Feminist Pedagogy Feminist Pedagogy Volume 3 Issue 1 bell hooks Article 8 (original) (raw)

Call for Submissions: Issue on Teaching Feminisms

Caribbean Review of Gender Studies

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.

Uncovering Our Feminist Pedagogy

What does it mean to be a feminist educator? How would we know if we were? We call ourselves feminist teachers and yet we have not focused on this identification and its influence on our teaching in some time. In this self-study, we set out to look at our practice-using co/autoethnography. As our study progressed, we began to realize that our research methodology seemed to align more with feminist principles than did our teaching. We became increasingly aware of how our methodology illuminated areas of our practice that may well have remained hidden. With our attention now on co/autoethnography itself, with its embrace of the autobiographical notion in sociopolitical context and an evolving epistemology, we were attentive to how co/autoethnography is itself a feminist research methodology. As we retrace our journey to this realization, we share this co/autoethnographic self-study. Are you talking, Monica? No, I'm listening. (Skype conversation, 1 February 2012) We express, display, make claims for who we are-and who we would like to be-in the stories we tell and how we tell them. In sum, we perform our identities. (Mishler, 1999, p. 19) As the particular people and the teachers we are, our identities are important. We engage in our practice as teacher educators from perspectives developed and undeveloped through experience, dialogue, and reflection that inform to various degrees who we are as teacher educators. For us, a central identity is as feminists and as feminist pedagogues. Our research began when we looked at ourselves and wondered: are we who we think we are? In other words, how do we define what it means to be a feminist teacher? In this article, we discuss how we came to see ourselves and our pedagogy differently, examining our practice using co/autoethnography. Here, we tell the story of our collaborative exploration of our teaching as feminist educators through the intermingling of narratives from our co/autoethnography to recreate rather than simply describe our unique research process. Unlike a traditional research paper, which is often reported in a particular order such as research question, context, literature review, method, findings, and conclusions, here our findings are discussed as the different phases of the self-study unfold. This unique style of writing research is an attempt to put into practice our emergent poststructural feminist beliefs (Lather,

Putting Feminist Pedagogy to the Test

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2000

Critics of women's studies (WS) have charged that WS teaching overemphasizes students' personal experience and is overly politicized. They claim further that WS classes discourage critical, independent thinking and stifle open, participatory learning, causing student dlssatisfaction. This study provides empirical ebidence of the process of WS teaching from the perspective of 111 teachers and 789 of their students from 32 campuses in the United States. Contrary to WS critics, WS faculty and students reported strong emphases on critical thinkindopen-mindedness and participatory learning and relatively weaker emphases on personal experience and political understanding/ activism. In addition, student ratings of positive class impact were higher for WS than non-WS classes. The results support the pedagogic distinctiveness of women's studies.