Teaching to Transgress Quotes

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“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.”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“education was about the practice of freedom.”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Many women do not join organized resis­tance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppres­sion. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme re­strictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“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. School”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“...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...any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public,”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“This is one of the tragedies in education today. We have a lot of people who don’t recognize that being a teacher is being with people.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“To fulfill that 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.”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“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.”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress

“The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk — and talk back. And, yes, often this feedback is critical. 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.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s lib­eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos­al of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. 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 per­ spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo­ ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“I feel that the way I teach has been fundamentally structured by the fact that I never wanted to be an academic, so that I never had a fantasy of myself as a professor already worked out in my imagination before I entered the classroom. I think that’s been meaningful, because it’s freed me up to feel that the professor is something I become as opposed to a kind of identity that’s already structured and that I carry with me into the classroom.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Hence, any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power. In these settings I learned a lot about the kind of teacher I did not want to become.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“She wanted me to bear witness, to hear again both the naming of her pain and the power that emerged when she felt the hurt go away.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“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?”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“They(students) 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 in how we know what we know. It’s as though many people know that the focus on difference has the potential to revolutionize the classroom and they do not want the revolution to take place.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“I think that one of the unspoken discomforts surrounding the way a discourse of race and gender, and sexual practice has disrupted the academy is precisely 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 think part of why everyone in the culture, and students in general, have a tendency to see professors as people who don’t work is totally tied to that sense of the immobile body.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“My effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being were traced back. Attending”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“...the more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“The focus on covering material precisely is one way to slip back into a banking system. That often happens when teachers ignore the mood of the class, the mood of the season, even the mood of the building. The simple act of recognizing a mood and asking “What’s this about?” can awaken an exciting learning process.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“For example, I am disturbed when all the courses on black history or literature at some colleges and universities are taught solely by white people, not because I think that they cannot know these realities but that they know them differently.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Throughout her chapter, whenever she offers an example of individuals who use essentialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to silence others via their invocation of the “authority of experience,” they are members of groups who historically have been and are oppressed and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of domination already at work in the academy and the classroom silence the voices of individuals from marginalized groups and give space only when on the basis of experience it is demanded.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“In his work Thich Nhat Hanh always speaks of the teacher as a healer.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom