Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Authority” can be used to oppress. If the professor insists on being the absolute authority in the classroom, or if white, middle-class students are the only ones to have the authority to speak, then the classroom becomes a site of oppression.

If all can have the authority to participate in the exchange of ideas, then authority is no longer a destructive but a democratic force in the classroom. hooks argues that students come to the classroom with knowledge based on their experiences, and they should be encouraged to trust and share this authority in the collective creation of classroom knowledge.

Paulo Freire coined this term to describe the dominant method of teaching in the college classroom where professors feel that their job is to deposit knowledge in their students, who act as receptacles for this knowledge. This passage exchange of knowledge, which emphasizes memorization of facts rather than critical thinking, concentrates all authority in the figure of the professor. Only the professor’s voice has value and agency.

hooks imagines the terror that black slaves must have felt when they were brought to this country, unable to understand anything being said. She then traces how the slaves were able to assemble the oppressor’s language into their own version of English, one that was able to subvert the dominance of Standard English, and this version still exists today in Black Vernacular. She wants her black students to feel free to use Black Vernacular in her classroom. Rather than stigmatizing such use, she wants that language to be a symbol of rebellion against domination. 

While class is usually not explicitly discussed in the classroom, there is an implicit assumption of the primacy of middle-class bourgeois values. Students from poorer, working-class backgrounds must erase any markers of those identities to “pass” and fit into the classroom. Again, hooks calls for an end to such erasures, as she argues that a focus on the diverse differences in the classroom should be valued in the classroom.

Paulo Freire created this term to describe the process of coming to an awareness of how systems of oppression operate in the world. hooks wants to use this word in the classroom to describe how students need to transform from passive consumers of education to active participants in their critical awareness.

In contrast to the banking system of education, engaged pedagogy (also referred to as “critical pedagogy,” “liberatory pedagogy,” “radical pedagogy,” and “transformative pedagogy”) emphasizes the value of transforming the classroom so that all the students in the classroom can share their experiences and knowledge in building classroom understanding. For professors to be able to lead this transformed classroom, the professor herself must be “self-actualized” in order not to feel threatened by opening up the classroom to the experiences and knowledge of her students.

This active participation is in direct contradiction to traditional models of pedagogy, in which the student is a passive consumer of what Freire called “the banking system of education.” This traditional model ignores the diversity and wealth of student experiences.

Rather than sexual passion, hooks refers to a broader definition of eros as encompassing empathy, affection, and friendship. She remembers a student of hers, O’Neal LaRon Clark, whom she “had a passionate teacher/ student relationship” (197). She dedicates this book to his memory. “to all my students,/ especially to LaRon/ who dances with angels/ in gratitude for all the times we start over—begin again—/ renew our joy in learning.” Her passion for her students, and their passion for her, is part of a life force that motivates people into actions of transformation and freedom.

Essentialism is stereotyping, reducing a person’s identity to an “essential” identity, such as their race or gender, and suggesting that members of such a group have distinct characteristics that are fixed at birth. For example, women have often been viewed through an essentialist lens that sees their identity as determined by their biology.

Obviously, such categorizing is controversial, as it limits and narrows identity to a narrow set of determinist attributes. People with essentialist mindsets often engage in “tokenism,” which is when someone of a specific race or ethnicity is made to be the spokesperson for that whole race or ethnicity.

Yet fear of being essentialist cannot rule out the value of experience. Although students should not be seen as “tokens” of their race, their experiences of race and class should be welcome as a type of knowledge for the class for those that choose to share the specifics of their experiences.

Feminism applies to a wide group of movements that focus on the interrogation of patriarchy to reveal the underlying systems that oppress women as they work toward equal rights for women.

However, mainstream feminism has often focused on the needs of white women, which has created tensions between white feminists and feminists of color, who felt that white feminists did not seek to address the needs of all women. hooks admits to feeling tired with the need to educate white feminists, but she also understands the value and vision of the feminist movement must not be given up on.

The classroom keeps growing more and more diverse from the days of Jim Crow “white only” and “colored only” classrooms. The classroom is full of students that come from a variety of races, ethnicities, countries, classes, genders, languages, religions, sexualities, disabilities, and abilities. And yet, despite this increasing diversity in the student population, teaching strategies in the classroom have not similarly changed. hooks is calling for a radical transformation in what we teach and the way we teach. It is not enough to add, for example, black female authors without also adding an interrogation of how race and gender inform the discussion. hooks emphasizes strategies that encourage students to speak up and take responsibility for their education, while calling on the idea of the absolute authority of the professor to be dismantled, giving all students a voice in the classroom