers who have these beliefs really have trouble experimenting and risking their bodies—the social order. They want the classroom to be the way it has always been.

We inhabit real institutions where very little seems to be changed, where there are very few changes in the curriculum, almost no paradigm shifts, and where knowledge and information continue to be presented in the conventionally accepted manner.

educate for freedom, then, we have to challenge and change the way everyone thinks about pedagogical process.

Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom.

There is such a fear of letting go in the classroom, of taking risks. When professors let go it is not only the student voice that must speak freely but also the professor’s voice. Teachers need to practice freedom, to speak, just as much as students do.

The power of the liberatory classroom is in fact the power of the learning process, the work we do to establish a community.

In the classes I teach, students are often presented with new paradigms and are being asked to shift their ways of thinking to consider new perspectives. In the past I have often felt that this type of learning process is very hard; it’s painful and troubling. It may be six months or a year, even two years later, that they realize the importance of what they have learned. That was really hard for me, because I think part of what the banking system does for professors is create the system where we want to feel that by the end of the semester every student will be sitting there filling out their evaluations testifying that I’m a “good teacher.” It’s all about feeling good, feeling good about me, and feeling good about the class. But in reconceptualizing engaged pedagogy I had to realize that our purpose here isn’t really to feel good. Maybe we enjoy certain classes, but it will usually be difficult. We have to learn how to appreciate difficulty, too, as a stage in intellectual development. Or accept that that cozy, good feeling may at times block the possibility of giving students space to feel that there is integrity to be found in grappling with difficult material, whether that material comes from confessional narratives, books, or discussions.

Sometimes it’s important to remind students that joy can be present along with hard work. Not every moment in the classroom will necessarily be one that brings you immediate pleasure, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of joy. Nor does it deny the reality that learning can be painful.

“Well, then, what can we do? How can we approach our subject to make it more interesting?” One of the most intense aspects of liberatory pedagogical practice is the challenge on the part of the professor to change the set agenda.

I have to undermine my own “I”; maybe the material I most want them to know on a given day is not necessarily what learning is about. Professors can dish out all the right material, but if people are not in a mind to receive it, they leave classrooms empty of that information, even though we may feel we’ve really done our jobs.

A more flexible grading process must go hand in hand with a transformed classroom. Standards must always be high. Excellence must be valued, but standards cannot be absolute and fixed.

The obsession with good grades has so much to do with fear of failure. Progressive teaching tries to eradicate that fear, both in students and in professors. There are moments when I worry that I am not being a “good” teacher, and then I find myself struggling to break with a good/bad binary. It’s more useful for me to think of myself as a progressive teacher who’s willing to own both my successes and failures in the classroom.

I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize.

The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies—different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview.

In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech.

Even though students enter the “democratic” classroom believing they have the right to “free speech,” most students are not comfortable exercising this right to “free speech.” Most students are not comfortable exercising this right—especially if it means they must give voice to thoughts, ideas, feelings that go against the grain, that are unpopular. This censoring process is only one way bourgeois values overdetermine social behavior in the classroom and undermine the democratic exchange of ideas.

Most progressive professors are more comfortable striving to challenge class biases through the material studied than they are with interrogating how class biases shape conduct in the classroom and transforming their pedagogical process.

the purpose of education is to show students how to define themselves “authentically and spontaneously in relation” to the world, then professors can best teach if we are self-actualized.

When I teach, I encourage them to critique, evaluate, make suggestions and interventions as we go along. Evaluations at the end of a course rarely help us improve the learning experience we share together. When students see themselves as mutually responsible for the development of a learning community, they offer constructive input.

Students do not always enjoy studying with me. Often they find my courses challenge them in ways that are deeply unsettling. This was particularly disturbing to me at the beginning of my teaching career because I wanted to be like and admired. It took time and experience for me to understand that the rewards of engaged pedagogy might not emerge during a course.

Commitment to engaged pedagogy carries with it the willingness to be responsible, not to pretend that professors do not have the power to change the direction of our students’ lives.