Join our Email Newsletter


[Click To Enlarge]

Email A Friend - Gift Reminder

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom


Availability:
In Stock

Price:
$27.95
$16.99*
Part No:0415908086
Manufacturer:

Routledge

MFG Part:

Customer Rating:
3.5 / 5.0
Qty:





Overview
Details
Reviews
Accessories


    bell hooks, one of America's leading black intellectuals, shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratcic participation.


    You might also like:


    Extremely Good Segue to Freire2008-01-075 / 5
    This is the third of three books on liberation pedagogy that I picked up, the other two being Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

    This book is a collection of essays by a woman of color who studied with Freire and found in his works her own liberation and her inspiration to take his ideas and practices further.

    I am shocked early on to realize that her description of black schools prior to desegregation as better, because their teachers were passionate about helping them excel, whereas in integrated schools they were treated as second class citizens and taught obedience, rings true.

    I see feminist pedagogy in a new more positive light.

    The author represents a unique interplay among anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.

    She resonates with me when she speaks of the crisis in education; of our need for a totally renewed educational environment in which biases must be confronted and students liberated.

    Her strong statement that education should be the practice of freedom is repeated in many different ways throughout the book.

    She states, and I have three sons in public school who would agree, that transgressing wrong-headed boundaries is liberating and entirely called for. She discusses teachers as healers, and throughout this book I gain a deeper broader sense of the pain that minorities and women take pains to repress or conceal because the educational environment is not safe for revelation, only obedience.

    I am quite taken by her discussion of the importance of wholeness in teaching, and her engaging discussion of how many professors, especially white mailes, are social misfits who think they can separate their teaching (one-way, authoritarian) without having to engage with students of be whole themselves. She is especially hard on the manner in which they treat the classroom as personal fiefdoms where they can exercise unchallenged authority.

    She says that resistance must include the unconvering of lost knowledge. I am reminded of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

    She quotes Martin Luther King in emphasizing, as he did, that shared values and a focus on people are essential is we are to contain, in his words, "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism."

    She teaches that cultural diversity is INCLUSIVE, and it is not about substituting one culture over another in the relation pecking order. I am reminded of two books I recently reviewed, The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations and The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

    She states that teaching that does not include explicit awareness of race, sex, or class, lacks liberating context.

    She cites Terry Eagleton who says "Children make the best theorists," for not being indoctrinated, and I am reminded of how many arguments I have lost to my 18-year-old when "because I say so" just does not suffice.

    I am fascinated by her discussion of how standards can suppresses, norms can neutralize.

    She spends time on the importance of theory as a space, a place, for sense-making and reconciliation.

    She cites Full in noting that the boundaries between insiders and outsiders contain information rather than allowing the dissemination of knowledge. I am reminded of The Pathology of Power - A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety.

    The author offers a very effective critique of the ignorance, stereotyping, and lack of understanding with which white professors wrote about black reality.

    I am not doing justice to the essays on existentialism and on black-white women in relation and in critique of one another, but she notes that resolution between them demands joint collective dialog.

    As the book of essays winds down I have a few notes:

    + Habit versus voice

    + Must teach students how to LISTEN

    + Being a teacher is about BEING with people

    + Pedagogy can be, should be, political activism

    + Queens in New York City has 17,000 people speaking 66 languages

    + Class matters, and is too often left unaddressed. I am reminded of Global Class War

    Her final note: Learning is a place where paradise can be created. We must learn to transgress freely, and thereby demonstrate that education IS freedom. I am reminded of Improper behavior.

    I would not have appreciated this book and the author's insights as easily had I not first read t he two works by Friere that I cite above. The author honors and exceeds her model, this is a very fine book, and I would add in passing that I also found Cornell West's Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism to be a Nobel-level reflection.

    Very highly recommended.

    Also recommended:
    Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development.
    Excellent colletction of essays2007-07-314 / 5
    I couldn't put this book down! The essays were very thought provoking and interesting. The only section I skipped was the one on Paulo Freire. It was a little too dry from the beginning. I feel that the only people who won't like this book are the ones who choose to judge hooks on her word choice and try to read her words with their own connotations rather than the way she intended. Yes, she uses terms like "white supremecist" a lot. If you take that in the way we tend to use it in common language, you would think she believes that white people knowingly have some sort of racist agenda against other people; to draw that conclusion, you have to assume that she's just another black person blaming white people for their situations. It is clear that hooks is not at all playing a blame game, but is instead just calling it how she sees it. You have to read the book in its entirety to grasp the points she's trying to make. I also really liked how she included little stories from her own personal experience. She also attempts to explain her theory with support from events in history. Overall, I thought it was a great book. The vocabulary wasn't extremely difficult, so it could really be read by anyone, yet the points are very difficult to understand if you come to this book with preconceived ideas of how black women think or believe that your own life experience is the only truth. I would recommend this book to ANY college student, anyone interested in education, and also people who enjoy thinking. Definitely not a book for someone who doesn't want to have to think as they read.
    Hooks and Hate Speech2005-09-262 / 5
    We read this book in class at the graduate level and her ideas caused a great deal of controversy. Some loved her and others were sure she was radical with no agenda except for blaming others for her anger. I thought that her book was non-academic because it was not an academic piece of writing. Color or gender have nothing to do with it. I was not impressed by her ranting against white middle class educational values because she was a beneficiary of a scholarship that helped her achieve her education. Besides, at least in this book, she can't get past her anger to give real examples of transformative education in the classroom, except to assure the reader she practiced it. Not good enough. Playing the race-card, flagrant self-promotion and hate speech is not enough. Being a revolutionary requires more than a polemic against the things you don't like. I wasn't impressed.
    The Road Is Long2005-07-124 / 5
    If you teach--whatever you teach; wherever you teach--please consider reading this book. Some of these reviews demonstrate the urgency of cultural transformation. Transformation begins with dialogue among learners--in a field, by the side of the road, in an urban classroom, even in the academy where transformative learning is most deeply challenged.
    Critical Analysis of Teaching to Transgress2005-04-033 / 5
    Bell Hooks is an a highly achieved academic who overcame the oppression of a family that discouraged free thought (p. 60), being a black woman in a "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (p. 71), and an education system wrought with oppression to teach a variety of courses as an adjunct in ivy league universities. Hooks states that education is the practice of freedom and challenges her students by aggressively opposing authorities, parents (p. 61), fraternities (p. 20), social norms, white oppression (p. 32), the English language, and white feminists, to name a few. By practicing engaged pedagogy, Hooks successfully rebels from the "banking system" of education that states students are to learn information provided by the professor. The system also-according to Hooks-encourages professors to remain uncontroversial as a means of ensuring security and tenure in their academic posts.
    The following pages will investigate and critically review several positions proposed by Bell Hooks within the text, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
    Self Actualization
    Though she does not define self actualization in her work, acknowledge the work of Abraham Maslow who spent a great deal of his career writing on the characteristics of self-actualized individuals, or mention the prerequisites to self-actualization (being devoid of psychopathology, using the extent of your natural abilities), Hooks refers to self-actualization and her disappointment in the lack of it with "the university" (p. 16). She states that as opposed to promoting self-actualization, academic institutions are instead havens for persons who are book smart and introverts-which Hooks describes as "unfit for social interaction" (p. 16). This addition of "necessary extroversion" for self-actualization is a dramatic and much needed contradiction to Maslow's study of self-actualized individuals, which shows self-actualized persons are generally more detached from others, as compared to the norm.
    Regarding self-actualization still, though Maslow's subjects were profoundly non-religiously oriented, Hooks promotes an integration of spiritual and intellectual education, stating that separating spirituality from learning is to do a disservice and-in her educational experience-to find a professor that attuned to integrating his/her spiritual nature in teaching is a "rare treasure" (p. 17). She states further and brilliantly convolutes her point with a totally unrelated topic of dominance in the classroom: "Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom" (p. 17).
    Though some white patriarchal academics maintain Hooks' work is non-academic solely because she is a black feminist (p. 71), Hooks proves otherwise by discovering the phenomenon of introverted academics becoming oppressive tyrants in the classroom.
    In continued regard to dominance issues, they are exclusively presented as a characteristic of white males, as Hooks states:
    It was particularly disappointing to encounter white male professors who claimed to follow Freire's model even as their pedagogical practices were mired in structures of domination, mirroring the styles of conservative professors even as they subjects from a more pedagogical standpoint (p. 17-18, italics added).
    Safety
    Hooks states regarding safety, "It is the absence of feeling safety that often promotes prolonged silence or lack of student engagement" (p. 39) and writes that with transformative pedagogy-which she encourages-the classroom is a democratic venue where all students have the obligation and privilege to participate. Though safety is important, a professor's focus should be on community, and a binding commitment to the common good (p. 40).
    Community, according to Hooks promotes diversity, and students (as well as professors) need to spend time learning "different epistemologies" that are held by students, as well as "other ways of knowing." Reportedly, many of her students are dissatisfied with the time Hooks spends off topic during her classes and may state something to the degree "Why are we talking so much about feminism in a math class?" Hooks states that she has learned throughout the years to ignore these complaints, and that students who do not desire to talk about feminism in non-feminism related courses will realize it is good from them at a later time, and will often contact Hooks to tell her how right she is (p. 42).
    Some additional interesting points by Hooks; who writes her text based completely on her experiences and reactions to others' works she has read that are based (I can confirm with many of them, Thich Nhat Hanh for example) completely on the reflective experiences of those authors, Hooks finds that her courses on feminism often go well except "those times when students abuse the freedom of the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personal experience" (p. 15).
    Later, hooks criticizes white male students for valuing essentialist standpoints of logic, which oppress the "knowledge of experience" possessed by the minorities in the classroom (p. 81). It is stated voices from marginalized groups are given space to "speak from experience" only then the basis of experience is needed in a discussion. Instead, Hooks suggests that the "knowledge of experience" should be equal to any factual knowledge white male students possess. In addition, regarding the experiences of white male students-though white male students are preoccupied with objective knowledge-Hooks states:
    The politics or race and gender within white supremacist patriarchy grants them their "authority" without their having name or 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 announces this way of thinking about identity, essence, subjectivity.
    These are very insightful points by Hooks, and her ability to read the minds of white students is compelling, trumped only by her ability to realize all white male students are homogenous in their perspectives of supremacy and dominance. Putting Hooks' tenets together in sum; white male students do not state that they are dominant even though they oppress, are attuned toward non-experiential objective knowledge, and incorrectly challenge minorities in the class who have "useful" experiential knowledge with their un-useful "white" experiential knowledge.
    Lastly, such arrogance does not end with white males but transcends even to female white feminist academics, for Hooks states
    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 (p. 50, italics added).
    Language
    Hooks most brilliant arguments are those regarding language. Hooks states, "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you" (p.167), and repeats this line as a dramatic special-effect that is well placed in her academic literature (that is wrongly labeled by white supremacist researchers as "not academic enough").
    English is the language of conquest and domination, and "it is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest" (p. 169) because the white people murdered Native Americans, according to Hook's knowledge of experience.
    More profound than the claims Hooks makes is the information that Hooks omits from her writings. For example, black people are allowed to speak their native languages if they desire. It is not discouraged, and is comparatively equal to the situation of Caucasian men who's ancestors are indigenous to countries that do not speak English (France, Italy, Russia, etc.). Second, African persons do not speak one language that binds them as a group, but many different African languages. Third, the Americans that went into physical battle against the Native Americans are many years deceased. Fourth, English, the language of oppression, is not really spoken in America for English (from England) is significantly different than American English that this country speaks as its official language, and American English is constantly evolving/changing. Therefore, American English is different from the language used to exterminate Native Americans. Fifth, though it is true an academic submission written in Ebonics would not be accepted as appropriate, such may have to deal with the fact that Ebonics is promoted as a second language among its promoters-such as Russian or any other foreign language, which also would not be accepted in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published for English speaking readers. Sixth, if Ebonics is considered an ethnic dialect of English, it is not alone in being considered not appropriate for academic submission-for even white "hillbilly" or "country" dialects are not accepted as proper academic language. Seventh, regarding the "bounding limitations" (p. 171) of the English language, much research contests the notion that language can be "binding." For example, it was believed people speaking English could not understand snow to the depth that northern Native Americans can, for northern Native Americans have seven (approximately) words for snow, while the English language has only one. It was later found the additional words were descriptive, such as "wet snow," "soft snow," etc. Eighth, rap music, which according to Hooks "has become one of the spaces where the black vernacular is used to invite the dominant mainstream to listen-to hear-and, to some extent, be transformed" (p. 171) may not be embraced by everyone-not to oppress blacks but-because rap music is often blatantly violent, promotes hatred, greed, and sexual promiscuity. Also contributing may be the high incidence of rap music producers and performers becoming involved in illegal activity, or gang warfare. Ninth, not addressed by Hooks is that poets, musicians, and other writers often create and alter English words in their works, and this is considered acceptable-even encouraged. In fact, some commonly used words in the English language originated as "new" words in music and literature. Lastly, having one language that a nation understands and can communicate with together mutually may not be intrinsically oppressive, but liberating.
    Conclusion
    The 10 rebuttals above are not written as a sincere challenge to Hooks. Instead, they are a blatant "devils advocate" written to display how claims contrary to Hooks' positions are obviously incorrect. That stated, it is difficult for me to clearly see the truth of the situation, being an educated white male. After reading Hooks work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, I am convinced of my oppressive white supremacist attributes; the domination, slaughter, and conquest of my native tongue; and of the uncontestable value of Hooks' experiential knowledge.


    * Current Price/Avail/Qty displayed on website may be delayed by up to 24 hours. Items added to cart and into the checkout process will reflect current price and status of product.