Teaching to Transgress: a legacy remembered: a tribute to the lasting impact of Bell Hooks

KEYWORDS:

• teaching
• pedagogy
• race
• student empowerment

In December of 2021, Bell Hooks died unexpectedly at the age of 69. For over 40 years she was a writer and an activist on issues such as race, gender, power, love, resistance, violence, and, of course, pedagogy. Her work has influenced generations of academics, including the editors of this special issue, and so we come together to honor this work, her legacy, and to say thanks. And what better way to do that than to explore how her work resonates with the increasingly turbulent social and political climate of the academy during the early part of 2023.

Hooks wrote Teaching to Transgress in 1994, almost 30 years ago. At the time the book was embraced as a challenging, if not a radical, critique of the nature of higher education. In her accessible but deceivingly profound prose, Hooks presents engaged pedagogy – her vision for how teachers could and should be engaged in the ‘spiritual and intellectual growth of students’ (13) by transgressing the traditional boundaries of higher education. She challenged teachers to ‘teach in a way that respects and cares for the souls of our students’ (13). The book then is a discussion about how to do that kind of radical academic work and what boundaries we must transgress in order to make engaged pedagogy a reality.

As we sit down to write this special issue introduction, we are struck by how radical the book feels in 2023, despite the passage of time. As we emerge from a global pandemic, we witness students struggling to re-engage with classroom learning after years spent online and isolated. We are seeing the emotional costs of the pandemic, in the exhaustion of students and the increase in issues of student mental health. In this climate, Hooks’ call to ‘approach students with the will and desire to respond to’ them as ‘unique human beings’ feels radical (13).

And into this reality, Hook’s voice rings from 3 decades earlier, challenging us to transgress assembly-line learning, to embrace multi-culturalism and transgress the boundaries of difference, to see theory as liberatory, to speak openly about essentialism and experience, to embrace feminism, to confront class distinctions, and to form radical teaching communities where we speak truth to one another. It is a gift and a call for revolution that was necessary in 1994 and perhaps is even more necessary in 2023. This is the spirit of this special issue.

Our authors each approach some aspect of hooks commitment to students through a unique lens. Stephen Muzzatti and Claudio Colaguori draw on their own experience as first generation working class academics to examine how to give marginalized students the opportunity to find their own voice. In two separate pieces, Madhavi Venkatesan writes, with several of her students, about the potential of an economics of crime course to teach students the realities of marginalization and economic opportunity, and later about how race can be addressed directly when teaching economics. Chrissina Burke discusses the impact of the small changes, such as creating an equity-focused syllabus, on the belonging students feel in a classroom. Sara Shuman writes of the power of collaboration, especially with those who have been justice impacted, in creating a unique space for learning. SM Rodriquez reveals the emotional cost of teaching in the way hooks advocates and discusses ways instructors pay hidden cost for engaging with students, especially around issues such as abolition. Tanni Chaudhuri demonstrates the way knowledge can be reconceptualized in a classroom through film to highlight minority experiences, and Linsey Pointer demonstrates the power of a restorative justice course to impact larger issues of marginalization in students’ lives.

Multicultural education, DEI, and the returning shadow

While most of the pieces in this special edition focus on the application of Hooks engaged pedagogy in a variety of education environments, it seems appropriate for us to use this introduction to speak to another critical part of Teaching to Transgress, one which in recent weeks has become even more relevant.

In chapter two of the book, Hooks addresses ‘A Revolution of Values’ beginning in the academy; one that is intimately connected to the recognition of multiculturalism in the classroom. In 1994, she writes eloquently about the potential of cultural diversity to free educational spaces from colonialism and white supremacy and how this promised revolution was ‘exciting’ for ‘those of us on the margins’ because it meant ‘acknowledgement of difference’ and even perhaps understanding, acceptance and affirmation (Hooks, 1994, p. 30).

“Finally we were going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral.” “The call for a recognition of cultural diversity, a rethinking of the ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution-one that seeks to restore life to a corrupt and dying academy” (p. 29–30).

In the last month, a lot of attention has been given to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ new efforts to increase state control over higher education. In a recent article in the Atlantic, Ibram Kendi asserted that DeSantis did not start the movement against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. In fact, such movements have been taking place for more than a century (Kendi, 2023). One of these backlashes against cultural diversity is what Hooks is addressing in Teaching to Transgress (1994) when she wrote, ‘some folks think that everyone who supports cultural diversity wants to replace one dictatorship of knowing with another’ (p. 32). This sentiment feel relevant 30 years later in the new conservative backlash unleashed with renewed vigor against the ‘wokeness’ of higher education in 2023. As Hooks writes,

Many folks found as they tried to respect ‘cultural diversity’ they had to confront the limitations of their training and knowledge, as well as a possible loss of ‘authority.’ Indeed exposing certain truths and biases in the classroom often created chaos and confusion. The idea that the classroom should always be a ‘safe’ harmonious place was challenged. It was hard for individuals to fully grasp the idea that recognition of difference might also require of us a willingness to see the classroom change, to allow for shifts in relations between students (p. 30).

These realizations that cultural diversity was hard work led to pushback in the 1990s of which Hooks is writing. ‘All of a sudden, professors who had taken issues of multiculturalism and cultural diversity seriously were backtracking, expressing doubts, casting votes in directions that would restore biased traditions and prohibit changes in faculty and curricula that were to bring diversity of representation and perspective’ (p. 31).

Again her words resonate as new politicians justify creating and passing laws curbing much-needed efforts of cultural diversity in higher education by labeling these efforts as ‘divisive’. In addition, these politicians claim that cultural diversity efforts seek to blame white students for things they for which they have no direct responsibility and that DEI has gotten ‘out of control’, diverting funds from the basics of education.

Those of us involved in more recent diversity, inclusion, and equity movements find ourselves in positions similar to those Hooks was in 30 years earlier. While in some universities dialogues about colonialism and inclusion have become standard, there still exists faculty resistance to acknowledging their own biases, university resistance to addressing systemic issues that hinder inclusion, and student resistance to participating in classrooms where learning includes ‘becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.’ As the beating drum against DEI grows louder with the passage of new laws in an expanding number of states, it becomes easier to ‘drown out’ the voices of those that continue to fight for cultural diversity. For some of us this is a call to action to ‘get louder’.

As we publish this special issue, we want to collectively assert Hooks call to action nearly three decades earlier. Perhaps this commitment to engaged pedagogy and cultural diversity in all its forms is the best dedication to her groundbreaking work. So we echo her words, ‘The threats should not be ignored. Nor should our collective commitment to cultural diversity change because we have not yet devised and implemented the perfect strategies for them’ (p. 33). We must fight back against our own new version of backlash if we are to not allow the promise of DEI to become yet another ‘dream deferred’ (Hughes, 2002).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.