Teaching to Transgress
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
When I was accepted to my top PhD program, a graduate student who I learned a great deal from during my undergraduate studies gifted me Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom as a gift: a guide to transition me from my philosophical journey to my pedagogical one. I was thirsty for a different way of educating our youth and in hooks I found a fountain. I graduated with my Master’s of Arts in Education this past Spring. I am now in a different program, not in education. Still, and perhaps even more now than ever, I am thinking about how much I loved being in conversation with students. I am aching to be back in the classroom and learning how to be the type of educator who can get students excited about learning again. I am currently on a 6-month break from teaching. Something about letting the body rest because I don’t teach with my mind alone. While I may no longer be in the discipline of education, there will never be a moment in time (and now space!) where my being belongs anywhere else than in the praxis of pedagogy. I have many thoughts about how and why our classrooms (in K-12 and higher ed) are structured the way they are, but for this series’ book review, let’s learn about education as the practice of freedom.
What is the purpose of education within the context of the United States? Through the lens of Black educators: educating our youth is fundamentally political (pg. 2). Before desegregated schooling, hooks describes her educational journey as one where teachers were “enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial,” (pg. 2). During the post-desegregation era, hooks describes finding herself, alongside her peers, to be removed from a classroom where joy was present. School was understood as a political space because Black students were always positioned to combat deficit ideologies posited onto them by their white counterparts. hooks notes that what was once a political space that was counter-hegemonic became a place where Black students found themselves “only responding and reacting to white folks,” (pg. 4). Through a deeply rooted feminist lens, bell hooks discusses the importance of pleasure, dialogue, and how teachers can implement different methods of pedagogy. It is within the context of U.S. colonization and history that hooks is situating us, and it is beyond the traditional Western K-12 schooling and higher education practices that she pushes us to extend ourselves towards being in the community. Teaching to Transgress pedagogically disrupts Western traditional understandings of positions and roles within the classroom. Across chapters that discuss race, class, language, pleasure, failings, and successes, along with dialogues between educators from different places and spaces, Teaching to Transgress is a book that may be focused on teaching and learning, but it is also about community: how to build community within and outside the walls of the classroom.
Going back and forth between theory, dialogue, and praxis throughout the essays in the book, hooks provides a framework and a methodology for education. For hooks, pleasure is still a gap that requires further exploration in higher academia: “Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom,” (pg. 7). Through a feminist standpoint, hooks portrays a possibility for enacting pleasure in higher education classrooms through the reading and discussion of theory, a recognition of our passion of experience and remembrance, and deeper understanding of race, gender, class, and language. Critiquing traditional Western practices of teaching, hook locates us in theory, where she found a “location for healing,” (pg. 59). It is in the fifth chapter, Theory as Liberatory Practice, where hooks makes it clear that theory in and of itself is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. Theory must be followed by dialogue, and dialogue must be followed by action. We have to will ourselves to enact the theoretical discussions and conversations: they have to come in and outside of the classroom. Conversations must also be accessible, which hooks credits as her reason for why her published works are not delivered in the conventional academic formats. Acknowledging that there are negative and positive consequences to her writing style, she states that her decisions to write in a more accessible way “are political decisions motivated by the desire to be inclusive, to reach as many readers as possible in as many different locations,” (pg. 71).
Much of the examples hooks brings up throughout her text embrace care and a deconstruction of what Western classrooms look like, as well as how teacher and student relationships are practiced in higher academia (and how they could be reimagined!). Intentional dialogue with one another naturally encourages teachers to rethink the power dynamics that exist in the ways we have historically understood and described a teacher-student relationship. Dialogue also assists us in forming stronger classroom relationships between students themselves: “Hearing each other’s voices, individual thoughts, and sometimes associating these voices with personal experience makes us more acutely aware of each other,” (pg. 187). When I was first hired as a Teaching Assistant, it was through Zoom University. Having been in classrooms before becoming a TA, I was able to notice the increase in some of the preexisting issues educators at all levels had been discussing, as well as some new issues that I still see us working through noticing, understanding, and unlearning come to life via online teaching and learning. Most noticeably, I was made acutely aware of the ways we had erased the body in academia (pg. 139). The erasure of the body to prioritize the mind always leads me back to one of my favorite dialogues, that between bell hooks and Ron Scapp. It is in the Building a Teaching Community chapter and dialogue where hooks reminds us that we are all subjects in history, and we are encouraged to intake a professor’s word as neutral, objective facts that are not to be questioned by and through separating their body from their mind. I thought of this when I began TAing in person 2 years after Zoom University. Remembering that education is always political, I had to remember that the position of my body was always encouraging a type of dynamic. I wanted my dynamic with the students I was working with to be the type that had my office hours filled. I have always used my body to move around the classroom; I moved around so much one time a student told me they forgot which door was for the front of the classroom and which one was for the back!
I continued to think about the ways we as TAs could continue to nurture our relationships with the undergraduate population during the UC strikes. I thought too, about what students who were supportive of the strike would say, and a lot of them referenced how much they had learned about the UC system from graduate students, and how much they cared for graduate students they considered friends and mentors. I wonder, if we were to have stronger relationships with our undergraduate student population, what would that mean for the way we disrupt the UC system? The running joke in academia is that no one wants to be a professor, but we all lie so we can get jobs. In understanding that teaching is of low priority in many of these R1 institutions, I pose the following question: where is the ethical outcry for the lack of pleasure in the classroom? If you are a graduate student, you will most likely be TAing: it’s the perfect time to get to know how you want to create joy in your classroom, encourage better relationships between educators and students, and work towards an education that functions as the practice of freedom.
Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks is an interdisciplinary text that connects multiple threads that all lead us back to understanding the evolution of education in the U.S., and different ways of thinking about pedagogy. Truly, I don’t think you have to be a teacher, or in a position of leadership, to benefit from the knowledges that have come out of this text. For the most part, we’ve all been students. For teachers, this book will push us time and time again to think about how we can be better educators to the students who come into our classrooms. As hooks reminds us, in spaces like colleges and universities, teaching is more often than not the least valued professional task (pg. 203). The reminder is spread out throughout the text and it is coupled with another reminder: education can serve as a practice for freedom. Interlinking our desire to bring pleasure to the classroom is also, then, the recognition that to be a teacher, is to be with the people, it is to be in community and dedicated to eradicating premature death in spaces that have historically extracted, alienated, and deserted.
At the beginning of this book review, I mentioned a couple of things, mainly that I missed the classroom and that I am currently on a 6-month break from teaching. I also said that I was thirsty, and in hooks, I found a fountain. When I gave one of my first presentations, I was asked about burnout, and said students rejuvenated me. I want to stress that this does not mean that I do not find myself needing a break from time to time. To be transparent: teaching kept me from losing hope. I mean it when I say that the undergraduate population is the best part of my graduate journey. (They are the reason this blog exists in the first place!) There are many parts in this book, particularly in the dialogue between bell hooks and Ron Scapp, where there is a discussion about the need for rest. Students may rejuvenate me, but as discussed throughout this book, there are many other factors that impact our teaching abilities. While I may yearn and ache for the classroom — I know I need to appreciate these 6 months of rest. I know I need rest. bell hooks has supported my mind, body, and soul during my last 4 years of grad school. I would not be so hopelessly dedicated to ensuring my classrooms are filled with joy if I was not once a pushout. I would, equally, not be where I am right now if it was not for the nurturing guidance of bell hooks.
