Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their text analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks mentions multiple sources of resistance to change.

• What are the sources of resistance to change that hooks has encountered in her quest to transform classrooms? (topic sentence)
• Explain at least three sources of resistance hooks mentions; in your explanation, discuss what motivates this resistance.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, describe how hooks approaches overcoming these sources of resistance and how this supports the book’s theme of Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing.

2. One of hooks’s characteristics as a thinker is that she is unwilling to entirely dismiss an idea or work simply because one part of it is flawed.

• How does hooks’s reaction to the works of white feminists, in particular the work of Diana Fuss, demonstrate her willingness to find the merit in partially flawed works and ideas? (topic sentence)
• Explain the flaws hooks sees in the work of white feminists in general and in the work of Diana Fuss in particular.
• Explain the merits hooks sees in these same works.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect this characteristic of hooks’s thinking to the foundation of her work in her controversial first meeting with Paulo Freire.

3. The change from a predominantly Black school to a desegregated, predominantly white school was devastating for hooks.

• In what sense is hooks’s approach to education an attempt to recreate her own memories of her earliest educational experiences?  (topic sentence)
• Explain at least three examples of pedagogy that the adult hooks advocates and connect each example to hooks’s childhood experiences at a predominantly Black school.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect this aspect of hooks’s work to the book’s concern with Confronting Divisions in American Education and Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at least three main points supported by text details, and a conclusion.

1. In what sense is Teaching to Transgress both an argument and a manual for sharing power? How does hooks see power as unequally distributed? What impacts does this inequality have? What theories about sharing power does hooks share, and how does she suggest putting these theories into practice? Write an essay that analyzes what Teaching to Transgress conveys about how and why power should be more equally distributed; show how this relates to the book’s theme of Confronting Divisions in American Education: Moving from the Margins to the Center in the Multicultural Classroom. Support your argument with evidence drawn from throughout the text, citing any quoted material.

2. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks suggests The Necessity of Accessible Theory. One of the ways she demonstrates the truth of this philosophy is through her emphasis on the transformative power of feminist theory. Why does hooks argue that theory must be accessible in order to have broad power? How did feminist theory transform hooks’s own life? What other examples does she give of classrooms and lives that have been changed because of feminist theory? In these cases, does hooks establish a clear causal link between the accessibility of the theory and the transformation that results? Write an essay that takes and defends a position on the effectiveness of hooks’s use of feminist theory as a case study in the ways that accessible theory can transform people’s lives. Support your argument with evidence drawn from throughout the text, citing any quoted material.

3. In what sense are hooks’s ideas a natural extension of the work of Paulo Freire? What ideas of Freire’s did hooks connect with as a young scholar? How do hooks’s ideas move beyond Freire’s? How are hooks’s philosophies influenced by the American context in which she lived and worked? Write an essay in which you first establish the key ideas of Freire’s that inspired hooks; then show how hooks’s ideas build on these within a uniquely American context to Confront Divisions in American Education. Support your argument with evidence drawn from throughout the text, citing any quoted material and any outside sources in APA format or in the style your instructor prefers.