Jimmy's Post

Drawing from the works of Paulo Freire and a feminist theoretical approach, Bell Hooks makes a general plea for teachers to enact an ardent commitment towards “engaged pedagogy,” where we can see “the classroom remaining the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (17). She emphasizes that “self-actualization” on the part of teachers to “link awareness with practice” will enable teachers and students to both be “active participants” rather than “passive consumers” (14). Amongst all that Bell Hooks covers in Teaching To Transgress, I specifically want to look at chapters five and six for this post.

In chapter five, Bell Hooks outlines how theory can be used as a liberatory practice, that we cannot hope to enact teaching as a practice of freedom if we don’t see theory as a “location for healing” (59). But first, we have to distinguish what qualifies as theory, enabling us to deconstruct “theory as defined by patriarchal institutions in academia” (64). As the banking system of education has enabled teachers to saturate their practice and theories in a language that both alienates and silences students, Hooks stresses that “any theory that cannot be shared in the everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public” (64). As my professor has said that “we can’t get out of bed without a theory’” (Bruce), we can enable theory in the classroom that will “work to resolve those issues that are most pressing in daily life” (70), grounding the abstract in reality, enabling students to explore critical points of reference that both pertain to their own lives and the classroom. How we do it is another question entirely.

Chapter six illuminates matters beyond Hooks’s difficulties with the works of Diana Fuss. The dilemma of essentialism in the classroom is something Hooks strives to both acknowledge and overcome. Basically, essentialism posits that entities have concrete characteristics and properties attributed to them that are inseparable, making it easy for us to define things precisely. If we observe our student’s tendencies to rationalize culture bound viewpoints as being universal truths, we can see how essentialism is something that needs to be combated, not accepted in the classroom, where “the concept of a privileged voice of authority is deconstructed by our collective critical practice” (84). If we are to accept essentialism as an essential facet of academic constructs, than we acknowledge that “the artificial boundary between insider and outsider necessarily contains rather than disseminates knowledge” (Fuss, 83), rejecting the value of students experiences that shape “classroom dynamics” (83). The question comes back to a free space versus a contextual space, and although Hooks “shares” the perception Fuss makes concerning essentialism, she acknowledges that “racism, sexism, and class elitism shape the structure of classrooms, creating a lived reality of insider versus outsider that is predetermined” (83). Therefore, it seems that we cannot avoid the contextual space students engulf in the classroom, that “underneath everywhere, there is a lived reality” (91). But we have to draw a line that distinguishes how things can be and how things simply can’t be. Alas my fellow TA’s, again…how we do this is…I don’t kno