Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

The banking model of education, which emphasizes the memorization and storing of knowledge, is in direct opposition to hooks’s ideas of learning, which she sees as a shared, sacred understanding created through dialogue. She sees the classroom as a place where both the teacher and student create meaning and knowledge. Students must be active participants in the classroom, but teachers also must reflect on their roles and become “self-actualized” before they can effectively teach in the classroom. 

hooks relates her experience in the college classroom, which made her feel estranged from education, but her discovery of Freire, with his emphasis on “liberatory” education, inspired her to maintain her commitment to creating a classroom that didn’t depend on a professor’s need for power and domination. Another crucial thinker for hooks was the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who “offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (14). hooks emphasized that too many professors focus on the “mind” and care for little else.

One exception to classrooms that emphasized the mind/ body split was the feminist classroom, where hooks noted professors were “striving to create participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge” (15). While hooks has witnessed a decline in some feminists’ commitment to this shared conception of the classroom, she does acknowledge the crucial haven that these feminist spaces continue to offer for many students.

She gives an example of “engaged pedagogy” by including a quote from a former student Gary Dauphin, who wrote about what it was like to have hooks as a teacher. While she encouraged his intellectual and spiritual growth, she recognized the limits in her ability to influence students. In this case, hooks thought it would be a bad idea for Dauphin to join a fraternity, but he pledged anyway. They continued their back-and-forth discussion, and Dauphin ultimately decided that his choice to join the fraternity was “not constructive” (20). hooks cites this example of how Dauphin’s growth was dictated not by blindly following hooks’ arguments, but instead developing his sense of understanding through his freedom to choose and to learn.

hooks emphasizes that both professors and students must learn to be vulnerable in the classroom to grow: “It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material” (21). If professors can learn to share their stories and experiences in the classroom to help illuminate academic ideas, then students will feel free to also take this necessary but intimidating step.

hooks opens with an anecdote describing her last-minute decision to attend her 20th high school reunion. She remembers the pain of desegregation, of leaving her beloved black school for the white school, where students endured the racism of the classmates and teachers. She also remembers a white friend, Ken, who, along with his family, embraced her, despite the taunts and terror. Once, a group of white men who did not like the idea of a young white man giving a young black woman a ride, nearly drove Ken and hooks off the road . When Ken’s family invited her to dinner, it was the first time she ever sat down to eat dinner with a white family: “I felt then as though we were making history, that we were living the dream of democracy, creating a culture where equality, love, justice, and peace would shape America’s destiny” (25). She was powerfully inspired by their shared belief in social justice.

After high school, she failed to find white friends with the same passionate commitment to social change as Ken and his family: “I had not found white folks who understood the depth and complexity of racial injustice, and who were as willing to practice the art of living a nonracist life, as folks were then” (26). As she reflects on the 20 years following high school, she sees that, while many people say they are committed to change, when it comes to actions, they are often unwilling to embrace the sacrifice that true change requires.

She also notes that the push for multicultural diversity in the classroom, which is committed to ending racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism, has encountered not only a resistance to change, but also a strong backlash against the movement for freedom: “What we are witnessing today in our everyday life is not an eagerness on the part of neighbors and strangers to develop a world perspective but a return to narrow nationalism, isolationism, and xenophobia” (28). Because the desire for equality threatens the domination of those that have thrived due to the white capitalist patriarchal structure, those groups have a strong desire to hold on to their authority.

This backlash against diversity and freedom also happens in the university. hooks emphasizes that all learning is political, and this must be recognized for a revolution in the classroom to take place. She observed that professors who had originally supported multiculturalism suddenly backtracked and fought necessary faculty and curricula changes. She describes her own experience of colleagues who belittled her Toni Morrison seminar, calling Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon “a weak rewrite of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls” (32). She recognizes how people fear change, thinking one form of domination will be replaced by another, rather than realizing that a revolution will bring a transformation of values, not simply a replacement. She recognizes that any change will entail “periods of chaos and confusion, times when grave mistakes are made” (33), but she says people should not hold themselves back because of a fear of mistakes; instead, they should fully commit to change to succeed in transforming the classroom.

When hooks was an untenured professor at Oberlin, she teamed up with Chandra Mohanty, her colleague in Women’s Studies, also untenured, to lead a series of seminars for the faculty to help transform the pedagogical practices of Oberlin professors, who were overwhelmingly white. They began the seminars by focusing on their experiences. hooks shared her early experiences in black classrooms where her experience was “recognized as central and significant” (37). When schools were desegregated, her experience became marginalized in the classroom, resulting in her alienation from school, an experience which continued into college.

hooks and Mohanty invited professors from across the country, including the scholar Cornel West, who talked about “decentering Western civilization” (37). Professors were able to discuss strategies they had used in the classroom to make their classrooms more inclusive.

Both hooks and Mohanty ended up disappointed by the seminar. While they saw that professors were willing to open up the Western canon to include writers of color, these professors did not have “a willingness to accord their work the same respect and consideration given other work” (38). hooks describes a professor who boasted about including the work of Toni Morrison, yet she did not bother to discuss race in the classroom.

hooks recognizes that professors are hesitant to discuss race in the classroom because they fear confrontation and tension: “To some extent, we all know that whenever we address in the classroom subjects that students are passionate about there is always a possibility of confrontation, forceful expression of ideas, or even conflict” (39), but she disagrees that creating a “safe” space for students means a quiet classroom where only the professor’s voice is emphasized. Instead, safety in the classroom can only happen when all students feel as if their voices are valued.

hooks then explains strategies she has used to give every student a chance to speak, such as having students write responses that they share with the class, no matter how large her class size. Still, she recognizes that it can be intimidating to approach the needs of a diverse classroom, even for her. Many teachers teach the way they were taught, and so they repeat the old ways and the traditional cycle of pedagogy continues.

She also recognizes that sometimes students, too, cling to their old ways of learning and are resistant to learning in different ways. hooks has had to deal with student complaints, but she realized that she had to let go of her need to be liked in the classroom. Many students later contacted her much later to say how much they learned in her class: “In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for immediate affirmation of successful teaching (even though some reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate the value of a certain standpoint or process straightway” (42). She says even negative feedback is still feedback, and that it is always important to encourage students to give feedback to shift paradigms of learning effectively, even if such shifts are not immediate.

hooks realizes that learning sometimes involves pain, as taking on new critical outlooks forces one to acknowledge the suffering. She empathizes with her students, encouraging students to share these experiences, which leads to building a community; those who typically have been left on the margins are brought into the centrality of the community.

She closes the essay by recognizing the difficulty of creating a truly multicultural classroom because such a classroom forces both teachers and students a to undergo a paradigm shift and recognize their own biases and complicity in the traditional power structure. 

hooks structures this essay as a playful self-interview in which she interrogates herself, using her birth name, “Gloria Watkins,” as the interviewer and uses the name for her writing self, “bell hooks,” as the interviewee. The topic for the “interview” is the impact that the Brazilian educator, writer, and philosopher Paulo Freire has had on her thinking and her work.

hooks states that her discovery of Paulo Freire had a profound impact on her life. hooks wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center during her undergraduate years when she experienced alienation from the university classroom.

Following her negative experiences with desegregated education, reading Freire empowered her. Reading about the marginalized poor in his books Pedagogy of the Oppressed as well as Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau gave her a way to connect her struggle to the broader global struggle of those without power. When “Watkins” critiques Freire’s sexism in his book, “hooks” responds that, while she recognizes the sexism in the book, she is not going to dismiss the value of the book just because of these flaws. She finds flaws in the feminist movement as well, which she points out has been dominated, especially in the beginning, by white bourgeois women. She felt more in common with Freire’s peasant class than white feminists. She said that, as a young woman who had grown up in the rural South, “I felt myself to be deeply identified with the marginalized peasants he speaks about, or with my black brothers and sisters, my comrades in Guinea-Bissau” (46). His books gave her a lens to understand her own experiences, even though he was writing about people from other countries.

hook’s work is dependent on both Freire’s work, as well as her childhood black teachers “who saw themselves as having a liberatory mission to educate us in a manner that would prepare us to effectively resist racism and white supremacy, that has had a profound impact on my thinking about the art and practice of teaching” (52). She credits her early teachers for the examples of their daily lives, which were dedicated to meaningful praxis, or the practice, of freedom. Even though these women would probably not label themselves as “feminists,” their focus on “academic excellence and open critical thought for young black females was an anti-sexist practice” (52).

Feminism encouraged hooks to question dominant paradigms, so when she met Freire for the first time, she questioned her mentor about the sexism in his works. Rather than being resistant, dismissive, or angry, Freire listened to her with an open mind: “Truthfully, I loved him at this moment for exemplifying by his actions the principles of his work. So much would have changed for me had he tried to silence or belittle a feminist critique” (55). His gentle, open spirit was so welcoming, and hooks realized he was truly a great teacher, as defined by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said that “great humans bring with them something like a hallowed atmosphere, and when we seek them out then we feel peace, we feel love, we feel courage” (56). Freire had that sacred effect on hooks, inspiring her to also be the same type of teacher for her students.

hooks discusses the power that theory has had in her own life, even as a young child. She quotes literary critic Terry Eagleton, who points out that children are “the best theorists […] and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement” (59). She was a child who questioned the patriarchal practices in her family home, to the confusion of her parents, who could not understand why she insisted on challenging everything. She felt alienated at home when her parents punished her desire to question the status quo. Theorizing allowed her to understand difference and to feel a sense of healing and a “sense of home” (61).

hooks also realizes that some people have a problematic understanding of theory. She has seen how both white male and white female academics have coopted theory, imposing strict, narrow interpretations as to what ideas qualify as theoretical and what ideas do not. Such interpretations favor written work that is highly technical, “highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references” (64). She criticizes such practices because only a few can understand and access such ideas.

In response, some people have completely dismissed incorporating theory in their lives because they feel that it has no relevance to their lives: “In many black settings, I have witnessed the dismissal of intellectuals, the putting down of theory” (66). She worried about this anti-intellectual reaction because she has seen the power of theory into her life; it allowed her to analyze social and political systems so she could understand the underlying forces that impacted her daily life. She wants to show the necessity of incorporating theory in one’s life. She does not want to perpetuate theory that is highly technical and irrelevant to most people’s lives but instead wants theory derived from experience so it can be understood and provide opportunities for healing:

Reflecting on my own work in feminist theory, I find writing—theoretical talk—to be most meaningful when it invites readers to engage in critical reflection and to engage in the practice of feminism. To me, this theory emerges from the concrete, from my efforts to make sense of everyday life experiences, from my efforts to intervene critically in my life and the lives of others (70).

It is this uniting of theory and practice that she advocates so that theory can be put into action and not just “theoretical talk.”

As a result, hooks does not use “conventional academic formats,” which she acknowledges makes it harder for her to be accepted as “scholarly enough” by some academics (71). She wants her scholarship to be marked by plain language and ease of access to create a discourse that anyone can read and understand and incorporate into one’s life.

She cites others who have read her work and been transformed by it, then sharing her work with others. As an example, she mentions a letter she received from a prisoner who said that he has made “her name a ‘household word around that prison’” (72). She wants discussions to occur in settings beyond the classroom as people broaden the practice of theory so that discussions can happen in non-traditional settings. She mentions another discussion that occurred in a black-owned, Southern restaurant, where a participant came up to her later and thanked her for the discussion which “eased her pain” (73). This is her goal, to connect those that suffer in discussions where they can locate the cause of their suffering and come together to create a “mass-based feminist resistance struggle. There will be no gap between feminist theory and feminist practice” (75).