Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-book review, unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. Which is a common thread running through the first five essays in the text?

A) These essays establish hooks’s credentials to discuss pedagogical issues outside of her own classroom.

B) These essays use autobiographical stories to illustrate how much has changed in education over the years.

C) These essays detail practical classroom applications of hooks’s pedagogical theories.

D) These essays contribute to the reader’s understanding of hooks’s motivations and inspirations.

2. Which is a common thread running through essays 6-10?

A) These essays argue for the centrality of feminism, intersectionality, and understanding across identity groups.

B) These essays promote rigorous introspection for teachers and offer tools for conducting this self-interrogation.

C) These essays demonstrate how hooks’s own academic career has been curtailed and threatened by structural oppression.

D) These essays contrast an ideal expression of hooks’s theories with the compromises the real world requires.

3. Which is a common thread running through the final four essays in the text?

A) These essays advocate for increased attention to and funding for programs that elevate marginalized voices.

B) These essays explore the ramifications of academic theory in everyday life outside the classroom.

C) These essays show how engaged pedagogy can be used to dismantle capitalism through erasing class barriers.

D) These essays explore markers beyond race and gender that can be factors in marginalization.

4. Which is a reasonable statement of a thematic motif that unites most of the essays in Teaching to Transgress?

A) Systemic oppression can be dismantled through accessible theory.

B) Students learn best when their identities are centered in the classroom.

C) Black students deserve to have their culture and language respected in the classroom.

D) The decentering of power in academia is fought hardest by those who fear losing power.

5. Which thematic motif in Teaching to Transgress is best supported by hooks’s style of writing?

A) Teachers have a responsibility to decenter power in the classroom.

B) Academics are too quick to dismiss the value of noncanonical texts.

C) Theory should be accessible and tied to practice if it is to be genuinely relevant.

D) Essentialism can be reductive but experience is still a valid source of knowledge.

6. Which thematic motif in Teaching to Transgress is best supported by hooks’s discussions of the ideas of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh?

A) Teachers are a source of healing but also in need of healing themselves.

B) Classrooms often stigmatize non-majority cultural practices and language.

C) Current pedagogies devalue the role of the body and its passions.

D) Valid theory is informed by both intersectionality and communication between identity groups.

7. What do hooks’s discussions of Friere’s work, the works of white feminist authors, and her collegial relationship with Ron Scapp all demonstrate about hooks?

A) She is disappointed by the casual sexism still prevalent in American culture.

B) She sees value in ideas that do not completely mirror her own.

C) She prioritizes class solidarity over concerns about race and gender.

D) She understands that all people struggle to resist oppression of some kind.

8. What problem does hooks mention during her discussions of Black vernacular, the works of authors such as Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis, and the experiences of lower-class students?

A) Bourgeois values

B) Devaluing of passion

C) The banking model of pedagogy

D) Erasure of identity

9. What problem does hooks see reflected in some of the conflicts she had at home and school, American culture’s rejection of theory, and resistance to changing the American model of education?

A) Devaluing of lived experience

B) Acceptance of essentialism

C) Devaluing of critical thinking

D) Rejection of intersectionality

10. Which best illustrates the realization that hooks comes to about white allies as she contemplates her high school reunion?

A) Hooks’s initial meeting with Paulo Freire

B) Hooks’s experiences leading seminars with Chandra Mohanty

C) Hooks’s experiences teaching the work of Toni Morrison

D) Hooks’s assessment of the work of Adrienne Rich

11. Which classroom technique is hooks modeling through her frequent use of personal anecdotes in Teaching to Transgress?

A) Being vulnerable by linking confessional narratives to academic material

B) Allowing multiple voices to be heard instead of a singular narrative

C) Decentering bourgeois values by showing respect for Black language

D) Encouraging critical thinking and the questioning of academic authority

12. Which chapter most clearly reflects the value hooks places on the kind of education she received in her earliest school experiences?

A) Chapter 5, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”

B) Chapter 10, “Building a Teaching Community: A Dialogue”

C) Chapter 11, “Language: Teaching New Worlds / New Words”

D) Chapter 13, “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”

13. What aspect of hooks’s academic career brings together her earliest academic experiences with her admiration for the work of Paulo Freire?

A) Her ability to bridge the worlds of Black and white feminists

B) Her desire to defend experience as a base of knowledge

C) The union of theory and praxis in her writings and teaching

D) The insistence on viewing Black women through the lens of intersectionality

14. Which of her other ideas is hooks’s commentary about the co-opting of theory by white academics most similar to?

A) Her ideas about the ironic effects of Brown v. Board of Education

B) Her ideas about Standard English in the classroom

C) Her ideas about the lack of follow-through by white allies

D) Her ideas about the suppression of desire in the classroom

15. What larger philosophy that permeates Teaching to Transgress is reflected in the metaphor of sisterhood that hooks uses in Chapter 7?

A) The importance of an equal exchange of ideas and mutual respect between identity groups

B) The power of love to transform classroom experience and empower both students and teachers

C) The causal link between democratizing education and transforming social power structures

D) The necessity of uniting theory and practice in order to create ideas that matter to the majority of people

Long Answer

Compose a response of 2-3 sentences, incorporating text details to support your response.

1. Explain what the choice of names for the interviewer and interviewee in Chapter 4, “Paulo Freire,” signifies about the relationship of Freire’s work to the trajectory of hooks’s career.

2. How do anecdotes from hooks’s own early life illustrate her contention that feminism teaches people to think critically and question authority?