Jennifer's Reviews > Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

In a very personal way, this book was both an affirmation and an admonishment. It's taken me 26 years of teaching in various settings to evolve from traditional classroom practices and canonical reading assignments to radically different approaches that are very similar to what hooks prescribes. I regret and feel guilty for all my years of lecturing and how slow I was to relinquish control over our meetings. I regret holding students to very conventional measures of success for so long before switching to a focus on demonstrated learning. And I'm very sad that my colleague and I will soon teach the third and final iteration of the class in which we come closest to hooks' ideal. And, too, I know that even in the small liberal arts school where I teach, an emphasis on democratic practice, ungrading, bringing in real-world experiences as often as possible, heavy reliance on discussion instead of lecture, integration of a broadly diverse set of readings well outside the conventional canon, etc., is unusual, at least in my discipline and, I'd guess, in general, with a few notable exceptions. Such teaching is onerous and time-consuming, works best in small classes, and faces all kinds of headwinds, especially for junior faculty. Anyway, the book hit very close to home.

Beyond reference to my own teaching (ha!), hooks demands that we all question the norms we use to judge people and understand them as constructs of elite control. She reminds white feminists to interact honestly with issues of race (to interact with issues of race at all!), all people to acknowledge the constraints of the class system, each of us to be sensitive to our own privileges and biases and to others' varied experiences. She warns against the body-mind separation many teachers aspire to in the classroom and also calls for real connection, passion, and joy in sharing ideas. She spends a chapter explaining the value of theory - the naming of behavioral and social dynamics - and rejecting claims that it's a waste of time when material action could instead be taken. She calls out the academy for many of its practices and recommends some new ones. Overall, I think every teacher and professor should read this book. Each of us benefit from hooks' reminders, whether we teach small seminars or in massive lecture halls.