Bell Hooks, in the introductory passage of her book Teaching to Transgress, describes the transgression needed to bring reform to teaching to make the classroom/academic environment more appealing and engaging. She namely argues that the learning environment should generate both excitements for students, but also teachers.
Engagement through excitement, according to Bell Hooks is a remedy to what she defines as the crisis in education: "students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach." Bell Hooks, within her more universal theoretical projections, infuses such beliefs with her own personal experience as both a student and a teacher. Her motives for wanting to transgress the academic pedagogy become enriched with the integration of her personal experiences, making the aims of her collection of essay concise, clear, and accessible to readers through her personal testifications.
The reading and concepts briefly addressed in Bell Hooks introduction were not very hard to interoperate, but from the first page on, it was intriguing to me as a reader to see where it was going. I love bell hooks work for the simple fact that she takes large ideas and makes them tangible for the reader by interjecting her own experiences. Even if the reader doesn’t relate directly to the excerpts she shares from her own life. They create a mood embedded in the text that is friendly for an outsider, especially when dealing with dull or complex issues.
I have read two other books of Bell Hooks, and she seems to incorporate the same experiences in different books and essays and much like she notes in this passage "written separately for a variety of contexts there is unavoidably some degree of overlap; ideas are repeated." it was in reading her brief summery of her education experiences going from a segregated to desegregated schools, and her undergraduate and graduate studies, that I directly remember her addressing those in the previous books I have read. It was interesting to me because I felt like I could put together some of the details that were not there making the ideas more complete.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Quin
ReplyDeleteIt is great to see you responding to and grappling with the readings, putting them into the context of your own politics, experience as a student and previous readings. bell hooks gives us her personal experience while Oakes and Lipton give us an historical and social context.
I wonder how these authors add up to and inform what you are looking at in your research. What did you think of the John Dewey article? How did Carl Anthony and the school site presentations shift or inform your perspective?
Quin - I love your responses to your colleagues in class - they are thoughtful and often just the scholarly nudge that each of us need. thank you for your contributios and insight.
Louise