bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness

This work lucidates bell hooks’ social and educational theory, with emphasis on her 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Florence deals with the issues of marginality and cultural alienation that are so prevalent among certain groups within the American society and presents strategies to help develop critical consciousness and affirmation of formerly subordinated cultural traits and characteristics. Her study resonates with current themes raised by critical, feminist and multicultural scholars showing how marginalized groups may be guilty of reinforcing their own status through complicity with the dominant culture’s world view, and how education can empower them to demand a more egalitarian society and one that recognizes cultural plurality.