#10. Tenth Blog Post Anniversary: Cherry Picking bell hooks

The blog is now ten posts old. Here's hoping for many more posts to come!  

Today I thought I would talk a little bit about pedagogy. Like many other writing instructors before me, bell hooks has influenced my approach to teaching and I do consider myself a critical pedagogue. I have read her books Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Teaching Community (2003), and there are two quotes from these texts that I want to analyze. While these two quotes are scattered across both texts, for me they have always worked together to form a certain theory of free speech that informs my bearing in the classroom. However, after rereading these quotes in preparation for this post, I realize that my original interpretation might not reflect what bell hooks was actually trying to say. I am worried now that I am potentially cherrypicking her ideas to support a preconceived opinion. Let's investigate. 

I will provide the two quotes here and offer an analysis: 

Quote 1, from Teaching to Transgress, "Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World:" 

"The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint that includes awareness of race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms will be uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained. To some extent, we all know that whenever we address in the classroom subjects that students are passionate about there is always a possibility of confrontation, forceful expression of ideas, or even conflict" (p. 41). 

Quote 2, from Teaching Community, "Democratic Education:" 

"Rather than embodying the conventional false assumption that the university setting is not the 'real world' and teaching accordingly, the democratic educator breaks through the false construction of the corporate university as set apart from real life and seeks to re-envision schooling as always part of our real world experience" (p. 41).  

My copy of Teaching Community.

Analysis: 

When looking at Quote 1, hooks seems to be suggesting that instructors, in an effort to keep their classrooms safe, will avoid controversial topics related to race, sex, and class because they can potentially lead to conflict between students. I would argue that Quote 2 says something similar, because if instructors are not engaging these difficult topics in their classrooms, they are not situating their classrooms in the real world where such topics have very real effects on people. When reading these books for the first time, my initial understanding was that hooks was making a case for free speech in the classroom. While hooks in Quote 1 is orienting her observation around discussions about race, gender, and class, I think it is fair that one could extrapolate this focus to also include controversial topics representative of any political ideology. At the same time, after looking at some of the context around these quotes, I wonder if I might be misinterpreting them completely. 

A few sentences after where Quote 1 appears, hooks writes that "The experience of professors who educate for critical consciousness indicates that many students, especially students of color, may not feel at all 'safe' in what appears to be a neutral setting. It is the absence of a feeling of safety that often promotes prolonged silence or lack of student engagement" (p. 41). It seems I may have overlooked the notion that hooks, writing in 1994, was operating in an academic environment where whiteness was very much the dominant cultural paradigm. I am writing in 2026 and studying at a public university with rich multiracial diversity, and while I certainly think the situation has improved since 1994, it would probably be wrong to say that what hooks is describing no longer exists and that everyone feels comfortable speaking their minds. 

There is even more context to offer that might distort my original interpretation of hooks' writing. After Quote 2, hooks writes that "They [students] have often learned in public school both that college is not the 'real' world and that the book learning offered there has no relevance in the world outside university walls" (p. 42). Again, it seems like my initial reading of Quote 2 is a little off base, as hooks is meditating on the age-old debate surrounding the relationship between education and experience and which of the two is more relevant to one's success in life. In this chapter of the book, hooks makes the argument that students, after leaving the university, should strive to be lifelong learners and seek knowledge outside of formal educational institutions. Again, this might be a little different from what I'm saying about the classroom needing to be a space where free speech is considered sacrosanct. 

While I realize I may have slightly taken hooks out of context, I do genuinely think that my interpretation is valid. After all, in Teaching to Transgress, hooks emphasizes that it is important for instructors to be theorizing about education. While I might not be honoring the original spirit of hooks' ideas, one might say that I am building on them and turning them into my own. The year 2026 has been, needless to say, a very confusing, frustrating, and stressful time in terms of politics and the influence of politics on education. If students from diverse cultural, linguistic, and political backgrounds are coming through our classrooms, the classroom should be a space where everyone can share their experiences, regardless of whether we disagree with their viewpoints. If the classroom is the real world, and the real world is a harsh place, then these uglier aspects of the real world are sometimes going to make their way into the classroom. As hooks mentions, in order to show students that our classes are worthwhile and relevant to the real world, I don't think we should run away or shut the door when this inevitably happens.

Perhaps I made this connection through the influence of Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire writes in his famous chapter about the banking method of education that students have often been led to believe that they exist outside of society, and that an oppressive education system frames education as the process of assimilating outsiders into society. Freire argues to the contrary that this is a false consciousness, as students already exist in society, and thus education should foster critical consciousness among students to make them aware of this reality. In thinking about the classroom as the real world, it seems to me that a pedagogy of domination would try to create a curated, incomplete view of reality that is not reflective of the real world. As a critical pedagogue, I therefore think it is important that we try not to create any illusions and encourage students to consider the world as it is. 

At the same time, I acknowledge that what I have written here is much easier said than done. This goes back to what hooks says in the same chapter ("Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World") about building a culture of community in our classrooms. If we build a culture of understanding where people engage in dialogue to understand and not dominate, such conversations will be easier to have. Regardless, to practice what I preach, I will continue to provide the text of the 1st Amendment on my syllabus and promote the idea that students, in a just country (which we might not have right now), have the right to free speech and they should exercise it if they feel comfortable doing so. 

References

Freire, P. (1970). The pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. 

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community. A pedagogy of hope. Routledge.