Feminist Pedagogy Meets Critical Pedagogy Meets Poststructuralism

Abstract

A few years ago, in a book assessing movements of radical education in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, Nigel Wright identified two main lines of action, a liberatory progressivism and a socialist critique and argued that neither had been successful (Wright, 1989). Neither approach, he argued, could bring together a project that both engages the interests and learning needs of students and also is an adequate project of challenge to oppressive social processes. Wright acknowledged in passing that feminist pedagogy had been something of an exception to this story of ineffectual action, but he gave this no more than a sentence or two of consideration, presumably on the grounds that it was a marginal development, and that 'real' radical education would not focus on gender. In recent years we have seen a new stream of writing on both radical and feminist pedagogies. This writing is preoccupied with themes significantly different from those associated with the earlier movements that Wright discussed. In this essay, I want to focus on three recent books on feminist and critical pedagogy and consider what new themes and assumptions are now being given priority. I also want to consider where these recent approaches leave us relative to the issues Wright raised about the earlier movements. Do these new theories manage to bring together powerful visions and directions for social change and also adequate ways of engaging with the learners? Is feminist pedagogy still successfully combining instructional practice and social visionand is it still relegated to the margins by male writers on radical pedagogy? And, what