Mainstream university pedagogy in feminist perspective

This article analyses university pedagogy by contrasting mainstream pedagogy and feminist pedagogical thought. The data consist of two textbooks, and we investigate what kinds of teaching, learning and knowledge the textbooks construct and what kinds of student and teacher positions they suggest. The inquiry shows that learning in the textbooks is seen as a strictly defined, hierarchical process and that ideal teaching stresses methods over content. The power of knowledge is not discussed, nor are gender, sexuality and other differences. Academics are seen as professional teachers who master teaching methods, and students are framed as customers. An assumed human sameness, marketisation of education, emphasis on vocational benefit and ‘pathos of the new’ were found to be themes guiding mainstream pedagogy. We suggest that feminist pedagogy can offer an alternative approach, one enabling a critical analysis of the power of knowledge and an awareness of differences among students.     

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.     

Blending in: reconciling feminist pedagogy and distance education across cultures

Distance education’s mandate to expand outreach to those with limited access to higher education makes it a particularly welcome mode for non-traditional women learners. Feminist pedagogy, which has tended to privilege the classroom space in the learning experience, has stopped short of a wholehearted acceptance of distance education which relies heavily on self-study and has become increasingly defined by technology aided learning in recent years. Despite this conflicted relationship, their shared democratising mandate and learner-centric approaches have made it possible to envision a rapprochement between the two. This has been aided by a revised understanding of ‘distance’, a dislodging of real/virtual dichotomies and an exploration of ‘hybrid’ spaces in the interest of feminist goals. After mapping these developments on an international canvas, I explore a similar reconciliation in the context of developing countries, specifically India. Here, I argue that despite the significance of democratisation, challenges posed by consumerist trends in mass-based open education call for suitable strategies, including a re-adaptation of the ‘hybrid’. Using the example of a ‘blended approach’ programme, I attempt to show how contextualised innovations may help to sustain the partnership between feminist pedagogy and Open & Distance Learning. It is hoped that such an illustration, despite its limitations and specificity, may provoke other experimentations in diverse socio-cultural contexts.     

Re-imagining the (un)familiar: feminist pedagogy in rural spaces

Little attention has been directed towards post-secondary education in rural spaces, instead conceptualising university study primarily as an urban phenomenon. Challenging dominant conceptions of rural areas as backwards, conservative, poverty stricken and isolated, this article investigates the unique opportunities associated with rural universities. Exploring the impact of feminist pedagogy in a rural context from the perspective of critical scholars teaching in rural spaces, the analysis contends that these sites provide a unique position from which to begin tackling complex rural social issues. Adopting an intersectional approach is integral to assisting rural women to theorise the complexity of their lives, both locally and globally. Such teaching is especially significant for rural women, who otherwise may find academia inaccessible and disconnected from their lived reality.     

Unmasking moral dichotomies: can feminist pedagogy overcome student resistance?

Scholarship on feminist pedagogy suggests that challenges to traditional forms of knowledge help university students overcome resistance to discussions about oppression. Because students assume that ‘truth’ is objective, they are unwilling to consider alternative voices from the ‘margins’. This paper theoretically argues and empirically examines whether feminist pedagogy expands students' morally dichotomous frameworks and, thus, decreases students' avoidance, denial, and resentment towards critical analysis. I showed students in three Women, Gender and Society classes videos I created that depicted a lecturer and three students negotiating gendered‐conflict in the classroom. My goal was to see if exposure to feminist pedagogy throughout the semester reduced the likelihood that students used morally, dichotomous frameworks to resist engaging in analysis about oppression, inequality and difference.     

Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo‐Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education

This article provides an analysis of a pedagogy of desire from a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective. A pedagogy of desire can be theorised in ways that mobilise creative, transgressive and pleasurable forces within teaching and learning environments. It also enables a new view on affect in education as a landscape of becoming in which forces, surfaces and flows of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring ontology. This marks an attempt to reclaim the notion of desire away from a purely negative, repressive or libidinal framework. The claim of pedagogy of desire is that through the mobilisation and release of desiring production, teachers and students make available to themselves the powerful flows of desire, thereby turning themselves into subjects who subvert normalised representations and significations and find access to a radical self. Some strategies and practical implications are offered to suggest how this approach to pedagogy may function in educational contexts.     

Power,pedagogy and the personal: feminist ethics in facilitating a doctoral writing group

The paper explores questions of power arising from feminist facilitators running a doctoral writing group at a UK university. Butler’s [2014. Re-thinking Vulnerability and Resistance. [Online]. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.institutofranklin.net/sites/default/files/files/Rethinking%20Vulnerability%20and%20Resistance%20Judith%20Butler.pdf] theorisation of precarity and vulnerability inspired us to re-think normative constructions of research writing and the academic identities and subjectivities this presupposed. Our doctoral writing group was imagined as a space to think collectively and reflexively about the thesis, the multi-faceted power-dynamics at work in its production, and our relations to the text as both writer and audience. This paper antagonises some of the pedagogic consequences of inviting seemingly ‘personal’ matters into the space of the writing space and, subsequently, the doctoral text itself. We speak back to discourses that position doctoral writing as always and only an individual, and individualising endeavour, that eschews encounters with the personal and relational. Indeed, we recognise that configurations and spaces for research writing are always ‘political’.     

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.     

Reproductive and resistant pedagogies: The comparative roles of collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy in science education

The underrepresentation of women (and men of color) in science has motivated many science educators to develop innovate classroom pedagogies aimed at making science courses and curricula more attractive and inviting to all students. One dominant approach to reforming science education is to transform how students learn by implementing collaborative approaches to learning in the classroom. Feminist pedagogy is an alternative approach to science education reform that is concerned with transforming both how students of science learn and the science curriculum that students are expected to learn. This article first compares and contrasts collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy. It then addresses the implications and consequences of each for science education. The theoretical and epistemological foundations of each approach demonstrates that choosing a classroom pedagogy is not an apolitical act. Collaborative approaches to science education serve to reproduce the dominant discourse of existing science systems. In contrast, feminist pedagogy resists the dominant discourse and invites all students to learn science, but more important, it invites them also to critically analyze existing scientific systems and the relationship of those systems to power, oppression, and domination. J Res Sci Teach 35: 443–459, 1998.     

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.     

It's about time! Repetition,fantasy, and the contours of learning from feminist pedagogy classroom breakdown

This paper explores feminist pedagogy classroom conflict through looking at how time, in a psychoanalytic sense, can rupture straightforward interpretations of manifest classroom dynamics. I use the concept of transference to consider how classroom conflict is complicated by the reliving and replaying of past conflicts in the pedagogical arena, a dynamic that is more unwieldy in feminist pedagogies that rely on personal experience and dialogue. Conflicted classroom experience can also reappear and be repeatedly relived in fantasy; I examine how fantasy can work as an ego defence at the same time that it can be a location for learning about the conflict that produced it. Finally, I draw on Freud's concept of deferred action to explore the haunting of difficult classroom experience. My central concerns lie in the difficulties of crafting learning from feminist pedagogy conflict and of arriving at a tolerable afterwards to such conflict.     

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。     

Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening

Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.     

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.     

Conversations about head start salaries: A feminist analysis

This qualitative interview study investigates the Hoover Community Action Agency's Head Start salary policies as described by 3 program administrators and 10 teachers. Feminist theories explain how teachers' and administrators' interpretations of salaries reflect societal beliefs about the value of Head Start teaching. Head Start teachers acknowledge both their low wages and their deep commitment to the Head Start mission. Low- and middle-income teachers differ in how they describe current salary levels: low-income teachers are proactive in salary enhancement efforts and middle-income teachers view salaries as supplemental family income. Agency administrators, while acknowledging the low teacher wages, argue that Head Start employment is more financially lucrative than day care teaching. Administrators cite teacher commitment, not salary, as the best predictor of teacher tenure.