In Teaching to Trangress, author, writer and teacher bell hooks writes about a new kind of education that teaches students to 'transgress' racial, sexual and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom. Hooks sees this as a teachers most important goal.
Teaching to Transgress is a series of 14 essays and interviews that investigate how to transform the multicultural classroom into an inclusive space. This collection of essays focus on the power of the classroom to transgress boundaries that often alienate students. Within these essays hooks uses her personal experiences as a student and teacher to show how students become marginalised and silenced in the classroom. She discusses how feminist pedagogical strategies have contributed to engaged pedagogy and how issues of language class and desire are often neglected in discussions of classroom privilege.
She says:
“As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.”
“…the academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
This series of essays helps us see the connections between our experience of education and highlights how education has often been a reproduction and relearning of dominant cultures. It is important that all education is rooted in diverse histories and is responsive to a specific group of students.