Feminist pedagogies in a time of backlash (original) (raw)
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The #RhodesMustFall movement highlighted the demand for critical pedagogy in the South African academy and feminist lecture halls have since been among the spaces that have offered this alternative. This article documents the findings of a study that sought to investigate the journey and experiences of second-year students taking Feminist Theory at the University of the Witwatersrand. Based on the findings, I argue that while feminist pedagogy has made great strides at creating and fostering learning environments that are safe, de-hierarchised, and dialogical, it has also overlooked the extent to which, in some respects, it falls short on delivering on its liberatory promise. I highlight how questions around the demands for de-hierarchized classrooms, 'safe spaces, and politics of 'bodies that belong' compromise its liberatory potential. Failing to recognise and remedy these shortcomings, I argue that feminist pedagogy suffers from what I have termed Reverse Theoretical Dysmorphia.
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This article examines challenges in writing histories of feminist reforms in schooling and educational administration. The focus is gender equity reforms in Australian schools since the 1970s, looking at how those earlier interventions are now remembered, represented and forgotten, in policy memory and collective narratives. Such feminist endeavours were part of the policy landscape and the administration of schools during the 1970s and 80s. I argue that feminist agendas can also be examined as themselves sites for managing the conduct of teachers and students and for regulating new forms of identity and social relations. These paradoxical aspects of feminist reform are analysed through a Foucauldian lens. The discussion identifies contextual themes in JEAH before considering debates within gender and feminist history. A revisiting mood has initiated a stocktake of the stories told not only about feminism but also the accounts feminism gives of itself. Extending this, I propose that critical attention to memory and the movement of received and revised historical narratives is vital for analysing the legacies of feminist reforms and how they might be (re)animated in the present. More broadly, it is suggested that attention to policy memory offers fruitful directions for historical studies of educational administration.
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Les auteures abordent la pédagogie féministe du point de vue des membres du Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF). Elles s’appuient sur une démarche inductive pour circonscrire et comprendre leurs conceptions de la pédagogie féministe, leurs pratiques pédagogiques féministes, examiner les facteurs qu’elles désignent comme des obstacles ou des catalyseurs par rapport à sa mise en action et connaître les stratégies qu’elles utilisent afin de contourner ces obstacles. Pour ce faire, les auteures ont revisité les différentes définitions de cette pédagogie dans la littérature féministe. Ainsi, 25 ans après la parution des premiers textes en français sur la pédagogie féministe, les données issues du sondage interne et d’une demi-journée de discussion avec des membres du RéQEF révèlent que peu de choses ont changé : les définitions, les stratégies et les obstacles d’une pédagogie féministe sont sensiblement les mêmes. Les auteures se penchent également sur les quatre débats qui ont...
Call for Submissions: Issue on Teaching Feminisms
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Teaching should be a liberatory act says noted Black feminist intellectual and feminist pedagogue bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Over the last few decades, feminist theorizing has been a framework for advancing the women’s liberation movement across the globe. Critical pedagogues who see education and social change as inextricable, have long since lauded feminism’s intersectional potentiality for liberating enchained humanity (Freire, 1970; Giroux and McLaren, 1994; hooks, 1994; Hill Collins, 2000). Neo-liberal educational reforms have however ruptured ideas of teaching and learning as necessarily emancipatory. We are now living in a climate where education is largely a profit-driven endeavour, where primacy is given to skill development at the expense of critical thinking, and where independent ideas that challenge the status quo are seen as inimical to the profit economy. Under the neo-liberal order, pedagogy and teaching practice are primarily about meeting market demands, and less about emboldening learners to transform inequitable power relations that pervade society. At the same time, we have seen a resurgence in discussions about the meanings, significance and usefulness of politicized pedagogies to learners and to our social world today (Crawford & Best, 2017; Hosein 2011; Patai and Koertge, 2003). Read more by downloading the PDF.