Description
For this Facebook learning activity our group posted a status update to prompt our Facebook friends to respond to the following questions: "What does a feminist classroom look like?" and "What examples if any can you share about a classroom that you would name as feminist?" Group members wrote a Facebook "note" which is a and tagged certain friends in an attempt to engage specific people in a conversation on feminist pedagogies and the potential for Facebook to further connect, share, and explore our feminist pedagogical goals. We also asked our classmates to initiate a similar discussion for those that have a Facebook account. To offer more information on the learning activity one could also include the link to our class website and blog. (This was quickly re-posted by other friends to include their entire friend list.)
Rationale
We asked fellow students in class to bring their Facebook discussions/responses to class in order to share and discuss the different ways that people are engaging with questions of feminist pedagogical practices. Additionally we hope that our discussion highlights the ways that social media and social networking sites such as Facebook may contribute to these discussions. Hopefully during our class discussion we can talk about the possibilities and potential drawbacks of using Facebook to initiate discussions and then compare and share them with the entire class.
Intended Participants
This activity is meant to "open the doors of the classroom" and expand participation to include not only students enrolled in the class, but to those who participate in these students' social networks (in this case Facebook) and would be willing to join discussion. Our learning activity can be used in different settings (undergraduate, graduate, high school classrooms, etc), as long as the students (at least some of them) have Facebook accounts.
The class size shouldn't be a matter in this activity, but larger classrooms may offer a broader variety of perspectives unraveled by the activity and the time for discussion should be tailored accordingly. The theme for discussion on Facebook can be also adapted for discussions on different subjects and for this reason we believe that this activity can be used by different disciplines.
For students who do not participate in social networking sites this activity is still beneficial since the variety of perspectives encountered by other students in their social network will be shared with all participants in class. The broader discussion of integrating non-academic voices into a traditionally academic topic is still relevant and useful in a feminist classroom.
Goals
The goals of this activity are to prompt students to bring class concepts and ideas into their social networks and to solicit input from those that are not in the classroom. In doing so, this activity may provide the class with an array of perspectives that are otherwise absent during classroom discussions. The role(s) of the non-academic voice in classroom dialogue is valued in feminist pedagogies. Accordingly our group sought to integrate non-academic perspectives through the use of Facebook . Furthermore, prompting students to initiate a conversation using social networking sites beckons their own participation and renegotiation of the concept as they encounter the unfamiliar voices we seek to include. Engaging in a dialogue with others that could be hostile to feminist perspectives or simply have no background in the subject may challenge the student to clarify their own ideas in helpful ways. The hope is that using Facebook to dialogue will bring critical conversation and thought to the social networking site and help students begin to understand their role in challenging their close networks outside of the classroom.
1. How open and honest were you about your own perspectives?
2. How did those that responded to you challenge you?
3. Did you receive the amount of responses that you expected? Why or Why Not?
4. Did you find that this exercise made you develop more clear and concise answers to your own question?
5. Did your dialogue with someone change your answer to the question posed?
Strengths and Limitations
Initiating and connecting traditionally academic conversations (such as those about feminist pedagogy) outside of the academy is challenging for all of us, especially undergraduates who are freshly encountering complex critical topics. Our group's activity is designed to address this challenge and motivate students to continue dialoging with others outside of their class experiences. Although exact percentages are difficult to attain most statistical studies estimate 80% of U.S. college students to use the social networking site Facebook. Our activity is designed to mobilize Facebook as a tool for potentially meaningful dialogue by utilizing that which is already familiar. Therefore a central strength of our activity resides in the site's relevance and popularity to student lives outside of the classroom.
Furthermore students have oftentimes amassed extensive friend lists on Facebook and are thus connected to a wide range of users that are excluded by university systems. The diversity of users on Facebook opens the possibilities for perspectives to be shared between individuals that otherwise remain unknown.
Facebook's "comment" design allows users to submit more text than other social networking sites such as Twitter, facilitating more complex discussions. Additionally because many facebook friends are familiar with each other in some sense it is possible that the scope of self-disclosure, reflexivity, and/or "authenticity" is widened. Similarly since Facebook profiles can be "private" conversations may feel safer to some users.
Facebook itself is privately owned and has come under well-earned criticism for offering information about its users without their explicit permission. Supporting student participation in a large private enterprise such as Facebook may then be counterproductive in relation to other feminist goals. Evaluating how students are using their Facebook page may encroach on a student's autonomy in ways that are also counterproductive, instructors using Facebook in their classroom should therefore allow students to inform the process as much as possible and offer alternatives.
I think your activity was a very creative way to think about the pedagogical potential of facebook and a great approach for getting your/our friends involved in feminist pedagogical discussions. Your point about how this activity was “meant to "open the doors of the classroom" and expand participation” seems especially important. While I don’t really use facebook that much, you have inspired me to reconsider how I could use it--and/or how my students could use it.
Pros: I like your emphasis on expanding our community of learners through facebook. It was great to hear about how various facebook friends really engaged with you all and your questions. I also liked the different parts of your assignment: not just an engagement via facebook, but an in-class discussion about our engagements + further reflection. I think integrating online/offline participation is important for making social media work in feminist classrooms.
Cons: I think this assignment depends a lot on what kind of friends you have and how active you are on facebook. When I posted the questions, I only got two responses (admittedly, I wasn’t able to engage with those friends and their responses, so that probably helped discourage others from engaging). I wonder if I was more active on facebook if I would have received more feedback? Is this something that needs to be built into the assignment--some time helping students to cultivate their facebook selves? I also wonder if this type of assignment would be better if it were practiced many time throughout the semester?
A few thoughts:
I liked your discussion in class about how you strategically tagged certain friends in order to get a more diverse set of responses. I have never used notes on facebook before (although I am vaguely familiar with how they function, having read a few). What are the differences between posting the questions as a status update and putting them in a note and tagging friends? What are some unique features (other than comment boxes) that make facebook especially valuable for connecting people? I ask these questions because I am curious about how facebook works (and I don’t know that well). Knowing its functionality seems key to finding the best ways to use it in feminist classrooms.
Here’s a suggestion for your facebook guide. Post an entry that briefly describes the various key features of facebook: notes, comments, pages, proflies, etc. The twitter and youtube groups could do this as well.
Thanks again for your creative facebook activity!
I realized after class was over that when selecting comments to read aloud, I covered all of the joke ones and none of the substantive ones. Some of the comments were quite thoughtful, and so I want to share them with you here.
Comment 1: The students address you as a person, not a woman. Alas, I have a beard. (university instructor)
Comment 2: this is lame, but what about in decoration? if you were an English teacher you could have an equal number of pictures of famous female writers and famous male writers. I think a feminist classroom would really have more to do with the material taught than how the room itself looks. (high school friend)
Comment 3: To my mind, an ideal feminist classroom must be the praxis of egalitarianism (structures that lay bare for students our equal human worth, are anti-domination and anti-coercion) and diversity theory (i.e. work to lay bare the necessity and ...therefore high value of difference/variety - "over-specialization leads to death" as the movie says). It is almost impossible to have a truly/purely feminist classroom in a patriarchal institution, esp. one as thoroughly conventional as the U.
The rather Fordist model of having an "expert" bequeathing knowledge while empty vessels receive, and then judging how much of the worthiest pieces of information have been accepted and digested properly, is inherently anti-feminist; it is rather feudal in both properties and, not coincidentally, origin. AND It's doubly (triply?) hard when you *don't have* 25 feminists for students, because they will often be suspicious of and sometimes resist ways that a feminist teacher will try to diverge from tradition (e.g., you will explain a game with X set of rules, but then they will play by the rules that they've been taught in all other walks of life, thus doing badly at the game you've set up, thus "earning" lower grades in the traditional paradigm [which employs you], which makes everyone think your game was stupid/ineffective - when, in actuality, hardly anyone even really gave your way a real go) (one or two did). Plus, the more "masculine" style of "teaching"/interpersonal comm tends to inspire a higher ethos in college teachers, who are perceived as "authority figures" in traditional environments -- except when such a style is really insincere and so a teacher can't pull it off and just comes across as insecure and "womanish" (authenticity _usually_ trumps masculinity, in my experience).
There is, of course, a whole field of study in this area - a subset of "critical pedagogy" -- bell hooks 'Teaching to Transgress' is a famous example, but you can also look at Henry Giroux and Antonia Darder and a whole bunch of other people whose names are not springing to mind. Also, Comm Theory studies of gender dynamics have a lot to inform the issues.
... Have a nice day! :)
I have to go grade now........ (university instructor)
Comment 4: So in the one pedagogy class I've taken, it was made very clear to me through the readings that classroom architecture matters. The type of classroom architecture that makes a "student centered" classroom could be considered (IMHO) as pret...ty much identical to the classroom which is "feminist." Essentially, there is no strict "front" or "back" of the room for starters. It's not a lecture hall, and nobody is "performing education" for a theoretically-appreciative audience (because downloading facts and ideas is not actually the way that people learn best). The best that most can do in a traditional classroom is to move all the desks into a circle and have a conversation.
It can be a little tricky, depending on context. Creating a feminist classroom for a core majors course in biology could be a lot more difficult than, say, intro level courses or senior seminar courses. This is mostly because there's a lot of base level information that needs to be transmitted, and the most time-efficient way to do this is via the boring, rather patriarchal lecture and exam style of learning. There are certain concepts that students need to understand in order to make it in the upper level courses, and letting them discover the material for themselves would just take too damn long. A good analogy might be language classes. It's hard to "do feminism" by realistically telling a classroom right off the bat, "Okay, we're all equals here but I know Spanish and you don't." There are ways of going about the process that are more effective and less effective, but there is still basically an "expert" and a class of relative "novices" no matter what.
I am actually a big believer in classroom peer review. It's a natural step to take in the science classroom because that's what researchers do for each other professionally. It decentralizes the power away from the teacher to some extent. It forces students to think critically about their own and each other's work. People might argue with me about this point but I consider it a rather feminist method for the classroom, even if it was basically instituted in a patriarchal context.
Comment 5: Awareness of the unconscious bias in favor of male students (even as they become a minority) would probably be a good start.... (college friend)
Comment 6: The peer review practice is a really good illustration of how hard it can be to "sell" basically feminist practices to students who are not consciously looking to be "liberated" from the norm, who find comfort in predictability and in the t...raditional educational styles they've always been taught are How It Works. I know that others make the peer review thing work, so I keep doing it, keep trying, but I somehow don't set it up well or something -- somehow I always get a fair number of people who write that they are against it, should not be asked to do it, do not want to be graded by other undergrads, do not know enough to make a judgment, think it should be the teacher's job (that's what teachers are for), etc. Even those who don't resist it usually only give each other A's unless someone in their group was _really_ slacking off. I've come to see it as a kind of mathematically balancing device, practically speaking -- I feel less guilty giving C's because I know the peer grade will off-set it somewhat. :P ...I do believe it has something to do with my own set-up of the practice, though, because I hear that others have success.... It also has a lot to do with the specific group of students and the subject/context of the class. (College instructor #2)
Me again: I thought it was telling that some of the answers could have come straight out of our classroom readings. Commenter 3 made an interesting point about the degree to which it is even possible to build a truly egalitarian classroom within a fundamentally patriarchal institution esp. working with resistant students. I also liked commenter 4's articulation of student-centeredness with feminist-ness. This commenter is the only natural scientist in the thread, and her concerns about structuring a student-centered class for a core majors course echoed some of our own concerns.
I guess my takeaway is to wonder about the limitations some of these commenters posed - is feminist pedagogy something we do only when the particular class affords us some luxury of pushing boundaries? Is there a degree to which our goals cannot be accomplished without significant vertical reform? And what happens if you press on regardless?