Small Strokes Big Oaks

Today’s guest post in the Teaching Feminism series is from L, a feminist blogger and college composition teacher. You can find her blog at http://heartoffalsehood.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lazerbug.

The theme of this series, Teaching Feminism, is near and dear to my heart. I recently graduated with my master’s in English, and I spent much of last and this year researching feminist pedagogy to write my master’s thesis. In my thesis, I focused on creating a women-only, feminist developmental composition class for the community college setting. Despite the specificity of this focus, many of the issues I addressed have great import for the secondary classroom as well.

In my research, I found that there are broadly two ways to “do” feminism in the classroom. The first is by way of incorporating feminist/woman-centric content. Ashley — my gracious host — has demonstrated this in her post about teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” and discussing its gendered themes outright. The other way is touched on by guest blogger Laura in her post about the importance of respect in feminist classrooms: instructional technique is another important way for feminist teachers to teach and do feminism in their classrooms. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be focusing on this second way of doing feminism in schools, with a few ideas for classroom activities to demonstrate or practice these techniques here and there.

But first, some theoretical background:

Feminist pedagogy is deeply rooted in the examination of power relationships in society. In its inception in the 1960s and 1970s (at least in the US), feminist pedagogy was primarily concerned with gendered power relationships; however, as feminist pedagogy has grown and adapted to our changing society, feminist pedagogy has become concerned with all kinds of power relationships. Really, feminist pedagogy keeps up with feminist activism at large: as mainstream feminists have redefined what it means to be a feminist — not just fighting male privilege, but calling into question white, class, able-bodied, and cis privilege — so has feminist pedagogy redefined its boundaries. Therefore, feminist pedagogy overlaps heavily with other liberatory pedagogies, such as critical pedagogy.

One power relationship that is called into question in feminist pedagogy, making it unlike other forms of feminist activism, is the teacher-student relationship. In traditional classrooms, especially those that use a “banking” approach, the teacher has complete control, complete power, and the student has none. The teacher is considered a benevolent dictator in such classrooms, and the persona of such traditional teachers takes on a bit of a colonialist air: they’re doing “what’s best” for the uncultured, blank-slate students.

In many ways, the public school system in the US promotes this sort of teacher-student relationship. You can see it in the way most classrooms are designed: blackboards on one side of the room make it easy for the teacher to stand there and pass down knowledge to the empty heads of the students, who are sitting individually in desks all facing the teacher. Even teachers who attempt to mitigate this by putting students in circles or desks in small groups face challenges and find themselves reverting to traditional techniques in order to pass knowledge on more efficiently. And it can be difficult to find the money to buy texts written by women and/or that address feminist concepts if your school has already sunk its dollars into “the classics” or into other textbooks.

Despite the many obstacles for feminist teachers, there are still many ways to enact a feminist pedagogy — because feminist pedagogy is so much about examining power: who has it and who doesn’t.

Again, the theme of the traditional classroom is the all-knowing teacher bestowing knowledge upon the student. This is a paternalistic conception of the classroom that disregards the knowledge that students already have and the fact that teachers are human and therefore flawed. Though the vast majority of teachers don’t actually teach this way and don’t actually believe their students know nothing, many, many students have experienced learning situations where their knowledge was ignored and they were treated as ignorant. Feminist pedagogy — even if it isn’t presented as such (which can be good in more hostile schools/districts or in classes where saying “feminist” would distract students more than help them) — can help all students, regardless of gender identity, feel more empowered in their learning.

What I think is excellent about instructional techniques associated with feminist pedagogy is that they’re just best practice when you get right down to it. Most of you reading probably already do a lot of these things in your classes. Now you have good reasoning for why it’s also feminist.

Small groups AND independent work

Obviously, we need to teach students how to work both independently and collaboratively: both are part of being human and, more practically, part of being a productive member of a workforce. (Having students work in small groups can also be a break for teachers who’ve been lecturing all day, and it gives students a chance to apply concepts hands-on.) However, we live in a patriarchal and therefore competitive society, one which devalues teamwork and collaboration and demands that each student be the best — at the cost of others’ success. Small group work has the potential to give students a chance to develop their teamwork skills, in addition to showing students that they, too, have the ability to create knowledge and to learn without the guidance of The Teacher. If implemented within a framework of authentic collaboration and student empowerment, group-work has the capacity to mess with all kinds of unfortunate and oppressive power relationships.

Authentic questions

Teacher educators call asking questions a way to gauge student understanding. I call asking questions a way for teachers to tell their students that knowledge is created and that they, too, can create knowledge — not just the teacher. The difference between gauging comprehension and empowering students, though, is in the question asked. There are “teacher questions” — the questions you already have the answer to — and there are authentic questions. Asking authentic questions — ones that you really don’t know the answer to and/or are aware that there are many possible answers to — allows students to play a useful role in the creation of knowledge. It also positions you, the teacher, as another learner, as someone who doesn’t have the answers and is engaging in the education process alongside students. You’re no longer the Holder of Knowledge: you’re a seeker of truths, your students have some of the answers, and you all have to talk it out to get the bigger picture.

Encouraging reflection in the name of student empowerment

As a composition teacher, I teach a lot of writing, and I assign a lot of papers. In the last couple of years, I have begun assigning reflective essays along with the typical essays students write in my class. This initially came out of a desire to show students that their learning is up to them, not me, that they can’t blame me for everything they don’t understand, that they earn grades rather than receiving them. (In other words, I was getting some disgruntled evaluations from students who thought they could get an A with C-level writing and no effort to improve their skills.) Even though the initial intent of these new reflective assignments was more practical in nature, I’ve come to see how fostering reflection is an important part of doing feminist pedagogy. My students generally see me as the Composition Expert who is going to pass down all of the “right” composition facts to them. Because I’m the “Expert,” they also see me as superior to them, which imbues my relationship with my students with a power differential. Reflective writing allows students to think about writing — or whatever other concepts they are addressing — in their own terms, to explain what they understand, and to see how it fits into their lives, either academically, personally, or both. My class becomes less about “doing what the teacher wants” and more about “this is what I learned and why it’s important to me” (especially because I don’t focus on grammar/mechanics/style as I read these papers). Creating an opportunity to see knowledge as constructed and to see their own personal role in how that knowledge is constructed helps students be empowered as individuals with agency in their educational lives.

Gender segregation

I commented on the first post in this series about the uses and misuses of sex/gender-segregation in the classroom. I think dividing classes into boys and girls has a lot of potential to benefit students. Not only does this allow for the discussion of sensitive topics without fear of shame from the “opposite sex,” but it allows both girls and boys to be more themselves without feeling the need to perform for each other. Gender segregation, however, can also inadvertently lead teachers and administrators down the “gender-based education” path, a path paved with gender stereotypes, sexism, and misogyny. I’m not sure that doing gender segregation within one classroom would be a good idea. But if your school has considered segregating genders into different classes, keep in mind that this can be a powerful way for students to examine gender — and it can also be damaging for them if classes are designed around gender stereotypes about how boys and girls learn. Basically, avoid people like when designing single-sex courses, and think about the many, many ways boys and girls benefit from typically masculine and typically feminine forms of instruction.

I could go on and on about this stuff, but I’ll stop there for now. I am planning a follow-up post that will touch on some of the stickier parts of doing feminist pedagogy — such as what happens when embracing the “feminine” stops being feminist, dealing with conflict in a feminist space, and being a female feminist teacher who questions authority in her classroom — because, let’s be honest, the ideas I’ve discussed here are pretty mainstream. The revolutionary thing about this is calling mainstream approaches like this feminist. Yes, it’s excellent that these things are mainstream and an expected part of educational culture; however, without naming these approaches as feminist in intent and in creation, feminist pedagogy loses its relevance, its educational edge, and its healing power. So go out there, get your kids into groups and ask them to work as a team to accomplish a shared goal, and continue being a feminist pedagogue.

Enjoy this series? Have something to add? Want to write a guest post? Leave your voice in the comments or e-mail me at smallstroke (at) gmail (dot) com.