Facilitating Smart-Girl: Feminist Pedagogy in Service Learning in Action (original) (raw)

Central to hooks’ (1994) feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching and learning, a pathway that allows learner and teacher to actively question what is and what must be. This learning-teaching space examines the intersecting topics of gender, culture, and leadership by unlearning, learning, and relearning one’s understanding and experience of these three identities. Journaling, a process of finding one’s voice, and capturing one’s experience, proved to be a pathway for unlocking hooks’ “Engaged pedagogy [which] necessarily values student expression” (p. 20). This teaching activity illustrates how the engaged practice of journaling provides a learning space to question and reimagine society, power, and leadership through a cultural lens. The processes of questioning and reimaging are aligned with the key principles of feminist pedagogy (Webb et al., 2002). As a result, the emerging critical view and analysis of identity, beliefs, and socialization reflects how cultivating a questioning mind, while respecting one’s lived narrative, opens pathways of transformation for students.