Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

• Genre: Nonfiction; pedagogy essay collection
• Originally Published: 1994
• Reading Level/Interest: College/Adult
• Structure/Length: 14 chapters and introduction; approx. 216 pages; approx. 7 hours, 30 minutes on audio
• Central Concern: This work is a collection of essays reflecting on how classroom environments can marginalize individuals and foster racism and gender discrimination; the author offers theories on pedagogy that instead promote educational systems which work to transgress the boundaries of bias and power and support freedom for all.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Racism and prejudice, sexism

bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), Author

• Bio: 1952-2021; poet, writer, and teacher; born in Kentucky and raised in a racially-segregated community and school system in Hopkinsville, Kentucky; earned a scholarship to Stanford University and graduate degrees at the University of Wisconsin (master’s in English literature) and University of California (Ph.D.); served as a professor at a number of colleges and universities; published over 30 works of nonfiction and other writings in which she explored feminist theory, racism, identity, pedagogy, place, and politics; preferred her pen name uncapitalized to emphasize the topics of her works instead of the writer
• Other Works: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981); Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984); Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996); Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997); Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002); We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003)
• Awards: 1991 American Book Award for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Before Columbus Foundation); 1994 Writer’s Award (Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund); 2001 Image Award nomination for Happy to Be Nappy (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People); 2002 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee for Salvation: Black People and Love; 2002 Children’s Book of the Year for Homemade Love (Bank Street College); 2012 Best Poetry Award for Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (Black Caucus of the American Library Association)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Confronting Divisions in American Education: Moving from the Margins to the Center in the Multicultural Classroom
• The Necessity of Accessible Theory
• Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Explore obstacles faced by marginalized students—and the importance of bell hooks as a figure offering solutions to these obstacles—in order to increase their engagement with and comprehension of hooks’s theories in Teaching to Transgress.
• Read/study paired texts and other brief resources to deepen their understanding of themes related to Confronting Divisions in American Education: Moving from the Margins to the Center in the Multicultural Classroom and Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing.
• Demonstrate their understanding of engaged pedagogy by creating a brief teaching unit using hooks's ideas from Teaching to Transgress.

Construct essay responses analyzing the relationship between hooks’s personal experiences and her theories, among various theories contained in the text, and between the book’s themes of Confronting Divisions in American Education: Moving from the Margins to the Center in the Multicultural Classroom, The Necessity of Accessible Theory, and Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing and the textual elements that support them.