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. 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 TransgressandTeaching Community.The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. 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. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning. 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. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today. About the Author: bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021) was a pioneering feminist whose writings revealed how the specific life experiences of Black women were marginalized by the idea that feminism represented all women equally. A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, she taught at the University of Southern California, Yale, Oberlin College, City College of New York, and Kentucky's Berea College, which established the bell hooks Institute for her work. The author of more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions; Salvation: Black People and Love; Communion: the Female Search for Love; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, hooks was nominated for the NAACP Image Award, won an American Book Award, and was named one of Time's 100 Women of the Year in 2020. Celebrated as one of America's leading public intellectuals, she was a charismatic speaker and writer who taught and lectured around the world. A resident of Kentucky and New York City, she died in 2021.
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