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?