Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

A Brazilian writer and educator, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, chronicling the lives of the marginalized poor in both Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, both former Portuguese colonies, and the education efforts that he led there. These books had a profound influence on hooks, who used his ideas on “engaged pedagogy” to inform her ideas on education, especially the need for open access to education for all students, even those who are traditionally denied access to power. hooks connected to Freire’s work and found herself in the peasants he wrote about, “my comrades in Guinea-Bissau” (46). Freire’s ideas run throughout Teaching to Transgress, including his ideas on the need for a theory that is tied to praxis, or practice, since ideas are nothing if they are not connected to actions.

bell hooks wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the novelist Toni Morrison, focusing on Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), and has taught many classes on Morrison’s works. hooks uses Morrison’s work as an example to discuss how some professors treat the issue of multiculturalism. Some professors feel that it is enough to simply add the works of an African American writer like Morrison to their syllabus, thinking this automatically results in a multicultural curriculum, but hooks doesn’t believe it’s enough simply to add writers of color to the traditionally white male canon. Adding a writer like Morrison without transforming teaching strategies does little to advance the cause of multiculturalism. Instead, professors must address the systems of race, gender, and class that such novels examine through classroom dialogues that allow all students to have a voice as they work toward an understanding of the novel.

In Chapter 10, hooks includes her interview with Ron Scapp, “a white male philosopher, comrade, and friend” who is the Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Multi-Cultural Education at the College of Mount St. Vincent. The interview provides an example of how two people who seem to be very different in their relationships to privilege and power can come together and have an honest dialogue about the role of the professor in the classroom and how to enact progressive, liberatory pedagogy.

Mohanty is a scholar in postcolonial feminist theory, famous for essays such as “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) and “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s” (1989). One of her most recent books is Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope (2018). She is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University, New York.

In Chapter 3 of Teaching to Transgress (“Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World”), hooks recalls when she taught at Oberlin College. Mohanty and hooks, both untenured professors at the time, were concerned about the lack of awareness of many of their white colleagues in teaching multicultural classes. They set up seminars for “constructive confrontation and critical interrogation” (36-37). Once the meetings concluded, they were disappointed by the unwillingness of some professors to change their pedagogy to address issues of gender, race, and class, often because these professors feared losing control of the classroom rather than embracing the opportunity to bring more voices into the classroom conversation.