Self-in-Systems Thinking with bell hooks' Teaching To Transgress
Kate Nickelchok- Jul 8, 2017
- 3 min read
Over twenty years since its publication, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom still stands on the cutting edge of transformative social critique. Through her collection of essays, the celebrated teacher, writer, and academic, calls for a “renewal and rejuvenation in our teaching practices,” and outlines a radical praxis towards education as personal and collective liberation. This review examines the congruence of hooks’ ideas within Global Leadership studies, systems thinking theory, and my capacities as an emerging leader in higher education.
Like all of hooks’ works, Teaching to Transgress stands firmly in the Marxist tradition. The text itself is a masterclass in Black Feminism. Accordingly, hooks’ theoretical framework emerges “from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical and feminist pedagogies” More poignantly still, hooks traverses her epistemological landscape with curiosity and an ecstasy for transgressing paradigms .
Each chapter playfully alternates between academic writing, storytelling, and dialogue as hooks communicates policentrically across difference. In many ways, hooks’ mastery of “beingness” and “generativeness” exemplifies Plotkin’s definition of “cultural artistry and visionary leadership.”
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Within the framework of Global Leadership, hooks’ pedagogical praxis models soul-centricity and advanced self and relationship management. Conversely, applying hook’s critical lens to conventional leadership literature, illuminates a comparative lack of self-in-systems awareness. For instance, although Mendenhall and colleagues acknowledge the Western male bias of global leadership research, a critical theorist like hooks might derail the white, capitalist, heteropatriarchal imperialism tacit in defining leadership as efficacy in multi-national management.
In that case leadership development renegades like Peter Senge, David Stroh, and Margaret Wheatley prescribe systems theory as an antidote to conventional thinking. Hooks’ pedagogy dismantles any system which binds complexity or reinforces dominance. Whereas linear thinking, like hierarchical thinking, reproduces a passive system "committed to the status quo.". Holarchiacally integrative systems shakes up normative discourses and interlaces theory with a living practice. For hooks, whole systems perspectives are needed to “understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality.”
The book’s invitation to teach and learn without limits forces us to face our complicity in perpetuating boundaries of any kind. Amongst many things, I am called to disrupt my behaviours beholding of classism. In her chapter “Confronting Class in the Classroom,” hooks details how higher education reinforces an intellectual class hierarchy which disproportionally advantages my bourgeois values and identity. Though my strategies for solidarity remain imperfect, hooks’ liberation praxis reminds us that the struggle is also a place of transformation.
A video on reading bell hooks by Dr. Kuku (Feb. 13, 2015).
In sum, reading Teaching to Transgress as a white intersectional feminist, is a rollercoaster ride in feeling and theorising. I felt successively lifted by hooks’ love of learning and then dropped into deeper recognitions of oppression; solidarity in sisterhood, and then distanced by racialized realities. Every essay strained my resilience and powers of personal adaptability. But each moment of dis-ease strengthened my self-reflectivity and each loop of learning deepened and complicated the last.
At the centre of Teaching to Transgress’ challenging narrative, is a wellspring of optimism. With intellectual and emotional openness, hooks invites readers to “collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries” even in the face of adversity. “This,” she holds, “is education as the practice of freedom.”
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