Book Review: Teaching to Transgress

Alright!

As my review is excessively detailed and lengthy, I shall now attempt to summarize my views in a more accessible and pithy manner!

The Upshot: I short, I love bell hooks, and I love this book. Her idea that education can be a liberatory practice appeals to me on several levels. First, I sometimes have concerns that being an academic will not allow me to foment political change in any real way. I've always been a bit of an armchair revolutionary, and I worry that the ivory tower will prove too comfortable and I'll become complaisant. hooks' idea that teaching can be a political act, that we can create spaces of equality in the classroom, and that the content of our courses can be expressly political opens up the space for me to conceptualize academic work as part of a larger struggle.

Second, hooks points out the theory, in particular, can be extremely liberating. This is a phenomenon that I have experienced firsthand, but somehow I failed to assign much significance to it until hooks pointed out the power of theory. As a young proto-feminist, I remember having an innate understanding that various institutions-- my school, my church, my family-- did not conceptualize women as full human beings. And I remember feeling a strong, undirected rage, a rage that I couldn't explain (because no one else seemed to have it), couldn't put into words, and couldn't do anything productive with. Discovering feminist theory confirmed my instincts and gave me a language with which to articulate my thoughts. Perhaps most importantly, theory connected me to a larger community of thinkers who were committed to change. hooks is quite right in pointed out that theory and activism, often seen as antagonistic opposites, actually work in tandem.

Additionally, several of hooks’ narrative strategies really appeal to me. I love that she conducted an interview with herself, and I love that she works her own stories into her analysis. As some of you may recall, I’m working with this last strategy in my paper for this class. I’m trying to use hooks as a model for how to do this successfully; connecting my ramblings to the topic at hand is not always my strong point, and hooks does it very well.

The Downside: Perhaps the single most frustrating thing about Teaching to Transgress is that it proposes a very attractive set of pedagogical values, but fails to give specific instructions about how to put them into practice. hooks acknowledges enough, but points out (I think rightly) that each classroom is different, and hence each classroom will require different approaches. A detailed list of suggestions might in fact be antithetical to the ethos of liberatory teaching, which requires creativity and specificity. With careful reading, however, we can tease out a few concrete strategies: sit students in a circle, move through the classroom, put students in small discussion groups so that all students, even the shy ones, can speak in class.

I also found reading Teaching to Transgress a bit repetitive. I would suggest that this book be read in pieces, rather than as a whole. Each essay requires a fair amount of mental marination to really make its points felt. A little extra time between essays might therefore be useful, and will prevent readers from getting worn out by some of the overlaps.

Okay, this is threatening to become lengthy again, so I am going to stop here. I give a very firm two thumbs up to this book!