26.266 - Teaching Without Making a Copy of Yourself
“The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)
Quotation source
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bell hooks was a writer, cultural critic, feminist theorist, and teacher who treated education as a practice of freedom.
Her pedagogy emerged from Black antiracist struggle, feminist critique, and sustained resistance to systems that ask learners to become obedient copies of an approved type. In Teaching to Transgress, she argues that teaching strategies cannot become fixed blueprints because each classroom contains different people, histories, and relations of power. The engaged voice must therefore change through dialogue without abandoning its commitments.
This is not an argument for lowering standards or treating every interpretation as equally sound. It is an argument against confusing authority with domination. A teacher can bring knowledge, structure, correction, and care while still recognizing the learner as an active participant. What travels most faithfully may not be the teacher's exact form, but the capacity to think, question, practice, and create beyond it.
The Score Is the Same; the Music Is Not
The first student plays the passage with bright precision. Each entrance is clean, the tempo holds, and the final phrase rises with confidence. The teacher nods, marks one place to breathe, and asks the student to play it again.
The second student begins more slowly. The notes are correct, but the phrase carries a different weight. A pause that sounded buoyant before now feels unresolved. The teacher stops her and demonstrates the passage: lighter here, quicker through the turn, less pressure on the final note. The student tries to reproduce it. The music becomes more polished and less convincing.
The teacher is about to demonstrate again when he asks a different question: “What do you think this phrase is trying to do?”
The student explains that she hears reluctance before the resolution. She plays once more. This time the teacher listens for the reasoning inside the interpretation. The slower pace is not careless. The tension is deliberate. There are still matters of technique to correct, but the difference itself is not the error.
A lesson often begins with imitation. We watch how a hand moves, hear how a sentence is shaped, or follow the sequence that someone with more experience has learned to trust. Demonstration makes invisible knowledge easier to see. Yet an example carries two things at once: something worth learning and the particular life through which it was learned.
The teacher's task is not to remove personal experience from the lesson. That would remove much of what makes teaching useful. The task is to distinguish the score from one performance of it. A teacher can pass on a standard without prescribing a self.
When Imitation Feels Like Proof
Imitation can reassure everyone involved. A student who sounds like the teacher appears to have understood. A new professional who follows an established path seems easier to evaluate. Institutions can credential a recognizable method more readily than a result that arrives in an unfamiliar form. Within a lineage, resemblance may also be offered as respect.
The emotional appeal is just as strong. When someone uses our phrases, adopts our routines, or makes the choice we once made, their repetition can seem to confirm that our own path was right. Their divergence can feel like rejection. Without intending to, we may begin protecting our biography as though it were the principle itself.
That confusion matters because biography includes circumstances that do not travel automatically. A demanding routine may have helped a teacher during a period of unusual freedom from caregiving. A direct style may have been rewarded inside one culture and punished inside another. A professional risk may have been possible because a safety net remained available. These details do not invalidate the lesson. They locate it.
hooks warns against turning teaching strategies into blueprints. Her argument is not merely that people possess different preferences. She writes within a feminist and antiracist tradition concerned with who is expected to obey, whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, and who is allowed to become an independent thinker. If only the teacher's form counts as mastery, the learner's context can disappear from view.
This does not make every departure wise. A student can call something adaptation when it is avoidance. A novice may reject a constraint before understanding what it protects. The answer is not unlimited permission. It is a clearer account of what the lesson contains: a principle, an example, a constraint, a choice, and an authorship that must eventually belong to the learner.
Teach the Tool, Return the Authorship
Begin with the principle. What must remain true if the lesson is being honored? In the music room, the student must attend to the score, sustain the pulse, control the instrument, and make an interpretation she can support. Elsewhere, a principle might require you to prepare before making a consequential promise or to test an assumption before building a decision on it. A principle names the value or relationship the practice is meant to serve.
Then offer an example and label it honestly. “Here is how I have done this” teaches something different from “Here is how this must be done.” Examples give a principle texture. They show sequence, judgment, difficulty, and consequence. More than one example can also help a learner see what remains constant when the surface changes. The goal is not to overwhelm the learner with options, but to prevent one performance from being mistaken for the whole score.
Name the constraints. Authorship means making a real choice and remaining responsible for what that choice produces. The musician cannot disregard the notes and still claim fidelity to the composition. The craftsperson cannot ignore structural safety because another shape feels more expressive. The colleague cannot invoke authenticity to excuse cruelty. Good teaching makes standards, risks, and non-negotiable conditions visible. It also explains what those constraints are protecting.
Within that frame, identify the choice. Where can the learner alter pace, sequence, language, emphasis, or form? Which decision depends on circumstances the teacher does not share? A choice becomes more useful when it is connected to evidence: What are you noticing? What effect are you trying to create? What would tell you that this version is working?
Finally, return authorship. The learner must try something, observe what happens, and revise. That responsibility cannot remain permanently with the teacher. If the learner succeeds only while reproducing the demonstration, the lesson has not yet become portable. If the learner can adapt it while explaining what remained true, what changed, and why, the teaching has begun to travel.
The second musician plays the passage again. The teacher still corrects an uneven shift and asks her not to lose the underlying pulse. He does not withdraw rigor. He makes rigor more precise. When she reaches the disputed phrase, he asks her to commit to her interpretation and listen to its effect. She must respond to what the music reveals rather than borrow his version. The result does not sound like his performance. It sounds considered.
Teaching can be faithful without producing resemblance. A lesson may be most alive when another person carries its purpose into circumstances the teacher could not predict. From there, a new question emerges. As lessons pass between people and generations, which examples become the stories a community keeps, and which possibilities disappear from memory?
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Practice: Teach the Principle, Release the Copy
Set aside five to ten minutes to examine one lesson you regularly offer. This exercise will help you separate its durable purpose from the particular way your own history taught you to express it.
The worksheet guides you through the principle, one lived example, the constraints that still matter, and three questions that make room for another person's context. You will finish by writing a clear statement of permission to adapt. The goal is not to weaken the lesson. It is to make the lesson portable without turning your biography into a rule.
Scientific Summary
Gick and Holyoak (1983) studied analogical transfer through laboratory problem-solving tasks. Their experiments found that comparing analogous examples could help participants abstract a shared solution structure and apply it to a new problem. Transfer was not automatic. Surface differences could prevent people from recognizing that an earlier example was relevant. For this article, the useful implication is limited but important: a learner may reproduce the visible features of an example without recognizing the deeper relationship that makes the lesson transferable. Naming the principle and showing that it can take more than one form may help make that structure easier to perceive. The study does not establish that multiple examples guarantee transfer in every educational or life setting. Study record.
Jang, Reeve, and Deci (2010) observed 133 Midwestern public high-school classrooms and surveyed 1,584 students in grades 9 through 11. Autonomy support and structure each predicted observers' ratings of behavioral engagement, while only autonomy support uniquely predicted students' self-reported engagement. Because the study was correlational, it does not establish that either teaching style caused the differences. It does support treating autonomy and structure as potentially complementary rather than inherently opposed. Clear expectations, guidance, and feedback can coexist with meaningful learner agency. Allowing another person to make an accountable choice does not require a teacher to stop teaching, correcting, or naming consequences. Study record.
Using a GPA-based assignment threshold, Dee and Penner (2017) estimated the local causal effect of assignment to and participation in a ninth-grade ethnic studies course in several San Francisco schools. The study reported substantial estimated gains in attendance, grade-point average, and credits earned for students near that threshold. The evidence concerns one high-fidelity program, district, age group, and student population. It should not be generalized to every form of culturally responsive teaching. It does, however, reinforce the practical importance of context: whose histories, identities, and experiences instruction recognizes can affect how learners participate. Study record.
Together, these studies support a bounded conclusion. Teaching for transfer requires more than a model to copy. Learners benefit when underlying structure is made visible, expectations remain clear, and context is treated as part of the learning situation. The five-part framework in this article is Lucivara's practical synthesis, not a protocol directly tested by these studies.
Bibliography
Dee, T. S., & Penner, E. K. (2017). The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 127–166. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216677002
Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1983). Schema induction and analogical transfer. Cognitive Psychology, 15(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(83)90002-6
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Publisher preview
Jang, H., Reeve, J., & Deci, E. L. (2010). Engaging students in learning activities: It is not autonomy support or structure but autonomy support and structure. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(3), 588–600. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019682
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