Teaching To Transgress

by bell hooks

But excitement about ideas was not sufficient to create an exciting learning process. As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.

Since the vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional educational practices and concern themselves only with the presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. Often before this process can begin there has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics. That responsibility is relative to status. Indeed, the professor will always be more responsible because the larger institutional structures will always ensure that accountability for what happens in the classroom rests with the teacher. It is rare that any professor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an exciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort.

Throughout my years as student and professor, I have been most inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning. Such teachers approach students with the will and desire to respond to our unique beings, even if the situation does not allow the full emergence of a relationship based on mutual recognition. Yet the possibility of such recognition is always present.

Translating that term to critical awareness and engagement, I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer. Education as the practice of freedom was continually undermined by professors who were actively hostile to the notion of student participation. Freire’s work affirmed that education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor.

Part of the luxury and privilege of the role of teacher/professor today is the absence of any requirement that we be self-actualized. Not surprisingly, professors who are not concerned with inner well-being are the most threatened by the demand on the part of students for liberatory education, for pedagogical processes that will aid them in their own struggle for self-actualization.

This fear is present because many professors have intensely hostile responses to the vision of liberatory education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Within professorial circles, individuals often complain bitterly that students want classes to be “encounter groups.” While it is utterly unreasonable for students to expect classrooms to be therapy sessions, it is appropriate for them to hope that the knowledge received in these settings will enrich and enhance them.

Caring about whether all students fulfill their responsibility to contribute to learning in the classroom is not a common approach in what Freire has called the “banking system of education” where students are regarded merely as passive consumers. Since so many professors teach from that standpoint, it is difficult to create the kind of learning community that can fully embrace multiculturalism.

Certainly many white male students have brought to my classroom an insistence on the authority of experience, one that enables them to feel that anything they have to say is worth hearing, that indeed their ideas and experience should be the central focus of classroom discussion. The politics of race and gender within white supremacist patriarchy grants them this “authority” without their having to name the desire for it. They do not attend class and say, “I think that I am superior intellectually to my classmates because I am white and male and that my experiences are much more important than any other group’s.” And yet their behavior often announces this way of thinking about identity, essence, subjectivity.

Fuss argues that “it is the unspoken law of the classroom not to trust those who cannot cite experience as the indisputable grounds of their knowledge. Such unwritten laws pose perhaps the most serious threat to classroom dynamics in that they breed suspicion amongst those inside the circle and guilt (sometimes anger) amongst those outside the circle.” Yet she does not discuss who makes these laws, who determines classroom dynamics. Does she perhaps assert her authority in a manner that unwittingly sets up a competitive dynamic by suggesting that the classroom belongs more to the professor than to the students, to some students more than others?

As a teacher, I recognize that students from marginalized groups enter classrooms within institutions where their voices have been neither heard nor welcomed, whether these students discuss facts—those which any of us might know—or personal experience. My pedagogy has been shaped to respond to this reality. If I do not wish to see these students use the “authority of experience” as a means of asserting voice, I can circumvent this possible misuse of power by bringing to the classroom pedagogical strategies that affirm their presence, their right to speak, in multiple ways on diverse topics. This pedagogical strategy is rooted in the assumption that we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge, that this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience. If experience is already invoked in the classroom as a way of knowing that coexists in a nonhierarchical way with other ways of knowing, then it lessens the possibility that it can be used to silence. When I teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in introductory courses on black women writers, I assign students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory. Each person reads that paragraph aloud to the class. Our collective listening to one another affirms the value and uniqueness of each voice. This exercise highlights experience without privileging the voices of students from any particular group. It helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our experiences and provides a limited...

In the institutions where I have taught, the prevailing pedagogical model is authoritarian, hierarchical in a coercive and often dominating way, and certainly one where the voice of the professor is the “privileged” transmitter of knowledge. Usually these professors devalue including personal experience in classroom discussion. Fuss admits to being wary of attempts to censor the telling of personal histories in the classroom on the basis that they have not been “adequately ‘theorized’,” but she indicates throughout this chapter that on a fundamental level she does not believe that the sharing of personal experience can be a meaningful addition to classroom discussions. If this bias informs her pedagogy, it is not surprising that invocations of experience are used aggressively to assert a privileged way of knowing, whether against her or other students. If a professor’s pedagogy is not liberatory, then students will probably not compete for value and voice in the classroom.

Until white women can confront their fear and hatred of black women (and vice versa), until we can acknowledge the negative history which shapes and informs our contemporary interaction, there can be no honest, meaningful dialogue between the two groups.

Has this happened?

With the increasing institutionalization and professionalization of feminist work focused on the construction of feminist theory and the dissemination of feminist knowledge, white women have assumed positions of power that enable them to reproduce the servant-served paradigm in a radically different context. Now black women are placed in the position of serving white female desire to know more about race and racism, to “master” the subject.

Talking with groups of women about whether they thought feminist movement has had a transformative impact on relations between white and black women, I heard radically different responses. Most white women felt there had been a change, that they were more aware of race and racism, more willing to assume accountability and engage in antiracist work. Black women and women of color were adamant that little had changed, that despite recent white female focus on race, racist domination is still a factor in personal encounters. They felt that the majority of white women still assert power even as they address issues of race. As one black woman put it, “It burns me up to be treated like shit by white women who are busy getting their academic recognition, promotions, more money, et cetera, doing ‘great’ work on the topic of race.” Some black women I spoke with suggested that it was fear that their resources would be appropriated by white women that led them to avoid participating in feminist movement.

If perhaps we look at where I really do see my identity, which is more often as a writer, maybe I’m much less flexible in imagining that practice than I am in seeing myself as a professor. 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.”

Colleagues say to me, ‘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. Instead, some of us think, “I must return to the traditional way of doing it, otherwise I don’t get the respect, and the students don’t get the education they deserve because they don’t listen.” When I was a student, I embraced any professor who wanted to create more progressive teaching practices. I still remember the excitement I felt when I took my first class where the teacher wanted to change how we sat, where we moved from sitting in rows to a circle where we could look at one another. That change forced us to recognize one another’s presence. We couldn’t sleepwalk our way to knowledge. Nowadays, there are times when students resist sitting in a circle. They devalue that shift, because fundamentally, they don’t want to be participants.

When I enter the classroom at the beginning of the semester the weight is on me to establish that our purpose is to be, for however brief a time, a community of learners together. It positions me as a learner. But I’m also not suggesting that I don’t have more power. And I’m not trying to say we’re all equal here. I’m trying to say that we are all equal here to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning context.

There are times when I walk into my class and the students seem absolutely bored out of their minds. And I say to them, “What’s up? Everybody seems to be really bored today. There seems to be a lack of energy. What should we do? What can we do?” I might say, “Clearly the direction we’re moving in doesn’t seem to be awakening your senses, your passions right now.” My intent is to engage them more fully. Often students want to deny that they are collectively bored. They want to please me. Or they don’t want to be critical. At such times I must stress that, “I’m not taking this personally. It’s not just my job to make this class work. It’s everyone’s responsibility.” They might reply, “Well it’s exam time,” or “It’s this kind of time,” or “It’s the beginning of spring,” or “We just don’t want to be sitting here.” And then I try to say, “Well, then, what can we do? How can we approach our subject to make it more interesting?”

bh That brings us back to grades. Many professors are afraid of allowing nondirected thought in the classroom for fear that deviation from a set agenda will interfere with the grading process. 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. RS In most of the courses I teach, I take the position that I am observing. I am there to observe and evaluate the work that’s being done.

bh When you acknowledge that we are observers, it means that we are workers in the classroom. To do that work well we can’t be simply standing in front of the class reading. If I’m to know whether a student is participating I have to be listening, I have to be recording, and I have to be thinking beyond that moment. 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. RS I think that’s a really important point. Many students feel they could never presume to evaluate their own work positively. Someone else will decide how hard or how well they are working. And so there is already a devaluation of their own effort. Our task is to empower students so that they have the skills to assess their academic growth properly. bh 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.

Though it has become common in contemporary culture to talk about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves, particularly spirituals, less is said about the grammatical construction of sentences in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured world of the slave. When the slaves sang “nobody knows de trouble I see—” their use of the word “nobody” adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase “no one,” for it was the slave’s body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the sentence structure, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning, so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more than the oppressor’s language.

Realizing that my students were uncertain about expresssions of care and love in the classroom, I found it necessary to teach on the subject. I asked students once: “Why do you feel that the regard I extend to a particular student cannot also be extended to each of you? Why do you think there is not enough love or care to go around?” To answer these questions they had to think deeply about the society we live in, how we are taught to compete with one another. They had to think about capitalism and how it informs the way we think about love and care, the way we live in our bodies, the way we try to separate mind from body.