Teaching to Transgress Outline/Quotes
Introduction: Teaching to Transgress
Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We were always and only responding and reacting to white folks.(4)
That shift from beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging, taught me the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination.(4)
The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility. (4)
I wanted to become a critical thinker. Yet that longing was often seen as a threat to authority. (5)
… learning could be liberatory.(6)
Those classrooms were the one space where pedagogical practices were interrogated, where it was assumed that the knowledge offered students would empower them to be better scholars, to live more fully in the world beyond academe. (6)
The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. (7)
Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom. (7)
Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. (7)
Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community. (8)
My pedagogical practices have em erged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies. (10)
… the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching and learning, about the classroom experience. (10)
Even though I share strategies, these works do not offer blueprints for ways to make the classroom an exciting place for learning. To do so would undermine the insistence that engaged pedagogy recognize each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience. (10-11)
Teaching is a performative act. (11)
To teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak. The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself. (11)
The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. (12)
Chapter One, Engaged Pedagogy
Education as the practice of freedom was continually undermined by professors who were actively hostile to the notion of student participation. (14)
Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that “the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people.” (15)
… the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalization. (16)
They do want an education that is healing to the uninformed, unknowing spirit. They do want knowledge that is meaningful. (19)
Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply. (22)
Chapter Three, Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World
As a consequence, many teachers are disturbed by the political implications of multicultural education because they fear losing control in a classroom where there is no one way to approach a subject— only multiple ways and multiple references. (35-36)
… no education is politically neutral. (37)
I have heard individual white women “boast” about how they have shown students that black writers are “as good” as the white male canon when they do not call attention to race. Clearly, such pedagogy is not an interrogation of the biases conventional canons (if not all canons) establish, but yet another form of tokenism. (38-39)
Many professors have conveyed to me their feeling that the classroom should be a “safe” place; that usually translates to mean that the professor lectures to a group of quiet students who respond only when they are called on. (39)
Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy. (39)
Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn—to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. (40)
The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk—and talk back. And, yes, often this feedback is critical. (42)
Chapter 11, Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. (167)
Reflecting on Adrienne Rich’s words, I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize. (168)
Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist. (170)
For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. (170)
The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies— different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview. (171)
We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language. (175)
Chapter 13, Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process
To call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professorial elders, who have been usually white and male. But our nonwhite elders were just as eager to deny the body. (191)
Repression and denial make it possible for us to forget and then desperately seek to recover ourselves, our feelings, our passions in some private place—after class. (192)
Beyond the realm of critical thought, it is equally crucial that we learn to enter the classroom “whole” and not as “disembodied spirit. (193)
To understand the place of eros and eroticism in the classroom, we must move beyond thinking of those forces solely in terms of the sexual, though that dimension need not be denied. (194)
When eros is present in the classroom setting, then love is bound to flourish. (198)
the purpose of education is to show students how to define themselves “authentically and spontaneously in relation” to the world, then professors can best teach if we are self-actualized. (199)
To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire. (199)
Chapter 14, Ecstasy: Teaching and Learning Without Limits
In our society, which is so fundamentally anti-intellectual, critical thinking is not encouraged.(202)
Occasionally students feel concerned when a class departs from the banking system. I remind them that they can have a lifetime of classes that reflect conventional norms. (203)
Over time, I’ve begun to see that departmental pressure on “popular” professors to accept larger classes was also a way to undermine engaged pedagogy. (204)
Yet some version of engaged pedagogy is really the only type of teaching that truly generates excitement in the classroom, that enables students and professors to feel the joy of learning. (204)
Engaged pedagogy not only compels me to be constantly creative in the classroom, it also sanctions involvement with students beyond that setting. I journey with students as they progress in their lives beyond our classroom experience. In many ways, I continue to teach them, even as they become more capable of teaching me. (205)
It took time and experience for me to understand that the rewards of engaged pedagogy might not emerge during a course. (206)
Commitment to engaged pedagogy carries with it the willingness to be responsible, not to pretend that professors do not have the power to change the direction of our students’ lives. (206)
The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. (207)