teaching to transgress & pedagogies of difference

I never planned to teach.

Teaching was what my mom did. Early on, she taught students, and then she switched to staff development where she taught teachers, and then she taught students-who-would-become-teachers, and then she was a principal, so she was back to teaching teachers. That was her thing, not mine.

People would ask, "Are you going to be a teacher like your mom?" and I'd roll my eyes and turn up my nose and say, "No. That's not what I do."

When I started teaching, I thought they'd ask if I was qualified, if I knew what I was doing, if I could really teach. The answer to all of these questions was "no." I'd had a two-day training session and was provided with sample syllabi, none of which I used. Using them would have been easier, but I take the Yoda approach—if I'm going to do something, the easy way out isn't an option. I picked a set of readings where we went from advertising & capitalism to television-as-text to gender to race & class, because I wanted them to write about things that they could own, things that were part of their lives.

But still. The first time I walked into a classroom as an instructor, I was scared to death.

Then I started reading the responses to the first-day diagnostic writing prompt, and the addendums my students—brand-new college freshmen—wrote in their blue books.

"I'm bad at writing."
"I'm not sure I can do this."
"I'm afraid I'll fail."
"I hope you like my essay."

That was when two things happened. The first thing that happened was my realizing that in this situation, I had the power. They weren't going to ask me if I was qualified, because they were too terrified that they weren't. The second thing that happened was I fell in love. You know the bolt-of-lightning fairy-tale movie kind of love at first sight? Yeah. That was pretty much exactly what happened to me with teaching. Because I had the power, and that meant I could give it to them.

Reading bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was like having a conversation with someone who keeps saying what I was about to say, leaving me with not much to do other than holler "Word!" with the occasional fist-bump or high-five. While hooks draws heavily on Freire's work—much of which certainly resonated with me—her interpretation and discussion of it was easier for me to connect to my own personal experience, as she discussed being a black woman in feminist classrooms and helping people find their voices.

There is a passage in which hooks explains that after a discussion in a restaurant, a black woman "who hesitated before she entered the conversation because she was unsure about whether or not she could convey the complexity of her thought" came up and "[shared] that the conversation…enabled her to give voice to feelings and ideas she had always 'kept' to herself" (72). I think for most of us, this is our teaching ideal: A student (whether formally or informally a student) says, "You made a difference." And yet, it's not always so simple.

Making a difference doesn't always make people happier.

In "Pedagogies of Difference, Race, and Representation: Film as a Site of Translation and Politics," from Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, the primary argument that Henry Giroux makes is that multicultural education and cultural critique must function together to be genuinely meaningful. We cannot teach students to decode the texts of culture without also teaching them "how material relations of power work to sustain structures of inequality and exploitation" (88). Identifying some of the stereotypes and meanings and ideological representations in cultural texts is not the end, nor are these meanings simply a reflection or hint as to what the "real world" is like. They constitute the social world.

Hooks tells of the moment when she realized that "shifting paradigms" can cause "discomfort," saying, "I respect that pain" (43). This, I think, is crucial. If I engage in critical pedagogy, I am not merely trying to help students see the world "correctly," as Freire puts it; I am disrupting the worldview of my students. For some, I am helping them find a way to voice things they have always thought. And for some, I am showing them that the world is not what they have always thought.

And this is why the point that Giroux makes is so important: He is arguing that students must be able to see a way to change the system. We cannot end with mere analysis; he sees this as fundamentally meaningless, and I would argue that, for students who take that analysis seriously and intently, it also is likely to provide them with a sense of hopelessness. Education must involve helping students acquire the tools to change things, to make a difference.