Teaching to Transgress

A collection of essays subtitled Education as the Practice of Freedom, in which bell hooks reflects on her years as a student and teacher. She recalls the segregated Black schools of her childhood in Kentucky, where teachers treated learning as a form of resistance, and the desegregated schools that followed, where education became mere obedience. Drawing on the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, she proposes engaged pedagogy: teaching that cares for students as whole persons, invites their experience into the room, and requires teachers to be willing to grow and be vulnerable themselves. Essays address multicultural and feminist teaching, class differences in the university, the politics of language, the place of the body and of passion in learning, and a dialogue with a fellow teacher. Throughout, hooks presents the classroom as a place where freedom can be practised, not only discussed.

It is a humane and practical guide for anyone who teaches or learns, arguing that real education changes both students and teachers.