Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Chapter 5 elucidates hooks’s views on The Necessity of Accessible Theory. What are the key ideas in this chapter? How does hooks try to model accessible theory throughout Teaching to Transgress? Do you think that there is any merit to criticisms that her work is not “academic” enough in its style? Do you think that hooks fails to give ordinary people enough credit, or do you think that the style modeled in Teaching to Transgress is actually necessary so that more people can understand the book’s ideas? Which ideas in this text might still be inaccessible to a general reader, and why?

Teaching Suggestion: If you wish to model hooks’s theories of engaged learning, consider having students either respond to this question orally or share something from their written responses after writing. It may be helpful to encourage students to avoid quick judgments as they respond to the prompt; their goal is to think critically rather than simply accepting either hooks’s or her critics’ assertions at face value.

Differentiation Suggestion: English language learners and students with reading, attentional, or executive function issues may struggle to sift through the entire text looking for examples to support their answers to the questions in this prompt.