Teaching To Transgress

by bell hooks

Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn—to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. It has been my experience that one way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each individual voice.

In the transformed classroom there is often a much greater need to explain philosophy, strategy, intent than in the “norm” setting.

Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. I learned to respect that shifting paradigms or sharing knowledge in new ways challenges; it takes time for students to experience that challenge as positive.

Paulo was one of the thinkers whose work gave me a language. He made me think deeply about the construction of an identity in resistance.

our lives must be a living example of our politics.

critical interrogation is not the same as dismissal.

Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer perspective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water.

Since so many of the early feminist books really reflected a certain type of white bourgeois sensibility, this work did not touch many black women deeply; not because we did not recognize the common experiences women shared, but because those commonalities were mediated by profound differences in our realities created by the politics of race and class.

it was the intersection of Paulo’s thought and the lived pedagogy of the many black teachers of my girlhood (most of them women) who saw themselves as having a liberatory mission to educate us in a manner that would prepare us to effectively resist racism and white supremacy, that has had a profound impact on my thinking about the art and practice of teaching.

Authentic help means that all who are involved help each other mutually, growing together in the common effort to understand the reality which they seek to transform. Only through such praxis—in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously—can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped.

It is evident that one of the many uses of theory in academic locations is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references.

Hence, any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public.

feminist activists we might ask ourselves, of what use is feminist theory that assaults the fragile psyches of women struggling to throw off patriarchy’s oppressive yoke?

In this capitalist culture, feminism and feminist theory are fast becoming a commodity that only the privileged can afford.

my decisions about writing style, about not using conventional academic formats, are political decisions motivated by the desire to be inclusive, to reach as many readers as possible in as many different locations.

gender is not the sole determinant of woman’s identity.

Suddenly, the feminist classroom is no longer a safe haven, the way many women’s studies students imagine it will be, but is instead a site of conflict, tensions, and sometimes ongoing hostility. 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.

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, the experience of black men was the point of reference.

The vast majority of white feminists did not welcome our questioning of feminist paradigms that they were seeking to institutionalize; so too, many black people simply saw our involvement with feminist politics as a gesture of betrayal, and dismissed our work.

those critical thinkers working with issues of pedagogy who are committed to cultural studies must combine “theory and practice in order to affirm and demonstrate pedagogical practices engaged in creating a new language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentering authority, and rewriting the institutional and discursive borderlands in which politics becomes a condition for reasserting the relationship between agency, power, and struggle.”

It is fashionable these days, when “difference” is a hot topic in progressive circles, to talk about “hybridity” and “border crossing,” but we often have no concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern with teaching practices.

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.

one of the things that has connected us is that we both have a real concern with education as liberatory practice and with pedagogical strategies that may be not just for our students but for ourselves.

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.

But as teachers I think our emphasis has, over the years, been to affirm who we are through the transaction of being with other people in the classroom and achieving something there.

Not just relaying information or stating things, but working with people.

as a white university teacher in his thirties, I’m profoundly aware of my presence in the classroom as well, given the history of the male body, and of the male teacher.

I need to be sensitive to and critical of my presence in the history that has led me there.

Some male colleagues are hiding behind this, repressing their bodies not out of deference but out of fear.

The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body.

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.

Even those of us who are experimenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change.

Bloom and D’Souza reached a mass audience and were able to give a distorted impression of progressive pedagogy.

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.

Before we try to engage them in a dialectical discussion of ideas that is mutual, we have to teach about process.

teach many white students and they hold diverse political stances. Yet they come into a class on African American women’s literature expecting to hear no discussion of the politics of race, class, and gender. Often these students will complain, “Well I thought this was a literature class.” What they’re really saying to me is, “I thought this class was going to be taught like any other literature class I would take, only we would now substitute black female writers for white male writers.” They accept the shift in the locus of representation but resist shifting ways they think about ideas. That is threatening. That’s

why the critique of multiculturalism seeks to shut the classroom down again—to halt this revolution...

It’s as though many people know that the focus on difference has the potential to revolutionize the classroom and they do not...

If there is laughter, a reciprocal exchange may be taking place.

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.

regards to pedagogical practices we must intervene to alter the existing pedagogical structure and to teach students how to listen, how to hear one another.

I see it as a fundamental responsibility of the teacher to show by example the ability to listen to others seriously.

the more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen.

I’m trying to say that we are all equal here to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning context.

I want them to think, “What I’m here for is to work with material, and to work with it the best way that I can. And in doing that I don’t have to be fearful about my grade, because if I am working the best I can with this material, I know it’s going to be reflected in my grade.” I try to communicate that the grade is something they can control by their labor in the classroom.

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.

Engaged Buddhism emphasizes participation and involvement, particularly involvement with a world beyond yourself.

When new semesters begin I’m very aware that this is one of the most important moments. No matter that it’s a ritual for students—there is also a genuine excitement. At the very beginning of each semester I try to use that excitement to deepen and enrich the classroom experience.

professors are wounded, damaged individuals, people who are not self-actualized, then they will seek asylum in the academy rather than seek to make the academy a place of challenge, dialectical interchange, and growth.