Will I love Teaching to Transgress?

When I first read this book, I had just started teaching gender in university classrooms and was studying gender training for my PhD research. This book crystallized for me what I found so fascinating and important about teaching and learning as a feminist.

In this book, the late great bell hooks weaves together personal experience with academic engagement in a way that is accessible and engaging. In dialogue with the iconic Brazilian education theorist Paolo Freire, she lays out her vision for education as a practice of freedom, as opposed to education that reinforces systems of domination. I assign parts… show more.

Bell Hooks bravely tells her own story of being a professor and the ways in which being a Black woman challenged the status quo of higher education.

Hooks directly addresses systemic racism in education and suggests that all teachers should view education as “the practice of freedom.” By this, she meant that education should have the explicit goal of empowering underserved populations and creating a more equitable society for communities of color.

I was introduced to bell hooks only later in my teaching career—after I had taught for 10 years.

And I read hooks immediately after reading Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

This is a book on pedagogy, especially within a classroom with students from diverse social backgrounds. This is the book on critical pedagogy, I would say.

The training of economists will significantly benefit from engaging with the work of hooks.

This 1994 classic by the late bell hooks never ceases to inspire us. “To educate is a practice of freedom,” hooks writes. She means that to be truly educated means to be liberated: to understand the forms of oppression, coercion, and limits imposed on learners because of class, gender, racial, sexual bias, and in every other way. hooks points to the barriers that keep us from being our very best selves. She inspires every reader to self-educate, self-reflect, find and build communities of support in order to live a better life. She inspires every educator to make, as their objective,… show more.

Teaching to Transgress is a powerful work by hooks that really taps into the power and potential of teaching. This work is in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh, but offers way more than just a take on mindfulness. Hooks seems to understand how intentional reflection can be used as a powerful tool for real change in the classroom.