新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Contradictions in feminist pedagogy: black women students' perspectives

摘要：

Constructive classroom dynamics were sustained in [Chris Gabriel]'s class by peers who felt their ideas and experiences were valued, not only by one another, but by their feminist teacher as well. In a feminist classroom environment of egalitarian relations where differing views were aired and acknowledged, Chris's peers (a racially mixed group) challenged each other and heard each other's differences in opinion, based on the multiple realities of women in the classroom. Uncovering power relations and systems of oppression based on multiple realities such as race, class and sexuality was an everyday part of critical anti-racist feminist conversations in the classroom. Chris later mentioned that the group's collegiality (as feminist friends) has outlived the classroom and that they still maintain a close connection with each other. Though Chris's instructor's white racial location reproduces the normalized racialization of the Women's Studies professor, the politics of her teaching stands out in its significance to students like Chris. Her political stance supports an understanding of how curriculum in the feminist classroom can become a powerful support for the emancipatory vision of feminist education (specifically for women students of different racial and social locations). The feminist professor's political teaching stance against all forms of dominance ignited alliances across the racial differences which the women in the class represented. For instance, the instructor brought in contemporary knowledge of sexuality studies, intersectionality theory and psychoanalytic theory. Chris found these transdisciplinary texts highly valuable in the process of learning how to engage and challenge such forms of dominance as the social construction of whiteness. Being able to talk with a feminist professor who discussed these issues was valuable to Chris. She found the classroom conversations particularly edifying because they extended her thinking on, and critique of, the interconnections of domination in new and challenging ways. Carolyn M. Shrewsbury (1993) characterizes the vision of the feminist classroom as "a liberatory environment" in which both "teacher-student and student-teacher act as subjects, not objects," in a collaborative teaching and learning process. Shrewsbury describes feminist teaching and classroom dynamics as intending "engaged teaching/learning.... in a continuing reflective process" for both teacher and student (p. 8). These ideas come out of feminist praxis -- a concept in teaching that concerns the transformation of oppressive patriarchal relations of power both outside and inside the classroom. Ann Manicom (1992) looks specifically at ideas about "teaching for transformation" found in normative accounts of feminist pedagogy in Canada, Britain and the United States, and then raises questions about three key themes in the literature: "experience," "collaboration," and "authority" (p. 366). She points out that "attempts to attend to experience, to foster collaborative forms of learning, and to reduce relations of authority in the classroom are to be valued; nonetheless, these practices are full of complexities and contradictions" (p. 366). According to Manicom, self-reflectivity guides the process of rethinking practices which must be "challenged and deconstructed" and is central to the feminist educator's role in the classroom (p. 366). Manicom stresses that the self-reflective stance of the socially conscious teacher, who "gazes inward" with "remarkable" critical "intensity," is necessary to advance the political project of feminism (pp. 365-6). I want to focus attention on these central liberatory aims in feminist pedagogy, and also on how they are implemented in the classroom with varying degrees of success. Through an analysis of student narratives, detailing lived experiences in the feminist classroom, I assess the conditions under which the student views learning as "liberatory" in the classroom. Then, I shift the focus to the problem of what happens when what we expect least produces oppressive relations that harm the student. I describe these least expected and harmful classroom relations as contradictions within feminist practices because patterns of oppression persist in an environment which explicitly argues against dominance.