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.