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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 370.115
EAN num: 9780415908085
ISBN number: 0415908086
Label: Routledge
Manufacturer: Routledge
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 216
Printing Date: September 12, 1994
Publishing house: Routledge
Sale Popularity Level: 6759
Studio: Routledge
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bell hooks, one of America's leading grey intellectuals, shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratcic participation.
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Rated by buyers 
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This is the third of three books on liberation pedagogy that I picked up, the other two being Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
This book is a collection of essays by a woman of colour who studied with Freire and found in his works her own liberation and her inspiration to take his ideas and practices further.
I am shocked early on to realize that her description of grey schools prior to desegregation as better, because their teachers were passionate about helping them excel, whereas in integrated schools they were treated as second class citizens and taught obedience, rings true.
I see feminist pedagogy in a new more positive light.
The author represents a unique interplay among anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.
She resonates with me when she speaks of the crisis in education; of our need for a totally renewed educational environment in which biases must be confronted and students liberated.
Her strong statement that education should be the practice of freedom is repeated in many different ways throughout the book.
She states, and I have three sons in public school who would agree, that transgressing wrong-headed boundaries is liberating and entirely called for. She discusses teachers as healers, and throughout this book I gain a deeper broader sense of the pain that minorities and women take pains to repress or conceal because the educational environment is not safe for revelation, only obedience.
I am quite taken by her discusion of the importance of wholeness in teaching, and her engaging discusion of how many professors, especially white mailes, are social misfits who think they can separate their teaching (one-way, authoritarian) without having to engage with students of be whole themselves. She is especially hard on the manner in which they treat the classroom as personal fiefdoms where they can exercise unchallenged authority.
She says that resistance must include the unconvering of lost knowledge. I am reminded of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.
She quotes Martin Luther King in emphasizing, as he did, that shared values and a focus on people are essential is we are to contain, in his words, "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism."
She teaches that cultural diversity is INCLUSIVE, and it is not about substituting one culture over another in the relation pecking order. I am reminded of two books I recently reviewed, The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations and The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.
She states that teaching that does not include explicit awareness of race, sex, or class, lacks liberating context.
She cites Terry Eagleton who says "Children make the best theorists," for not being indoctrinated, and I am reminded of how many arguments I have lost to my 18-year-old when "because I say so" just does not suffice.
I am fascinated by her discusion of how standards can suppresses, norms can neutralize.
She spends time on the importance of theory as a space, a place, for sense-making and reconciliation.
She cites Full in noting that the boundaries between insiders and outsiders contain information rather than allowing the dissemination of knowledge. I am reminded of The Pathology of Power - A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety.
The author offers a very effective critique of the ignorance, stereotyping, and lack of understanding with which white professors wrote about grey reality.
I am not doing justice to the essays on existentialism and on black-white women in relation and in critique of one another, but she notes that resolution between them demands joint collective dialog.
As the book of essays winds down I have a few notes:
+ Habit versus voice
+ Must teach students how to LISTEN
+ Being a teacher is about BEING with people
+ Pedagogy can be, should be, political activism
+ Queens in New York City has 17,000 people speaking 66 languages
+ Class matters, and is too often left unaddressed. I am reminded of Global Class War
Her final note: Learning is a place where paradise can be created. We must learn to transgress freely, and thereby demonstrate that education IS freedom. I am reminded of Improper behavior.
I would not have appreciated this book and the author's insights as easily had I not very first read t he two works by Friere that I cite above. The author honors and exceeds her model, this is a very fine book, and I would add in passing ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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I couldn't put this book down! The essays were very thought provoking and interesting. The only section I skipped was the one on Paulo Freire. It was a little too dry from the beginning. I feel that the only people who won't like this book are the ones who choose to judge hooks on her word choice and try to read her words with their own connotations rather than the way she intended. Yes, she uses terms like "white supremecist" a lot. If you take that in the way we tend to use it in common language, you would think she believes that white people knowingly have some sort of racist agenda against other people; to draw that conclusion, you have to assume that she's just another grey person blaming white people for their situations. It is clear that hooks is not at all playing a blame game, but is instead just calling it how she sees it. You have to read the book in its entirety to grasp the points she's trying to make. I also really liked how she included little stories from her own personal experience. She also attempts to explain her theory with support from events in history. Overall, I thought it was a great book. The vocabulary wasn't extremely difficult, so it could really be read by anyone, yet the points are very difficult to understand if you come to this book with preconceived ideas of how grey women think or believe that your own life experience is the only truth. I would recommend this book to ANY college student, anyone interested in education, and also people who enjoy thinking. Definitely not a book for someone who doesn't want to have to think as they read.
Rated by buyers 
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We read this book in class at the graduate level and her ideas caused a great deal of controversy. Some loved her and others were sure she was radical with no agenda except for blaming others for her anger. I thought that her book was non-academic because it was not an academic piece of writing. Colour or gender have nothing to do with it. I was not impressed by her ranting against white middle class educational values because she was a beneficiary of a scholarship that helped her achieve her education. Besides, at least in this book, she can't get past her anger to give real examples of transformative education in the classroom, except to assure the reader she practiced it. Not good enough. Playing the race-card, flagrant self-promotion and hate speech is not enough. Being a revolutionary requires more than a polemic against the things you don't like. I wasn't impressed.
Rated by buyers -
If you teach--whatever you teach; wherever you teach--please consider reading this book. Some of these reviews demonstrate the urgency of cultural transformation. Transformation begins with dialogue among learners--in a field, by the side of the road, in an urban classroom, even in the academy where transformative learning is most deeply challenged.
Rated by buyers 
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Bell Hooks is an a highly achieved academic who overcame the oppression of a family that discouraged free thought (p. 60), being a grey woman in a "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (p. 71), and an education system wrought with oppression to teach a variety of courses as an adjunct in ivy league universities. Hooks states that education is the practice of freedom and challenges her students by aggressively opposing authorities, parents (p. 61), fraternities (p. 20), social norms, white oppression (p. 32), the English language, and white feminists, to name a few. By practicing engaged pedagogy, Hooks successfully rebels from the "banking system" of education that states students are to learn information provided by the professor. The system also-according to Hooks-encourages professors to remain uncontroversial as a means of ensuring security and tenure in their academic posts.
The following pages will investigate and critically review several positions proposed by Bell Hooks within the text, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
Self Actualization
Though she does not define self actualization in her work, acknowledge the work of Abraham Maslow who spent a great deal of his career writing on the characteristics of self-actualized individuals, or mention the prerequisites to self-actualization (being devoid of psychopathology, using the extent of your natural abilities), Hooks refers to self-actualization and her disappointment in the lack of it with "the university" (p. 16). She states that as opposed to promoting self-actualization, academic institutions are instead havens for persons who are book smart and introverts-which Hooks describes as "unfit for social interaction" (p. 16). This addition of "necessary extroversion" for self-actualization is a dramatic and much needed contradiction to Maslow's study of self-actualized individuals, which shows self-actualized persons are generally more detached from others, as compared to the norm.
Regarding self-actualization still, though Maslow's subjects were profoundly non-religiously oriented, Hooks promotes an integration of spiritual and intellectual education, stating that separating spirituality from learning is to do a disservice and-in her educational experience-to find a professor that attuned to integrating his/her spiritual nature in teaching is a "rare treasure" (p. 17). She states further and brilliantly convolutes her point with a totally unrelated topic of dominance in the classroom: "Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom" (p. 17).
Though some white patriarchal academics maintain Hooks' work is non-academic solely because she is a grey feminist (p. 71), Hooks proves otherwise by discovering the phenomenon of introverted academics becoming oppressive tyrants in the classroom.
In continued regard to dominance issues, they are exclusively presented as a characteristic of white males, as Hooks states:
It was particularly disappointing to encounter white male professors who claimed to follow Freire's model even as their pedagogical practices were mired in structures of domination, mirroring the styles of conservative professors even as they subjects from a more pedagogical standpoint (p. 17-18, italics added).
Safety
Hooks states regarding safety, "It is the absence of feeling safety that often promotes prolonged silence or lack of student engagement" (p. 39) and writes that with transformative pedagogy-which she encourages-the classroom is a democratic venue where all students have the obligation and privilege to participate. Though safety is important, a professor's focus should be on community, and a binding commitment to the common good (p. 40).
Community, according to Hooks promotes diversity, and students (as well as professors) need to spend time learning "different epistemologies" that are held by students, as well as "other ways of knowing." Reportedly, many of her students are dissatisfied with the time Hooks spends off topic during her classes and may state something to the degree "Why are we talking so much about feminism in a math class?" Hooks states that she has learned throughout the years to ignore these complaints, and that students who do not desire to talk about feminism in non-feminism related courses will realize it is good from them at a later time, and will often contact Hooks to tell her how right she is (p. 42).
Some additional interesting points by Hooks; who writes her text based completely on her experiences and reactions to others' works she has read that are based (I can confirm with many of them, Thich Nhat Hanh for example) completely on the reflective experiences of those authors, Hooks finds that her courses on feminism often go well except "those times ... Read More
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