Teaching To Transgress - Hardcover

Hooks, Bell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415908078 ISBN 13: 9780415908078

Publisher: Routledge, 1994

Synopsis

The author, a feminist writer and professor, shares insights and strategies on teaching

About this title

About the Author

bell hooks is a writer and critic who has taught most recently at Berea College in Kentucky, where she is Distinguished Professor in Residence. Among her many books are the feminist classic Ain't I A Woman, the dialogue (with Cornel West) Breaking Bread, the children's books Happy to Be Nappy and Be Boy Buzz, the memoir Bone Black (Holt), and the general interest titles All About Love, Rock My Soul, and Communion. Her many books published with Routledge include Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, Belonging: A Culture of Place, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, and Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies.

From Publishers Weekly

Cultural theorist hooks means to challenge preconceptions, and it is a rare reader who will be able to walk away from her without considerable thought. Despite the frequent appearance of the dry word "pedagogy," this collection of essays about teaching is anything but dull or detached. hooks begins her meditations on class, gender and race in the classroom with the confession that she never wanted to teach. By combining personal narrative, essay, critical theory, dialogue and a fantasy interview with herself (the latter artificial construct being the least successful), hooks declares that education today is failing students by refusing to acknowledge their particular histories. Criticizing the teaching establishment for employing an over-factualized knowledge to deny and suppress diversity, hooks accuses colleagues of using "the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power." Far from a castigation of her field, however, Teaching to Transgress is full of hope and excitement for the possibility of education to liberate and include. She is a gentle, though firm, critic, as in the essay "Holding My Sister's Hand," which could well become a classic about the distrust between black and white feminists. While some will find her rejection of certain difficult theory narrow-minded, it is a small flaw in an inspired and thought-provoking collection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0415908078
• ISBN 13: 9780415908078
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200