Teaching To Transgress

by bell hooks

Indeed, my all-black grade schools became the location where I experienced learning as revolution.

a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial.

Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission.

my teachers made sure they “knew” us. They knew our parents, our economic status, where we worshipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family. I

My effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family experience.

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone.

Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle.

obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us.

Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat ...

education was no longer about the practice of freedom.

the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic.

the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination.

sustained the belief that learning at its most powerful could indeed liberate.

It surprised and shocked me to sit in classes where professors were not excited about teaching, where they did not seem to have a clue that education was about the practice of freedom.

we were to learn obedience to authority.

a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an...

the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a pla...

used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power.

The banking system of education (based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and used at a later date) did not interest me. I wanted to become a critical thinker.

were made to feel that we were there not to learn but to prove that we were the equal of whites. We were there to prove this by showing how well we could become clones of our peers. As we constantly confronted biases, an undercurrent of stress diminished our learning experience.

And even though I taught my first class as a graduate student on black women writers from a feminist perspective, it was in the context of a Black Studies program. At that time, I found, white women professors were not eager to nurture any interest in feminist thinking and scholarship on the part of black female students if that interest included critical challenge.

These critiques were not always encouraged or well received, but they were allowed. That small acceptance of critical interrogation was a crucial challenge inviting us as students to think seriously about pedagogy in relation to the practice of freedom.

The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring.

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process.

excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement.

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.

That responsibility is relative to status.

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. Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community.

My pedagogical practices have emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.

To do so would undermine the insistence that engaged pedagogy recognize each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience.

There is a serious crisis in education. Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach. More than ever before in the recent history of this nation, educators are compelled to confront the biases that have shaped teaching practices in our society and to create new ways of knowing, different strategies for the sharing of knowledge. We cannot address this crisis if progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of our regard.

The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.

undermined by teachers and students alike who seek to use it as a platform for opportunistic concerns ra...

teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the “teachers” who have touched me deeply with their work.

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,

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 ...

That notion of mutual labor was affirmed by Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism, the focus on practice in conjunction with contemplation. His philosophy was similar to Freire’s emphasis on “praxis”—ac...

Thich Nhat Hanh always speaks of the teach...

Progressive, holistic education, “engaged pedagogy” is more demanding

than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being. That means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.

I was slowly becoming estranged from education. Finding Freire in the midst of that estrangement was crucial to my survival as a student. His work offered

both a way for me to understand the limitations of the type of education I was receiving and to discover alternative strategies for learning and teaching.

It was particularly disappointing to encounter white male professors who claimed to follow Freire’s model even as their pedagogical practices...

I needed to know that professors did not have to be dictators in the classroom.

career, I believed that personal success was intimately linked with self-actualization. My