Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that No one is born a racist.

In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, anytime - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy.

Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem.

In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.

Teaching to transgress book