An engaged teaching voice must shift with its audience and context

Evidence

In our everyday lives we speak differently to diverse audiences. We communicate best by choosing that way of speaking that is informed by the particularity and uniqueness of whom we are speaking to and with. In keeping with this spirit, these essays do not all sound alike. They reflect my effort to use language in ways that speak to specific contexts, as well as my desire to communicate with a diverse audience. To teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak. 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, 33

Categorization

• SEED: Hooks’ refusal to sound uniform across essays is a lesson in code-switching as intellectual virtue, not capitulation — possible piece on polyvocal academic writing.
• XREF: connects to: Effective teaching functions as a performative catalyst, not a spectacle; Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 24; Transformative teaching requires teachers to become learners in dialogue with students — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 685 (+1 more)