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.