Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their text analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks mentions multiple sources of resistance to change.

• What are the sources of resistance to change that hooks has encountered in her quest to transform classrooms? (topic sentence)
• Explain at least three sources of resistance hooks mentions; in your explanation, discuss what motivates this resistance.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, describe how hooks approaches overcoming these sources of resistance and how this supports the book’s theme of Teachers as Healers and as Needing Healing.

2. One of hooks’s characteristics as a thinker is that she is unwilling to entirely dismiss an idea or work simply because one part of it is flawed.

• How does hooks’s reaction to the works of white feminists, in particular the work of Diana Fuss, demonstrate her willingness to find the merit in partially flawed works and ideas? (topic sentence)
• Explain the flaws hooks sees in the work of white feminists in general and in the work of Diana Fuss in particular.