Feminist pedagogy and feminist epistemology: an overview

This article offers an overview of the field of feminist education, epistemology and pedagogy. It examines the variety of streams of feminist thought in these areas including socialist, radical, cultural, liberal and postmodern feminisms. In doing so, it engages with some of the most influential writings in the field from the last 12 years and looks at the relationship between feminist education, feminism as a whole, and poststructuralist social theory and postmodernism. The article goes on to discuss epistemology and Foucauldian notions of knowledge and power hierarchies and asks whether feminism accepts notions of ontology in relation to women. In the final section, feminist pedagogy is discussed in relation to other streams of critical or radical pedagogy; is Women's Studies in universities the most productive place to devote feminist energy to? Can Women's Studies be considered part of radical education when it necessarily operates within an institution which arguably operates to ‘domesticate’ women and valorizes traditional, or patriarchal, epistemology? It concludes by exploring an educational environment, or methodology, which has the potential to be more productive for both students and educators interested in the liberatory possibilities of education.     

Poststructural feminist pedagogy in English instruction of vocational-and-technical education

The purpose of this study was to develop a poststructural feminist pedagogical model and to investigate whether vocational-and-technical college students receiving poststructural feminist instruction would exhibit better learning achievement and critical thinking ability, and express greater satisfaction with their classes than those receiving traditional instruction. In applying a poststructural feminist model, the researchers intended to help both the teacher and students work together to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have long been the norm in the contemporary Chinese education system. The research results show that the poststructural feminist pedagogy had a positive effect upon the participants in the experimental group. Several conclusions are elicited from the study. First, in the English language achievement post-test, the participants receiving the poststructural feminist instruction significantly outperformed those receiving the traditional banking instruction in terms of listening, vocabulary, grammar, and reading. Second, in the critical thinking ability post-test, the participants significantly outperformed those receiving the traditional banking instruction in terms of length, focus, content, organization, and style. Third, in regard to the students’ satisfaction, it was clearly shown that the students who received the instruction informed by poststructural feminist pedagogy expressed significantly greater satisfaction than those who had received traditional banking instruction in terms of instructional objective, teaching method/materials, teacher quality, class environment, and assessment.     

Laughing to sexual education: feminist pedagogy of laughter as a model for holistic sex-education

This paper describes and analyses the ‘feminist pedagogy of laughter’ deployed in an original sex education presentation for college students, entitled Sexual Pleasure, Health, and Safety (SPHS). This work seeks to advance scholarship on liberatory education and humour in education by emphasising how we can use laughter to casually and joyfully deconstruct sexism, racism and heterosexism as they concern sexual stigma, violence, health and pleasure. This style of pedagogy also defuses discomfort around stigmatised topics and identities, disrupts oppressive norms about sex and bodies, and builds communities that enhance learning. We position the feminist pedagogy of laughter as a technique that may be replicated to empower participants to pursue sexual pleasure and wellbeing despite sexist, racist and heterosexist obstacles. Educators may apply the feminist pedagogy of laughter to create sex education lessons and curricula that participants can enjoy, learn from and apply in real life. The pedagogy may be especially useful in supporting high-impact lessons within the time constraints of university life.     

Caddie woodlawn: A feminist case study

Caroline Zilboorg is an associate professor of English at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio. She has just finished editingRichard Aldington and H.D.: The Early Years in Letters, 1918–1920 (forthcoming from the University of Indiana Press) and is currently working on a book-length study of H.D.     

公共教育学的革命:由教师教育学向学生教育学转变

公共教育学作为师范生的一门必修课，长期以来对师范生向师性的培养并未起到应有的作用，其原因在于该课是以教师能教些什么为出发点而组织的教学内容，即教师教育学；而不是以学生为本所建构的教学体系即学生教育学。     

The Sacred Circle: A process pedagogy of healing

This paper proposes a process pedagogy based on an aboriginal approach to healing. It is founded on the Sacred Circle teachings of Canadian Plains Indians and on the educational practices undertaken at a school for aboriginal youth, the Joe Duquette High School in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Healing, is viewed here as transition toward meaning, wholeness, connectedness, and balance (Katz & St. Denis, 1991, p. 24). As aboriginal pedagogy, this approach to the practice and theory of teaching is selfconsciously founded on process symbolized in the Sacred Circle. It is presented here as part of a critical theory of education committed to human emancipation that recognizes that the appropriation of an aboriginal world view as a foundation for teaching is undertaken within the context of modern political and cultural systems and institutions that have excluded, denied, or rejected aboriginal world views. The Sacred Circle is a traditional symbolic circle that incorporates the spiritual beliefs of many Indian tribes of North America, including Dakota Nations, Blackfoot Confederacy, Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine nations in Canada. It symbolizes harmony and the belief that life occurs within a series of circular movements that govern their relationship with the environment. Although the Sacred Circle has symbolized aboriginal world views for thousands of years, some schools are beginning only now to use it as a self-conscious foundation for education as healing.The paper begins with Whitehead's criticism of Western metaphysics and his notion of reality as process. These ideas and some of his views about education and teaching provide an introduction to and framework for developing the notion of healing as a process pedagogy based upon the Sacred Circle concept. The Sacred Circle is examined as the expression of an aboriginal metaphysics in which reality is conceptualized as process, the movement of life through wholeness, connectedness, and balance. Healing and teaching are viewed as the transition to meaning in that movement. Finally, process pedagogy as healing is interpreted as having the three phases of belonging, understanding, and critical reflection through an examination of practices at the Joe Duquette High School.     

Antonio Gramsci: A pedagogy to change the world

International Review of Education -     

English-in-the-workplace for Garment Workers: A feminist project?

This article draws on a recent study of an English-in-the-workplace (EWP) programme currently in operation at three Canadian garment factories. The EWP programme offers formal instruction in English during the workday to a labour force comprised mainly of immigrant women employed as sewing machine operators. Among other things, results from the study suggest that newly acquired English skills may be reinforcing linguistic behaviour that reconstitutes traditional relations between workers and management, men and women. The article highlights a possible connection between workers' linguistic behaviour and the pedagogical practices evident in the EWP classes. We suggest that an exclusive and/or particular emphasis on the 'personal' in the form and content of lessons, taken up as it is in the EWP classes is problematic and may not ultimately work in the best interests of women workers. We look to the development of more critical EWP programmes.     

A critical pedagogy of place: from gridlock to parallax 1

Differences of perspective, standpoint and subjectivity can help to enlarge the conceptual landscape of environmental education theory. Rejections of difference, on the other hand, can become an intolerance that narrows the scope of inquiry. This rejoinder argues that Bowers’ repeated rejections of critical pedagogy are based on a partial reading of the critical tradition, and that these critiques, including his current call to ‘avoid embracing’ a critical pedagogy of place, are unnecessarily dismissive and therefore counterproductive. Environmental education has benefited and will continue to benefit from the critical tradition of which critical pedagogy is a part. Relationships and/or antagonisms are constructed through human responses and interactions. Sameshima’s pedagogical theory of parallax is introduced as a way of seeing relationships between ideas that have been thought to be opposed. Moving toward relationship rather than rivalry, the rejoinder concludes by suggesting that Bowers’ and Freire’s criticality is actually more alike than different.     

A field of desire: visions of education in selected Australian silent films

The 1920s was an ambivalent decade in Australia: on the one hand Australians were still reeling from the disastrous effects of the Great War and on the other they were witnessing unprecedented and exciting technological and social changes brought about by modernity. One of the most important modern technologies was the cinema, which Australians embraced enthusiastically from its introduction. In the silent era Australians produced a great many films, some of which concerned the vast enterprise of the schooling of children. This article considers the relationship between cinema, modernity and education in a small selection of Australian silent films. It argues that these silent film visions of education represented education as a field of desire. These examples of silent cinema about schooling mirrored back at audiences, and attempted to allay, their desires (and anxieties) about the state of nation in the interwar period as well as concerns about the shifting gender boundaries exemplified by the young, unmarried and mobile female teacher. The desired future was ordered, fit and healthy, disciplined, prepared for war, and underpinned by traditional gender roles: little boys were soldiers in waiting, little girls were mothers in waiting, and nubile female teachers were destined for marriage.     

繁荣背后的反思:中国的教育学本土化

In the past 20 years, China has seen an influx of foreign pedagogies that emphasize Western concepts such as dualistic opposition and linear development. As educational studies have become localized to China’s environment, there has been a tendency to substitute transplanted ideas for methods based on local research. As such Chinese educational theory has arbitrarily been replaced by Western theory and practice as the standard. Therefore, there is now a need for restructuring methodology with more theoretical wisdom based on the localization of pedagogy in China. __________ Translated from Jiaoyu Lilun Yu Shijian 教育理论与实践 (Theory and Practice of Education), 2007, 27(5): 1–5     

妇女主义:女性主义乌托邦精神再现

妇女主义是艾丽斯.沃克为治疗美国社会的各种顽疾——种族歧视、性别歧视、环境恶化等问题提出的一套实验性的解决方案。它倡导人们建立一个新的社会秩序,一个男人与女人,各种肤色人种之间,人与自然之间和谐共处的精神家园和物质家园。妇女主义对诸多现实问题提出的解决方案与女性主义乌托邦精神内涵不谋而合,是现代女性主义乌托邦精神的具体再现。     

Bakhtin's theory of dialogue: A construct for pedagogy, methodology and analysis

This article describes the application of Bakhtin's (1981, 1986a,b) theorisation of language as dialogue to the study of young students' struggle with discourses of ethnicity within the context of a Studies of Asia curriculum project (Hamston 2003). Bakhtin's rich conceptualisation of the productive and ethical nature of dialogue has operated at all levels in this study as a theoretical, pedagogical, methodological and analytic research construct.     

略论教育学派的建构

教育学派的建构有赖于多方面条件的成熟,虽然近代教育学派在西方诞生以后,议论纷呈,学派蜂起,但传到中国的近百年历史中,却尚未形成中国教育学派。当前教育界某种建构教育党派尝试有待历史的检验。