The Field Guide › Paper
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks sets out a vision of teaching as the practice of freedom, a phrase she takes directly from Freire and turns towards the classroom. Against an education that bores, deadens and reproduces the existing order, she argues for what she calls engaged pedagogy: teaching that treats students as whole people rather than empty vessels, that values everyone's presence and voice, and that understands the classroom as a space of possibility where knowledge is made together rather than deposited by an authority. Her account is explicitly feminist and anti-racist and drawn from her own experience as a Black woman moving between segregated and integrated schooling: she insists that education is never neutral, that whose knowledge counts and whose voice is heard are questions of power, and that a teacher cannot ask students to take risks and be vulnerable without being willing to be present and vulnerable themselves. Excitement, she argues, and even a kind of joyful transgression of the boundaries that keep a classroom safe but dead, are not distractions from serious learning but conditions for it. For a corpus about psychological safety this is the concept arriving from critical and feminist pedagogy rather than from organisational psychology, and it both enriches and unsettles the mainstream account. It enriches it by describing, in fine and practical detail, what it takes to make a space where people will actually speak and risk; it unsettles it by insisting that such a space is not a neutral technique but a political act, bound up with race, gender, class and the willingness of those with authority to give something of themselves. It is a close companion to Woodson's Black feminist critique and a direct descendant of Freire. Its limits, for a reader wanting operational guidance, are that it works through essay and reflection rather than method, and speaks from and to education more than the workplace, though the translation is not hard to make. (Based on hooks's 1994 book, published by Routledge.)