On collective responsibility for engagement

"There are times when I walk into my classroom and the students seem absolutely bored out of their minds. And I say to them, 'What's up? Everybody seems really bored today. There seems to be a lack of energy. What should we do? What can we do?' I might say, 'Clearly the direction we're moving in doesn't seem to be awakening your senses, your passions right now.' My intent is to engage them more fully. Often students deny that they are collectively bored. They want to please me. Or they don't want to be critical. At such times I must stress that,'I'm not taking this personally. It's not just my job to make this class work. It's everyone's responsibility.'" Teaching to Transgress, page 155

main ideas and theses
Energy level in the classroom comes from both the professor and the students. If the students are for some reason disengaged, it is not necessarily the professor's fault. Every member of the learning community has equal responsibility to be committed to the gaining of knowledge.

consistencies with experiences as student and as teacher
I have definitely been in classrooms with a low energy level, especially in my large required classes at Baylor. Sometimes, such as in poli sci, the lecturer has been entirely aware that most students are asleep but simply continuted with his lecture. In other courses, typically smaller classes in which professors are aware of the needs of their students, my instructors have done nearly exactly what hooks describes here. My educational psychology prof has said several times in class, "We'll move on; y'all are clearly thrilled with this" at rare moments in which my classmates and I aren't fully engaged. (Also, it is true that we usually "come to" at this point and try to make her feel better and say, "oh, no, it's just that...") She would definitely agree that it is not her role to simply provide us with information; she fully intends for us to look at the material together and discuss it, each member of the community bearing equal burden.
However, I also have to admit that I have been on the other end of this situation. As Children's Intern at my church this summer, I had to fill in sometimes for missing teachers. I can think of one lesson in particular for which I didn't prepare nearly enough, when the fifth grade boys I was teaching looked incredibly bored. I wrapped up what I was doing as quickly as I could while still hitting the main points, and then moved on to some active applications of the lesson, which the boys enjoyed much more than listening to me talk. While I was trying to transmit information to them, they were obviously disengaged, but when I gave them an equal role in the learning, they became excited about what we were doing.

consistencies with teaching beliefs and practices
I agree with what hooks has to say here about engagement and responsibility of all members in the classroom. Of course, this looks a little bit different in the elementary class - I can't cancel class for the day when my first graders get a little wiggly. At the elementary level, I think this probably means more along the lines of adjusting teaching to fit the needs of my students. In this way, I can give each learner a part in the learning.
I also agree that it isn't always the teacher's fault if a class is not engaged; some days my students will simply need some time to play in the sun. However, I do think that if a teacher brings excitement to any subject, then the energy of the students should follow. All too often, kids are bored because their teacher has taken the whole of the responsibility for learning upon himself and will not relinquish any of it to the learners.

impact on future professional development
I think that, in the future, what I have read in Teaching to Transgress will be an encouragement and reminder to me to give some responsibility for engagement in the class to my students. This way, not only am I allowing them to construct knowledge for themselves, but I am also freeing myself of just a tiny bit of the burden of being accountable for the learning that happens in my class. If Billy is not engaged, Billy will not learn that day. I can help Billy and try to engage him, but ultimately, it's Billy's choice.

Teaching to Transgress

Teaching to Transgress chapter 8 – chapter 14

5 Big Picture Sentences
In the last half of her book, Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks looks at pedagogy from different perspectives. She also offers more practical and specific ways in which to use engaged pedagogy in the classroom. In these 8 and 9, she looks at how feminist thinking can affect engaged pedagogy. Chapter 10 is set up as an interview between miss hooks and a colleague; they discuss how to build a teaching community and look at how to effectively use dialogue to engage members of the classroom. The last two chapters offer a provocative look at education as hooks explains how ecstasy and passion are a part of effective pedagogy.

4 Key Passages
“To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences.” p. 130
“When I enter a classroom at the beginning of the semester the weight is on me to establish that our purpose is to be, for however brief a time, a community of learners together. It positions me as a learner. But I’m also not suggesting that I don’t have more power. And I’m not trying to say we’re all equal here. I’m trying to say that we are all equal to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning context.” p. 153
“In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen – to hear – and, to some extent, to be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular – or, for that matter, any language other than standard English.” p. 171
“To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and altogether allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.” p. 199

3 Key Terms
marginalized groups – women of all races or ethnicities, and men of color pg. 130-131
tradition - “Tradition should be such a wonderful word… Yet it is often used in a negative sense to repeat the tradition of the power of status quo.” p. 141-142
voice – hooks says voice “is not just the act of telling one’s experience;” it is being able to tell those experiences “strategically,” or “also speak freely about other subjects” p. 148

2 Connections
In the chapter about dialogue, I related to hooks’ and Scapp’s discussion about the issues of respecting and listening to each voice. I definitely appreciated their conversation about not letting “people who just like to hear themselves talk” control the conversation; there have been many times, kindergarten to undergrad, when one person has totally dominated a classroom discussion in which I was supposed to be participating. I think this is inappropriate regardless of whether or not what the student is saying relates to the topic at hand because it causes others to shut down and denies other students “voice,” but hooks specifically states that she calls out students when they are “unable to relate experience to the academic subject matter.” I have been on the other side of this situation, so it’s interesting to gain insight into the other side – the role of making the judgment call to keep the discussion moving.
On page 154, hooks says, “Sometimes it’s important to remind students that joy can be present along with hard work. Not every moment in the classroom will necessarily be one that brings you immediate pleasure, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of joy.” I wrote in the margins here that this made me think of working on UIL music in Choir in middle and high school. These songs were really tough; that’s why they were chosen. During the months and months that we sang the same songs over and over again, marking furiously in our sheet music, we certainly gained no immediate pleasure. But as we pushed through, and as we took the product of our labors to UIL competition to be judged, we were really proud of our work. The songs that everyone hated the most at the beginning of UIL season were the same ones the choir nerds sang on the bus ride home.

Question
The last two chapters wax poetic on putting passion back in our classrooms, but realistically, how do I as an elementary school teacher appropriately “allow [my] mind and body to know desire?” This seems very idealistic and out of touch with the reality of the public school system.

Countdown Paper:
Teaching to Transgress Intro – chapter 7

5 Big Picture Sentences
In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks seeks to define “education as the practice of freedom.” She begins by telling her own story and educational experiences. Later, hooks moves on to discuss classroom practice. She tells of how Paulo Freire influenced her work, maybe even more so because of the way he failed to address feminist issues; this made her read his work even more critically and thoughtfully. Her last chapter looks at feminist issues through the lens of race issues, giving a unique look at the problems hindering solidarity of all women.

4 Key Passages
“In the apartheid South, black girls has three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers.” (pg. 2)
“Along the way I had not found white folks who understood the depth and complexity of racial justice, and who were as willing to practice the art of living a nonracist life, as folks were then. In my adult life I have seen few white folks who are really willing to take risks, to be courageous, to live against the grain.” (pg. 26)
“Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral.” (pg. 30)
“…Professors must learn to respect the way students feel about their experiences as well as their need to speak about them in classroom settings: ‘You can’t deny that students have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful, or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions, feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice.” (pg. 88)

3 Key Terms
“banking system of education” – “the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and used at a later date” (pg. 5)

“praxis” – “action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (pg. 14)

“passion of experience” – also called “passion of remembrance,” a modified synonym of the feminist term “authority of experience;” a term “encompass[ing] many feelings but particularly suffering, for there is a particular knowledge that comes from suffering. It is a way of knowing that is often expressed through the body, what it knows, what has been deeply inscribed on it through experience.” (pg. 91)

2 Connections
It has been very useful in this course to have an understanding of the educational philosophies of DuBois and Washington. I learned about them in American Educational Thought. As hooks was talking about her own school experience, she mentioned her school’s name as part of the discussion of her teacher’s pedagogical practice, and I thought it was ironic that her school was called Booker T. Washington even though the teachers were “committed to nurturing intellect so that [their students] could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers – black folks who used [their] minds.” hooks goes on to say that their goal was that their students would “fulfill [their] intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race.” These are very DuBoisian sounding ideas.
hooks criticizes professors who employ “Tokenism” in their classes. She says, “individuals will often focus on women of color at the very end of the semester or lump everything about race and difference together in one section.” As much as I enjoyed my Christian Heritage course, this passage made me realize that my professor had done exactly this; at the end of the semester we covered feminist theology, black theology, and liberated theology.

1 Question
Your whole book compels us to change our teaching styles, but other than encouraging us to make our classrooms exciting and creating learning environments in which every voice is accepted and valued, what specific strategies do you suggest?