bell hooks.

Teaching to Transgress

Teaching to transgress
THE CLASSROOM AS A LOCATION OF POSSIBILITY

Western metaphysical split between mind/body

• "Suffering. There is a particular knowledge that comes from suffering. It is a way of knowing that is often
expressed through the body" (p. 91).
• "Acknowledging the fact that we are bodies in the classroom has been important for me, especially in
my effort to disrupt the notion of the professor as omnipotent, all-knowing mind" (p. 138).
• "the erasure of the body makes us think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, that are not
particular to whom is sharing the information" (p. 139)

Language (vernacular)

• Standard English: "learning to speak against black vernacular, against ruptured and broken speech of
dispossessed and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of
conquest and domination. In the US, it is the mask which hides so many lost tongues" (p. 168)
• "Official English language that can only express non events involving nobody responsible" (p. 173)
• "In America, we only have the present tense: I am in danger, you are in danger" (p. 174)
• The power of [alternative vernacular] is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but
that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies, crucial to
create a counter-hegemonic worldview" (p. 171) -- she gives the example of spirituals and rap music.
• About vernacular as being "exclusive", containing "fragments of speech that might not be accessible to
every individual: "pedagogically, I encouraged [white students] to think of the moment of not
understanding what someone says as a space to learn" ... "we do not necessarily need to hear and know
what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to "master" or conquer the narrative as a whole, that
we may know in fragments" (p. 174)
• Betraying your origins by speaking academic English / antagonism elite vs working-class -- (p. 182)

Self-actualization of the teacher

• "teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-
being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. The practice of a healer should be
directed towards his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help may
people". (p,15)

Dialogue between the students and getting them to listening to their colleagues

• Who speaks? Who listens and why? The teacher, even though s/he is not giving away "power", in not
the center of the dynamic anymore.
 • "In my classes, students keep a journal and often write paragraphs during class which they read to one
another" (p. 40, again in 186)
• p. 84
• "Understanding and appreciating our different locations" -- (white, female, city, middle class, etc)
• "...how deeply engrained is the student's perception that the professors can and should be dictators" (p.
147).
• "Even though students are speaking, they don't really know how to listen to other students" (p. 150)
• "In regards to pedagogical practices, we must intervene to alter the existing pedagogical structure and
to teach students how to listen, how to hear one another" ... "It means taking seriously what ones say"
(p. 150).
• "I see it as a fundamental responsibility of the teacher to show by example the ability to listen to others
seriously" (p. 150)
• LOOK at each other; engage in acts of recognition with one another, and do not just talk to the professor
(186)

Space for difference, dissidence, conflict and antagonism

• "Confronting one another across differences means that we must change ideas about how we learn;
rather than fearing conflict, we have to find ways to use it as a catalyst for new thinking, for growth" (p.
113)
• "the focus on difference has the potential to revolutionize the classroom" (p. 145)
• "Most students are not comfortable exerting this right [free speech] - especially if it means they must
give voice to thoughts, ideas or feelings that go against the grain, that are unpopular. This censoring
process is only one way bourgeois over determine social behavior in the classroom". (p. 179)

Personal experience in the classroom

• "offer education that makes the connection between what they are learning and their overall life
experiences" (p.19)
• "linking confessional narratives to academic discussions can show how experience can illuminate and
enhance our understanding of academic material" (p.21)
• knowledge that "connects to "lived" realities outside the classroom" (p. 65)
• "we all bring experiential knowledge t the classroom that can enhance our learning experience" (p. 84)
• "Critical pedagogies of liberation necessarily embrace experience, confessions and testimony as relevant
ways of knowing, as important vital dimensions of any learning process" (p. 89, +)
• "a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply
changing the curriculum" (p. 148).
• "one of the reasons I appreciate people linking the personal experience to the academics is that the
more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen. So one of my
teaching strategies is to redirect their attention away from my voice to one another's voice" (p. 151).
The "narrative informant"

• "experience does not make one an expert" For example, if a novel is read by a Korean American author,
white student turn to a student from a Korean background to explain what they do not understand. It
places an unfair responsibility on that student.

On the complexity/exclusionary academic language

• "There are so many settings in this country where the written word has only slight visual meaning,
where individuals who cannot read or write find no use for a published theory however lucid or opaque.
Hence, any theory that cannot be shares in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the
public." (p. 64)
• "my decisions about writing style, about not using conventional academic formats, are political decisions
motivated by the desire to be inclusive, to reach as many readers as possible in many different
locations" (p. 71)

The possibility of understanding others if our experience is different

• "For Said, it is both dangerous and misleading to base an identity politics upon rigid theories of
exclusions that stipulates for instance that only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews
can understand colonial experience, only Jews can understand the Shoa, only colonial subjects can
understand colonial experience" (p. 82)
• "Truthfully, if I had been given he opportunity to study African American critical thought from a
progressive Back professor instead of a progressive white woman, I would have chosen the black
person" (p. 90).

The special "right" to talk about oppression if experienced

• Does experience of oppression confers a special jurisdiction over the right to speak about that
oppression?
• "I would ask to consider whether there is any "special" knowledge to be acquired by hearing oppressed
individuals speak from their experience that might justify a special space for such a discussion.

Collaboration between teacher, multidisciplinarity

• "Combine theory and practice in order to affirm and demonstrate pedagogical practices engaged in
creating anew language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentering authority, and rewriting the
institutional and discursive borderlands in which politics becomes a condition for reasserting the
relationship between agency, power and struggle" (p.129)
• "Given this agenda, it is crucial that critical thinkers who want to change our teaching practices talk to
one another, collaborate in a discussion that crosses boundaries and creates a space for intervention". --
She introduced her collaboration with the white male scholar.
• "There has to be more emphasis on job-sharing and job-switching in the interest of creating an
environment where engaged teaching can be sustained" (p. 166)
Public vs private

• "Repressive education practices are more acceptable at state institutions than at places like Oberlin or
Yale." (p. 148)

Flexibility, risk taking

• The professor must be willing to change his agenda, not being disappointed if sticking to the lesson plan
is now working.
• "Fear of losing control in the classroom often leads individuals professors to fall into a conventional
teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively" (p. 188)

Grades

• "A more flexible grading process must go hand in hand with a transformed classroom." (p. 157)
• "The obsession with good grades has so much to do with fear of failure" (p. 157)

The possibility of progressive pedagogy in overcrowded classes

• "Even the best, most engaged classroom can fail under the weight of too many people ... we have to
insist on limiting classroom size" (p.160)
• "If classes became so full that it is impossible to know students names, to spend quality time with each
of them, then the effort to build a learning community fails" (p. 204)
• "The more engaged classroom becomes overcrowded, the more it is in danger of being a spectacle, a
place of entertainment" (p. 161).

Changing institutions as teachers

• "I think that it would enhance our practice if professors didn't always teach at the same type of
institution" (p. 161)
• "Ideally, education should be a place where the need for diverse teaching methods and styles would be
valued, encouraged, seen as essential to learning" (p. 203)

Addressing class in the classroom

• More than a question of money: "class is about values, attitude, social relations and the bias that
informs knowledge" (178)
• Bourgeois values in the classroom create a barrier, blocking the possibility of confrontation and conflict,
warding off dissidence by a "social etiquette" taught by example and reinforced by a system of rewards
(178)

Love and Eros

• Related her experience of behavior change when she was sexually attracted to a student
• "When Eros is present in the classroom setting, then love is bound to flourish. (p. 198)
• "Teachers who love students and are loved by them are still "suspect" in the academy (p. 198)
 • "To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classroom where it has never been, professors
must find again the place of Eros within themselves and together allow the mind and the body to feel
and know desire" (p.199)

Critical thinking; an essential key to engaged pedagogy

• "Critical thinking was the primary element allowing the possibility of change"
• "Without the capacity to think critically about our selves and our lives, none of us would be able to move
forward, to change, to grow. In our society, which is profoundly anti-intellectual, critical thinking is not
encouraged. (p. 202)