Introduction

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountaintop is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.” —bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

If education is a journey, and the point of the journey is to increase opportunity and improve our social systems, teachers are one of many guides seeking to help students reach their goals. As lonely as it can feel, being both a teacher and a learner, education should not be something you do on your own. As this quote from bell hooks suggests, learning is a journey that requires a community to help along the way.

hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, reminds us that teaching and exercising the power of a teacher on behalf of our learners, is sometimes a lonely journey. The Teacher’s Backpack is a hybrid handbook of teaching practices, ideas for designing learning experiences, and a tool for finding the community that we all need to help support our students as they undertake this educational journey that we are inviting them to undertake with us. 

We, the Pierce College Employee Learning and Development Team, hope that you will use this tool to find readings and tools for your teaching, but also as a way to find the support systems and people from Pierce who are here for you and your students.