Bell hooks’ argument for a critical pedagogy that creates a
democratic classroom among an increasingly multicultural or diverse student
body is, as she notes repeatedly, clearly influenced by Paulo Freire. Freire
has cropped up in many of the theorists we have studied, which demonstrates how
persuasive his negative description of the “banking system of education” and
the class barriers that divided the bourgeoisie academy of those who have power
from students who do not have power or a voice. From Freire, hooks develops
what she calls a “transformative pedagogy rooted in a respect for
multiculturalism” (40). The term “multiculturalism,”
which was thrown around anywhere and everywhere especially during the 1990s
when hooks wrote this collection of essays, is not a label we tend to use in
today’s discourse. For hooks, rather than being essentializing or divisive, the
term “multiculturalism” appears to denote a certain kind of democratization
that was rapidly happening within the university at the end of the twentieth
century. In addition, hooks assumes that democratization of the classroom is a
key goal for universities as a whole and a common good we should be working
toward. She perhaps defends this goal in other portions of Teaching to Transgress since the chapters we have somewhat jump
into the nuts and bolts of transformative pedagogy. Hooks writes, “Making the
classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to
contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39).
Importantly for hooks, this responsibility to
contribute does not imply that the classroom has to be established as the
ultimate “safe zone.” Contribution can be contentious and messy. Wanting to create a classroom of “openness
and intellectual rigor,” hooks writes, “Rather than focusing on issues of
safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is
shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is
the desire to learn – to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual
development and our capacity to live more fully in the world” (40). I believe
her use of the word “ideally” here is very important, since we all might be
able to imagine particularly difficult classmates or students who make us
really question why that student is even at the university to begin with. We
also get better sense of how hooks envisions this democratization practice
which may be full of confrontation and disagreement in her chapter on “Confronting
Class.” Hooks argues against the notion that a teacher’s primary concern should
be to “maintain order” within the classroom, as this reinforces the bourgeois
values that have been established in the university. From the perspective of
the students, hooks argues that these same social pressures often silence “marginal”
voices. She writes,
Even though students enter the ‘democratic’
classroom believe they have the right to ‘free speech,’ most students are not
comfortable exercising this right to ‘free speech.’ Most students are not
comfortable exercising this right – especially if it means they must give voice
to thoughts, ideas, feelings that go against the grain, that are unpopular.
(179)
In practical terms, the exercises she suggests to move
toward a transformative pedagogy of democratization in the multicultural
classroom are relatively tame. Hooks has every student write short paragraphs
throughout the class and then makes each student share these paragraphs at some
point in order for their unique voice to be heard. She sees this practice as a
way to subvert class, race, and gender structures in the classroom.
While this practice
seems less than revolutionary, I saw connections between hooks’ view of the
classroom as a communal space filled with unique voices that will often be in
opposition to one another to notion of the “Contact Zone” that Mary Louise
Pratt first introduced in her 1991 essay “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In that
initial essay, Pratt makes the statement that in the contact zone, “No one [is]
excluded, and no one [is] safe.” In a
1994 article published in CCC,
Min-Zhan Lu uses Pratt’s original article as a touchstone to argue for a multicultural
approach to style that re-envisions the way we think of “errors” in
composition. Instead of teaching students a standardized set of conventions and
stylistic formulas that reinforce the hegemonic language of privileged, white
native speakers, Lu borrows Pratt’s original terminology to cast rhetoric and
writing as a “contact zone” for students. This “contact zone” allows each
writer to carefully inspect his or her classmate’s writing and the writing of
professionals within the academy on an even plane that acknowledges English heteroglossia
(differences within the linguistic code). This difference in language can be
viewed as a point of resistance that helps students find their own voice among
a variety of syntactic choices. Thus, I see hooks’ notion of transformative
pedagogy in which students are actually forced to share their own perspective at
least once being translated into the composition classroom in particular with
the work of people like Lu in “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of
Style in the Contact Zone.”
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