This weekend, I have been wrestling with my concept of feminist pedagogy. I've been trying to look at each of the aspects of feminist pedagogy that hooks, Fisher, Elenes and Crabtree, Sapp, & Licona, described as essential components. And I've tried to look at each one in isolation from one another to better understand them. Some of the aspects that I've been analyzing are:
Student voice
Student empowerment
Classroom discourse (political or otherwise)
Transformative nature of feminist pedagogy
De-centering the instructor and shifting the power to students
Self-reflexivity
Ethic of care
I have found that when I try to describe or analyze any one
of these in isolation it seems empty without the others. Can one consider student empowerment separate
from student voice; can they exist separate from one another? How
about the ethic of care and de-centering the teacher's voice?
1. Can these elements that are so imperative to critical feminist pedagogy be separated from one another? Or must they be taken as a whole?
2. When taken as a whole, it seems to me that this problematizes the implementation of feminist pedagogical methods. How can you do it all at once? But, separating them leads to a different complex issue, i.e. what do they mean in isolation? How does one learn to implement all aspects of feminist pedagogy in her/his own classroom, if all aspects are to be considered as one?
3. Can feminist pedagogy be taken in baby steps? Can it be implemented in stages?
4. Do students schooled in the discourse of standard lecture courses, balk at the change in dynamics and activities in a classroom practicing feminist pedagogy?
5. Do students and/or instructors progress through the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) in "giving up" the classroom they're accustomed to? If you're interested you can check out the following link for a YouTube video on the 5 Stages of Grief .
6. How does an instructor manage the power struggles that occur in class? Does the instructor need to manage them? Or should the students be "empowered" to do this in their own?
I'm unable to synthesize this into one question, sorry fempedbloggers. Thanks for any comments and thoughts on these questions.
My jaw dropped when I read your question about the stages of grief. Wow.... I don't have anything intelligent to say other than this seems to mesh with my experience as a teacher and I think it would have been a helpful way for my students and I to think about their feelings about the change. I will be thinking more about this. Thanks for the ponderable.
Gee Barb, I usually use the 5 stages of grief while writing papers, but I guess it applies to teaching too ;)
To answer some of your questions:
I found, too, that while writing our essay it was easy to highlight the aspects of feminist pedagogy I find important, but hard to keep them all separate! I have rethought this to mean that my paper will have flawless transitions from one point to the next as all of my ideas are connected!
I asked your question #4 in my pedagogical question post as well. It seems like its a point not taken up yet by our literature in this class. we get it--we love the fem ped, and yes it is great for students, but how do we get them to accept it!? Maybe the answer is your question #3??
Oh also, I guess I should note that I am myself balking at the fem ped tactic of blogging in class in only one way. I do not like posting my papers/essays on blogs. In another class of mine--this is a requirement. Why don't I like it? Well it is simply because all the formatting/endnotes/etc. DISAPPEAR when you copy-paste into a blog. Sure you can spend a ton of time messing with it to finally get the endnotes to show up, and re-do all the formatting. But SHEESH. so i have to now write papers to work in a blog format? Meaning no endnotes?! and to just give up on pre-bolding or pre-italicizing some words? Do I have to write my papers with HTML code!? I might rebel against this a bit longer...
Intriguing questions Barb. Your essay seems like it is coming together nicely!
(Apologies if this gets posted twice. I posted it last night, 11/3, but it's been about 12 hours and it still hasn't show up yet.)
'm not responding to this in the most timely fashion, but going back through the blog posts of the past couple weeks, this one caught my eye. The YouTube clip about the 5 stages of grief was hilarious and apt. And I think your observation -- relating it to the difficult experience of "giving up" the classroom we're accustomed to in order to achieve a more democratic, feminist, anti-racist, etc. classroom -- is really insightful. I can totally see denial, anger, depression, and acceptance playing out in a fairly straightforward way, but what about bargaining? How might we frame bargaining in terms of relinquishing authority in the classroom? Perhaps its a teacher convincing him/herself that s/he is integrating some methods of critical/feminist/anti-racist pedagogy; perhaps it means convincing him/herself that s/he will make it up to the students in another way. I don't know...anyone else have any other thoughts? The other four stages seem to make perfect sense, and this is the one I'm struggling to connect more firmly.
Question 6 is also really interesting to me. This seems to engage with some of the issues raised by Ellsworth re: repressive myths of crit ped. My gut response would be "empower the students to manage their own struggles/conflicts" -- but of course, it's not that simple. As Ellsworth points out, saying that the classroom is safe space does not make it so, and telling the students that they have the power and responsibility to manage their own conflicts does little to actually help them do so. It comes back to building trust between students/teacher and among students; this doesn't happen overnight and rarely can happen over the course of a single semester. I do believe that students can and should be empowered to manage their own conflicts/struggles, with little instructor intervention, but I'm not clear on exactly how/if this can happen given the current structure of the university's semester system. I guess this means I default to assuming that the instructor, in the meantime, is managing the struggles -- either as a default position or in a kind of transitory way, as the power gets shifted gradually to the students as trust is built -- but I'm not really sure what the most effective way to manage student struggles is. It depends on the nature of the struggle, I guess -- with the material? with other students? with the teacher? Some of the instructor intervention would occur in the class, as a group initiative, but some of it might have to take place in another way, or a class on early American lit might turn into a conflict mediation session, which may in itself be productive but then can be distracting from what the course is trying to accomplish, lit-wise. A particularly skilled instructor would find a way to integrate the two, perhaps...