Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

hooks emphasizes that the theory of engaged pedagogy, which draws heavily on the work of Paulo Freire, must be tied to praxis, or practice. In what specific ways does hooks advocate praxis in the classroom?

Although hooks has taught in the university classroom, how can her ideas be adapted for K-12 classrooms to reflect engaged pedagogy?

hooks says that one reason professors resist transforming their classroom to reflect multicultural pedagogy is that they fear that talking about systematic oppression, such as racism, can result in losing control of the classroom, especially if such discussions raise passionate emotions. How does hooks respond to this fear?

Not only professors resist transforming the traditional classroom to allow for more voices in the classroom. Students also resist such changes. Why? What does hooks recommend for dealing with this resistance to change from both professors and students?

Feminist pedagogy with its emphasis on decentering traditional patriarchal discourses has been central to hooks’s ideas. Yet, there is a history of tension and suspicion within the feminist movement between black and white feminists. Discuss how such a struggle has impacted hooks’s ideas toward feminism. How relevant are those critiques today? Research today’s feminist voices and how their ideas intersect with the ideas in Teaching to Transgress.

hooks experienced two radically different educational environments. She loved her segregated schools and hated her integrated schools. Explain why those two experiences were so different: why was the first so profound and the second so alienating? How did these two experiences impact her ideas on education?

hooks is critical of those who fail to view her work as scholarly. She says that often students are unable to use her work in their papers because of her lack of citations. Why does she refuse to follow traditional research guidelines for her writing which would allow for broader, scholarly use of her work?

Despite a lack of scholarly footnotes, hooks still references several critics, such as Paulo Freire, Ron Scapp, and Chandra Mohanty, as well as the work of artists such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison. Research the work of one of these writers as they focus on a topic of social justice. How do their ideas intersect with the ideas in this book?