These practices cannot be sequestered to only women’s or gender studies courses, but must be introduced and explored in every discipline. Hooks draws on Black Feminist theory to frame pedagogy as a critical practice that is reflexive, critical, and builds solidarity. This is the practice of freedom, both within and without the classroom. This goes to say that it is imperative that one needs to care about every voice and really hear what those voices are saying. Hooks makes claims throughout the entirety of the reading that an educator must transform their pedagogy to build multicultural communities that cultivate ownership and responsibility within students. The book centers around how hooks wanted to shape herself and her teaching in a way that did not mirror her experiences as a student, but rather transgressed the systems of domination.

'To educate is the practice of freedom,' writes bell hooks, 'is a way of teaching anyone can learn.' Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom sees the late bell hooks discussing and engaging with her past as a student and then as an educator in relation to education as a potentially profound and transformative experience that can tax the mind, body, and spirit due to opposition and oppression that is very evidently still in place in our educational systems. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself. Teaching students to 'transgress' against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.īell Hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?įull of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings.

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks-writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual-writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.

Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks