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Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Author	bell hooks
Language	English
Published	1994
Publisher	Routledge
Publication place	United States

Student editor | course = (Links to an external site.) Education for Development

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom is Gloria Jean Watkins’ 1994 book, published under her pen name bell hooks. The work is broken into 14 essays that explore personal insights and reflections, pedagogical strategies, and critical analysis of existing teaching models. hooks centers her perspective as a Black female educator in a, “patriarchal and predominantly white US higher educational context” in order to counter oppressive pedagogies within the classroom; such as student-teacher, racial, or gendered power dynamics. Having grown up in the American South during an era of segregation, hooks also includes formative personal anecdotes from her early education. Considered her seminal work within the field of critical pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress has had global ramifications on how freedom and liberation are taught and interacted with in educational settings.

hooks considers her theoretical framework to be informed by, “anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies”. She stresses, “the need for African Americans to take on a political language of colonialism” in order to place issues within their larger political context. Thus, Teaching to Transgress centers Black self-determination. hooks advocates for a critical awareness of the overlapping nature of oppressive systems and to consider how, where, and why they converge. As a result, hooks references the patriarchy alongside capitalism, racism, and sexism, throughout her work to inform the various ways oppression occurs within the classroom. Feminism, as hooks references it, should be understood as a liberatory fight that centers the importance of solidarity and sisterhood in combatting group oppression. Throughout Teaching to Transgress hooks further explores these topics in relation to her proposed models of self-actualization and engaged pedagogy.

Context

Historical Context

hooks grew up as one of six kids, and the daughter of her father, a custodian, and her mother, a housewife. In Teaching to Transgress hooks’ childhood is explored and analyzed as an example of American education. In her early years, hooks attended an all-Black elementary school that focused on anti-racist struggle. However, in the latter half of her grade school education hooks attended a segregated school. hooks references this time in her life as fundamentally changing her perception of education; considered inferior to her classmates for the first time on the basis of race, her teachers no longer considered revolution an appropriate topic within the classroom.

"Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority."

The emotional and paternal silencing hooks faced during her upbringing and time at university led her to start her writing career, in an attempt to combat the white hegemony dominating her classrooms. As Black women are often marginalized within critical academic discussions, hooks' work seeks to center their voices. At the time of publication, models of desegregation, resegregation, and multiculturalism were on the rise, alongside the push for unity in an American ‘melting pot’. However, fundamentalist understandings of family and community values still resulted in the targeting, criminalizing, and antagonizing of Black people. It is within this sociopolitical context that hooks argues to move away from a false sense of cultural unity, and instead towards cultural democratization, justice, and equality.

Influences

Teaching to Transgress was largely inspired by the works of Paulo Freiere and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Freire was a Brazilian educator, infamous for his work on the banking model of education. Having both a personal friendship and a rigorous academic relationship, hooks’ work is considered a, “hybrid homage and companion to Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed" . hooks was vocal about the lack of female representation in Freire’s early work, and took to integrating both feminist and spiritual dimensions in her interpretations. Themes of excitement, literacy, and consciousness that are explored within Teaching to Transgress are all largely influenced by Freire’s banking model. Note that hooks regards literacy as a way for marginalized groups to acquire a critical consciousness through liberatory writing, reading, and thinking; thus, extending the definition beyond one’s ability to read and write. ‘Critical consciousness’ denotes one’s ability to be both informed and critical about the world around them, while also considering the power dynamics upheld by institutional and social structures.

Thích Nhất Hạnh was a Thiền Buddhist monk, author, poet, teacher, and peace activist. Nhất Hạnh founded the Engaged Buddhism movement, which seeks to apply Buddhist principles to political and social reform. hooks’ description of engaged pedagogy is largely modeled after the spiritual teacher-student and student-teacher relationship found within Nhất Hạnh’s work. Nhất Hạnh wrote about the teacher as a healer, offering a way of applying pedagogy that, “emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit”.

Form

Analytical Framework

Teaching to Transgress is considered a post-structuralist work as it situates knowledge as an ever changing concept, dependent upon the context within which it develops, and a product of the power structures surrounding its production. In this light, the identities of students and teachers are regarded as both evolving and nuanced. Further, hooks employs feminist post-structuralism in order to evaluate how power and resistance are used within the classroom, what knowledge is considered valuable, and highlight contradictions in academia as a setting for learning opportunities. This line of thought is applied in hooks’ pedagogy as she writes, “the academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility”.

Writing Style

hooks’ writing style plays with how to engage the audience; as she jumps from personal reflection to critical dialogue, she utilizes a postmodern approach to allow the reader to digest complex cross-disciplinary content. The inclusion of anecdotal references highlight the relevance of life experience within liberatory teaching, and is a common strategy within Black feminist writing. hooks also makes the conscious decision not to capitalize her name, as, she hopes, it allows for the public’s focus to remain on her work rather than on her.

hooks addresses her writing style in another of her works, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. In order to encourage the sharing of progressive ideas across a variety of mediums, hooks states that Black intellectuals should, “be politically challenged to interrogate the way we work, what we do, how we speak and write, to see whether or not we are working in a manner that crosses boundaries. I have made specific decisions about the nature of my work in the interest of making it accessible to a broader audience”. Considered a ‘non-academic’ form of writing, hooks has received a range of critiques for this decision; while some argue for the separation of personal narratives, it is generally praised for increasing the readability of her work.

Content

Concepts

Self-Actualization

hooks describes self-actualization as the healing process both the teacher and student go through during education, done in a manner that teaches students to transgress against sexual, racial, and class oppression in order to achieve freedom. In order for hook’s model of engaged pedagogy to aid in this process of transgression, self-actualization must be the first step. This is done through addressing how one’s own personal beliefs and positionality affect power-imbalances in the classroom. hooks uses the phrase ‘politics of domination’ to describe how the overlapping aspects of one’s identity may affect how people trust, develop reciprocity, and interact in a classroom. These interactions then lead to the privileging of certain voices; where, “white male students continue to be the most vocal” and “students of color and some white women express fear that they will be judged as intellectually inadequate” in their presence. In her other work, hooks engages with similar concepts proposed by Sojourner Truth and Kimberlé Crenshaw to extend these ideas.

In order to unpack this, hooks draws from Thích Nhất Hạnh’s work on the role of the teacher. Nhất Hạnh states that, “the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his/herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people”. That is, if a teacher has a psychological block surrounding a topic, for example, a sexist teacher has to teach a class on feminism, they will struggle to help students approach the topic with openness. hooks does not claim that all teachers need to be fully informed, or, ‘healed’, on all subjects; rather, hooks stresses the importance of honesty in how teachers choose to engage with these blocks. Further, hooks also recognizes the weight of responsibility this puts on educators as she writes:

“Part of the luxury and privilege of the role of teacher/professor today is the absence of any requirement that we be self-actualized. Not surprisingly, professors who are not concerned with inner well-being are the most threatened by the demand on the part of students for liberatory education, for pedagogical processes that will aid them in their own struggle for Self-actualization.”

Self-actualization, thus, does not only serve the students. While Freire demonstrated how the banking system of education often objectifies students into receptacles for information, hooks extends this thought to the objectification of teachers as mere implementers of curricula. This limits teachers' ability to grow alongside their vocation. Further, hooks argues that bourgeois education upholds a mind/body split that encourages compartmentalization. This then, “reinforces the dualistic separation of public and private, encouraging teachers and students to see no connection between life practices, habits of being, and the roles of professors”.  Where the intellectual had previously quested for union between mind, body, and spirit, hooks suggests this was, “replaced with notions that being smart meant that one was inherently emotionally unstable and that the best in oneself emerged in one’s academic work”. hooks received criticism for her philosophical standpoint, and was told she was misguided to push this perspective within the academy. In response, hooks references Martin Luther King Jr. as she calls for everyone to renew their minds if we are to transform educational institutions and society as a whole. Union, she argues, is required to align our lives with, “our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom”.

hooks emphasizes the importance of community in the classroom in response to the banking model of education which, hooks argues, fosters individualist thinking and deters multiculturalism. In comparison, fostering community in the learning environment challenges uneven teaching practices by supporting inclusivity. This then encourages respect, openness, and intellectual rigor. Community can be created through the process of self-actualization, sharing commitments, sharing a belief in a common good, and valuing the voice of every individual student through challenging them to participate. It is important to note that hooks does include Peter McLaren’s critique of multiculturalism, stating that, “diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is a conserv­ative and liberal model of multiculturalism”. Thus, hooks uses ‘multiculturalism’ here as a stepping stone towards inclusivity, and as a method of challenging single-axis, exclusive thinking.

Engaged Pedagogy

'Engaged Pedagogy’ is a term used by bell hooks to describe education that is creative, extends beyond the limitations of the classroom, is based on mutual engagement, and integrates the application of concepts into the student’s real life. hooks references it as, “progressive, holistic education” that emphasizes wellbeing through dedicated self-actualization. It has been summarized further as, “a reciprocal and vulnerable-making process for student and the professor, led by many voices, involving shared risk-taking and responsibility, and embracing the whole individual”. In short, this is how learning becomes action, reflection, and change.

In response to Freire’s male-dominated Pedagogy of the Oppressed, hooks developed engaged pedagogy with feminist and gendered practices made central. hooks goes beyond connecting one’s lived experiences to those in the classroom, the foundation of Freire’s ‘praxis’ model, by emphasizing both self-actualization and wellbeing in the process of empowering the student. This is how hooks considers education as a practice of freedom, as it breaks away from the cyclic model of education that perpetuates domination. Following an engaged pedagogy, the classroom will, thus, result in mutual empowerment; where both the student and the teacher hold power in different ways, and the teacher is empowered by their interactions with students.

hooks critiques the separation of theory and praxis as she outlines two possible reasons the banking system of education does not encourage real-life application. The first; information and theory can be learned separately from real life, and then applied. John Dewey debunks this notion in his work Democracy and Education (1916). The second; the education system does not intend to help students become self-actualized individuals, rather, it serves as a convenient and arbitrary tool for students to compete against each other in order to reproduce data. The latter theory is explored within Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at length. hooks claims both notions act as tools for domination, and argues against the separation of theory and praxis as a result. Indeed, she asserts they are inseparable. Theory informs the self of its place in the world. hooks writes about her experience coming to theory as an emotional safe haven, stating:

“I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”

This is a parallel notion to Nhất Hạnh’s concept of ‘contemplation’, in which contemplation is tied to compassion. This is done through the connection that suffering forages when recognized in one another. hooks also recognizes a similar notion argued by Freire; the alienation caused by oppression, felt by both the perpetrator and receiver, is inseparable from how the alienation must be overcome. Together, hooks concludes that liberation should be both an individual and a collective experience. Thus, “both theory and contemplation are responses to the fundamental human situation of suffering and separation, and are attempts to recover the original unity of self and world”.

Changes in the academy require emotional engagement with the content and a reclassification of traditional hierarchies of knowledge, as to justly value oppressed groups' contributions. Further, partnership and co-creation between actors creates an empathetic environment. hooks argues that this makes it impossible for students, and teachers, to right-off content. Likewise, hooks asserts that using an engaged pedagogy will lead to a cultural shift in values; where society will move from ‘thing’-oriented to become ‘person’-oriented. Values, here, serve as a tool to demonstrate the argument. hooks encourages the practice of revolutionizing one’s values as a way to challenge the normalization of materialist culture. This culture, it’s argued, teaches, “us to believe that domination is “natural,” and that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless”. This is a borrowed idea from Martin Luther King Jr., who argued that a true revolution of values, “will not be possible until material possessions, profit motives, and property rights take a secondary position to issues such as racism, sexism, and classism”. This shift, at the hands of an engaged pedagogy, is what hooks refers to as transgression. This is what it means for education to be the practice of freedom.

Reception and Legacy

Teaching to Transgress is considered essential reading across disciplines such as women and gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and education. It is regarded as a “distinct, feminist ethos that distinguishes it from earlier work in the field”, accredited for mapping the intersection between feminist and critical pedagogy. In 2014, for the book’s 20th anniversary, The New School celebrated with a scholarly residency that honored hooks. The widely attended event focussed on “commemorating, updating, and extending the work of this book”.

bell hooks, Samuel R Delany, M Lamar, and Marci Blackman at the New School

In 2003 hooks wrote a follow-up book titled Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, followed by Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom published in 2010. Throughout the trilogy hooks explores what critical pedagogy looks like in various educational settings, beyond the scope of academia. hooks utilizes the same postmodern writing style she uses in Teaching to Transgress in all three works, incorporating her own experiences with oppression under the American education system.

Further Reading

• BELL., HOOKS, (2018). TEACHING COMMUNITY. DEV Publishers & DISTRIBU. ISBN 1-138-29988-X. OCLC 1032653979.
• Cornelius-White, Jeffrey H. D. (2007-06-01). "The Actualizing and Formative Tendencies: Prioritizing the motivational constructs of the person-centered approach / Die Aktualisierungstendenz und die formative Tendenz: Prioritäten setzen bei den motivationalen Konstrukten des Personzentrierten Ansatzes / Las Tendencias Actualizante y Formativa: Priorizando los constructos motivacionals del enfoque centrado en la persona / Les Tendances Actualisantes et Formatives: Quelle priorité pour les concepts motivationnels de l'approche centrée sur la personne? / Tendência Actualizante e Tendência Formativa: a primazia dos constructos motivacionais na Abordagem Centrada na Pessoa /". Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. 6 (2): 129–140. doi:10.1080/14779757.2007.9688436. ISSN 1477-9757.
• 1921-1997., Freire, Paulo,. Pedagogy of the oppressed. ISBN 978-1-5013-1413-1. OCLC 1264151202.
• 1952-, Hooks, Bell, (2010). Teaching critical thinking : practical wisdom. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96819-5. OCLC 698599012.
• James., Herndon, (1985). Notes from a schoolteacher. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-54371-7. OCLC 300021578.
• Kimberle., Crenshaw, (2022). On intersectionality essential writings. The New Press. ISBN 978-1-62097-271-7. OCLC 1164728549.