Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Create a Transgressive Teaching Mini-Unit”

After reading hooks's ideas regarding pedagogy, students will demonstrate their understanding by creating a brief teaching unit using hooks's ideas from Teaching to Transgress.

Now that you have read bell hooks’s ideas about engaged pedagogy, how would you apply them if you were asked to teach her ideas to others? For this activity, you will create a set of three lesson plans intended to help others understand the main tenets of hooks’s educational philosophy. The design of your lessons should reflect your understanding of engaged pedagogy.

• Create a list of the most important points in Teaching to Transgress. You will not be able to teach everything this book covers, so you will need to prioritize and consider which points are most crucial to an understanding of hooks’s pedagogy. Your lessons will target students of your own age and ability level. Plan to convey two to four main ideas in each lesson.
• Organize the points you intend to teach. How can you group them logically into three lessons? Are there some points that need to be taught first, because they are foundational to understanding other ideas?
• Create three lesson plans, designed to take place during three consecutive class sessions. Each lesson must include a clear daily objective, the introduction of new material, a check for understanding, practice, and a summative assessment.
• The way you accomplish each part of the lesson is up to you, but your lessons will be evaluated based on both the judgment you show in choosing objectives and the pedagogy reflected in the lessons themselves. Make sure that all parts of your work reflect hooks’s ideas and priorities.

Teaching Suggestion: Depending on the time you have available for this activity, you might want to allow students to work in groups of three. You can also tailor this activity to the time available and students’ ability levels by increasing or decreasing the number and type of elements that you require as a part of students’ lesson plans. To offer students a challenge, you might require that one or more of the following elements be included in their plans:

• Supplementary media by creators from traditionally marginalized groups
• Diverse forms of formative and summative assessment
• Student choice and student-directed inquiry
• Problem-based learning activities
• Socratic seminar
• Interactive materials such as games
• Modeling
• Graphic representation, such as drawing or filling out a graphic organizer
• Group work or reciprocal teaching

Differentiation Suggestion: English language learners and students with dyslexia, attentional issues, or executive function issues may benefit from assistance with organizing their thoughts and structuring their lesson plans. You might lead them through creating graphic organizers as they decide how to group hooks’s ideas into distinct lessons and offer them a lesson plan template that they can simply fill in with their own ideas. English language learners and students who struggle with written expression, executive function, or attentional issues may benefit from reduced assignment length; consider having these students create a single lesson plan rather than a mini-unit.

Paired Text Extension:

This activity can also be carried out using the second book in hooks’s teaching trilogy, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope.

Teaching Suggestion: Should you choose to have students read hooks’s next book, this activity can be applied to either text or to both. If you have students repeat the activity, challenge them to link their second set of lesson plans to the first by including activation schemata, comparison and contrast activities, and so on.