Writing from the perspective of teaching undergraduate university students, hooks remarks that often students will feel lost, will resist her attempts to democratize her classroom, because they are used to being told what to do. We have to invite students to be a part of the learning process in a way that might frighten us (and them). To change that, hooks says, we have to be vulnerable. That is to say, teachers are expected to wield power in a way that dominates students. So we must teach our students to transgress this system.īeyond that, we ourselves must transgress the dynamics expected between teacher and student by this colonial, carceral system. She doesn’t say this quite in that way, of course-as I noted in my review of All About Love, hooks has this incredible facility for making her writing accessible, her sentences short-a skill, you have noticed, that still eludes me. To make them obedient in replicating structures of oppression. Thus we arrive at the first meaning of teaching to transgress: hooks wants us to be complicit, to recognize that the system itself is designed to sabotage students.
This is, alas, a story all too familiar today, even here in school systems in Ontario. She laments that she went from an all-Black school that was full of caring Black educators to a white school that treated her poorly and valued compliance over curiosity and actual learning.
As a white woman in Canada, all I was taught was that integration of schools was a good thing-makes sense, right? But hooks points that a lot of Black parents were skeptical of integration, were just as against it as white parents, albeit perhaps for different reasons. As a Black girl, and a Black woman, growing up in the American South during desegregation and integration. Much of what hooks says feels familiar in what I already do some of what she said pushed me to do better all of what she says just feels so true and right, especially in the current climate.Īt the start of the book, and then returning to it throughout, hooks discusses her experiences with education as a student. As a teacher, of course, this book really spoke to me. I value both books but in different ways.
This one is more practical, more focused on work rather than personal life (though hooks, of course, blurs those lines). Teaching to Transgress is quite a different vibe from All About Love. My second bell hooks book, I read this for the book club I’m a part of. This book was published when I was five years old, yet it remains timeless and in a way prescient.
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