Teaching to Transgress

Writing, I believed then, was all about private longing and personal glory, but teaching was about service, giving back to one’s community. (Location 99)

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. (Location 113)

School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. (Location 114)

The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power. (Location 139)

The banking system of education (based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and used at a later date) did not interest me. (Location 141)

The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. (Location 167)

boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere. (Location 168)

excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement. (Location 178)

There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. (Location 184)

Excitement is generated through collective effort. (Location 190)

To these students, transgressing boundaries was frightening. And though they were not the majority, their spirit of rigid resistance seemed always to be more powerful than any will to intellectual openness and pleasure in learning. (Location 200)

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. (Location 217)

More than ever before in the recent history of this nation, educators are compelled to confront the biases that have shaped teaching practices in our society and to create new ways of knowing, different strategies for the sharing of knowledge. (Location 243)

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential (Location 256)

it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer. (Location 266)

“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.” (Location 287)

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. (Location 298)

whether academics were drug addicts, alcoholics, batterers, or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our minds functioned, whether we were able to do our jobs in the classroom. The self was presumably emptied out the moment the threshold was crossed, leaving in place only an objective mind—free of experiences and biases. (Location 303)

Part of the luxury and privilege of the role of teacher/professor today is the absence of any requirement that we be self-actualized. (Location 306)

they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom. (Location 312)

there are no clear ethical guidelines shaping actions. (Location 338)

They do want an education that is healing to the uninformed, unknowing spirit. They do want knowledge that is meaningful. They rightfully expect that my colleagues and I will not offer them information without addressing the connection between what they are learning and their overall life experiences. (Location 341)

Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. (Location 370)

Resistance that is random and isolated is clearly not as effective as that which is mobilized through systemic politicized practices of teaching and learning. (Location 382)

We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. (Location 450)

many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives. (Location 458)

part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth. (Location 478)

Some folks think that everyone who supports cultural diversity wants to replace one dictatorship of knowing with another, changing one set way of thinking for another. (Location 526)

In all cultural revolutions there are periods of chaos and confusion, times when grave mistakes are made. If we fear mistakes, doing things wrongly, constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the academy a culturally diverse place where scholars and the curricula address every dimension of that difference. (Location 529)

Our solidarity must be affirmed by shared belief in a spirit of intellectual openness that celebrates diversity, welcomes dissent, and rejoices in collective dedication to truth. (Location 538)

most of us were taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the notion of a single norm of thought and experience, (Location 553)

any effort to transform institutions so that they reflect a multicultural standpoint must take into consideration the fears teachers have when asked to shift their paradigms. (Location 557)

almost everyone, especially the old guard, were more disturbed by the overt recognition of the role our political perspectives play in shaping pedagogy than by their passive acceptance of ways of teaching and learning that reflect biases, particularly a white supremacist standpoint. (Location 578)

tokenism is not multicultural transformation, (Location 596)

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. (Location 601)

Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy. (Location 609)

we must build “community” in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. (Location 623)

one way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each individual voice. (Location 626)

students keep journals and often write paragraphs during class which they read to one another. (Location 627)

To hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition. (Location 629)

As I worked to create teaching strategies that would make a space for multicultural learning, I found it necessary to recognize what I have called in other writing on pedagogy different “cultural codes.” To teach effectively a diverse student body, I have to learn these codes. (Location 638)

The sharing of ideas and information does not always progress as quickly as it may in more homogeneous settings. (Location 641)

Yet I found that there was much more tension in the diverse classroom setting where the philosophy of teaching is rooted in critical pedagogy and (in my case) in feminist critical pedagogy. The presence of tension—and at times even conflict—often meant that students did not enjoy my classes or love me, their professor, as I secretly wanted them to do. (Location 644)

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. (Location 652)

often this feedback is critical. (Location 654)

Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. (Location 654)

there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. I respect that pain. (Location 659)

We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community. (Location 666)

if there is one lone person of color in the classroom she or he is objectified by others and forced to assume the role of “native informant. (Location 670)

When we, as educators, allow our pedagogy to be radically changed by our recognition of a multicultural world, we can give students the education they desire and deserve. We can teach in ways that transform consciousness, creating a climate of free expression that is the essence of a truly liberatory liberal arts education. (Location 682)

Because the colonizing forces are so powerful in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it seems that black people are always having to renew a commitment to a decolonizing political process that should be fundamental to our lives and is not. (Location 714)

I never wish to see a critique of this blind spot overshadow anyone’s (and feminists’ in particular) capacity to learn from the insights. (Location 748)

the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response. (Location 751)

critical interrogation is not the same as dismissal. (Location 753)

I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. (Location 762)

When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your disposal of something that you consider impure. (Location 767)

the question of moving from object to subject (Location 808)

I, too, feel myself more strongly committed to a practice of openmindedness, a willingness to engage critique as I age, and I think the way we experience more profoundly the growing fascism in the world, even in so-called “liberal” circles, reminds us that our lives, our work, must be an example. (Location 834)

“great humans bring with them something like a hallowed atmosphere, and when we seek them out, then we feel peace, we feel love, we feel courage.” (Location 860)

a certain milieu is born at the same time as a great teacher. (Location 862)

The lesson I learned from witnessing Paulo embody the practice he describes in theory was profound. It entered me in a way that writing can never touch one and it gave me courage. (Location 867)

I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. (Location 906)

Mama would say to me, now and then, exasperated, frustrated, “I don’t know where I got you from, but I sure wish I could give you back.” (Location 923)

Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in “theorizing,” in making sense out of what was happening. (Location 930)

When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. (Location 938)

the privileged act of naming often affords those in power access to modes of communication and enables them to project an interpretation, a definition, a description of their work and actions, that may not be accurate, that may obscure what is really taking place. (Location 947)

King risks positioning herself in a caretaker role (Location 956)

category “woman”—the insistence on recognition that gender is not the sole factor determining constructions of femaleness (Location 964)

Work by women of color and marginalized groups or white women (for example, lesbians, sex radicals), especially if written in a manner that renders it accessible to a broad reading public, is often de-legitimized in academic settings, even if that work enables and promotes feminist practice. (Location 973)

one of the uses these individuals make of theory is instrumental. They use it to set up unnecessary and competing heirarchies of thought which reinscribe the politics of domination by designating work as either inferior, superior, or more or less worthy of attention. (Location 976)

of the many uses of theory in academic locations is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references. (Location 978)

any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public. (Location 987)

it is indeed the purpose of such theory to divide, separate, exclude, keep at a distance. (Location 997)

responded to hegemonic feminist theory that does not speak clearly to us by trashing theory, and, as a consequence, further promoting the false dichotomy between theory and practice. Hence, they collude with those whom they would oppose. (Location 1001)

By internalizing the false assumption that theory is not a social practice, they promote the formation within feminist circles of a potentially oppressive hierarchy where all concrete action is viewed as more important than any theory written or spoken. (Location 1003)

These risks to one’s sense of self now seem trite when considered in relation to the crises we are facing as African Americans, to our desperate need to rekindle and sustain the flame of black liberation struggle. (Location 1022)

I saw our words as an action, that our collective struggle to discuss issues of gender and blackness without censorship was subversive practice. (Location 1025)

we needed new theories rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality. (Location 1028)

the stereotype that would have us believe the “real” black woman is always the one who speaks from the gut, who righteously praises the concrete over the abstract, the material over the theoretical? (Location 1039)

blackness is complex and multifaceted and that black people can be interpolated into reactionary and antidemocratic politics. (Location 1045)

I find writing—theoretical talk—to be most meaningful when it invites readers to engage in critical reflection and to engage in the practice of feminism. (Location 1067)

Where can we find a body of feminist theory that is directed toward helping individuals integrate feminist thinking and practice into daily life? (Location 1075)

rooted in a political commitment to mass-based feminist movement. (Location 1079)

one can partake of the “good” that these movements produce without any commitment to transformative politics and practice. (Location 1081)

feminism and feminist theory are fast becoming a commodity that only the privileged can afford. (Location 1082)