bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Teaching to Trangress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks.

“The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. And if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere” (7)

“Excitement in higher ed was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress” (7).

“Agenda has to be flexible, had to allow for spontaneous shifts in direction. Students had to be seen in their particularity as individuals and interacted with according to their needs” (7).

Transgressions

“A movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom” (12).

“Progressive, holistic education, “engaged pedagogy” is ore demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy” (15).

Radical Pedagogy (this term includes critical and/or feminist perspectives) (difference between liberatory, radical and critical pedagogy??):

1. everyone’s presence is acknowledge; professor must genuinely value everyone’s presence (8).
2. Excitement generated through collective effort (8)
3. Create a sustained a learning community
4. Influenced by Freire’s “conscientization”—critical awareness and engagement; praxis—action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. (14)
5. Values student expression
6. Place where teacher grows, as well as students; share and take risks with your students
7. Share personal narratives—both for professors and students. “It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. (21)
8. “making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39)
9. race, class, sex.
10. Hear each other; listen to each other; no student should remain invisible in the classroom; she makes verbal contributions a requirement in class (41) “Collective listening to one another affirms the vale and uniqueness of each voice…it helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our experiences and provides a limited sense of the experiences that may inform how we think and what we say” (84)
11. Experiences should be valued (84) “it is a way of knowing” (84)
12. Combining the analytical and experiential is a richer way of knowing (89)
13. Voice. “Coming to voice is not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically—to come to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects. (148)
14. Critical thinking!!!!

Writing=theoretical talk (70); theory emerges from efforts to make sense of everyday life experiences, from my efforts to intervene critically in my life and lives of others. This to me is what makes feminist transformation possible. Personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile ground of production of liberatory feminist theory…forms base of our theory making” (70)