‘Locations of Possibility’: Critical perspectives on partnership

Rhiannon M Cates,Vicki L Reitenauer,Mariah R Madigan

doi:10.15173/ijsap.v2i1.3341

Rhiannon M Cates, Vicki L Reitenauer + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v2i1.3341

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Abstract

This article offers critical perspectives on collaborative partnerships and feminist teaching that revise paradigms of power, prioritize student agency, enrich curriculum and scholarship, and sustain empowered communities of learning that challenge institutional compartmentalization. The authors reflect on how co-created curriculum can catalyze new professional partnerships that in turn contribute to refreshed learning experiences and communities. This article presents evidence of how a partnership orientation effectively encompasses an ethic and practice of feminist teaching, posits a framework of feminist pedagogy and praxis into the discourse of partnership, and exemplifies possibilities of these practices as important steps towards a (re)vision of liberatory learning.

Highlights

As bell hooks suggests in the quote above, it doesn’t have to be this way—and those of us who engage in partnership practices grounded in critical perspectives and approaches may well have experienced the co-created paradises of transgressive learning spaces towards which hooks points (Fitzmaurice & Reitenauer, 2017; hooks, 1994; hooks, 2003; Reitenauer, 2017)
We reflect upon how co-created curriculum catalyzes new professional partnerships that in turn contribute to refreshed learning experiences and communities
The outstanding results of this engagement led us to develop this article, as we recognized that the partnership we have cultivated and cherish shines a light on the possibilities that reside at the intersections of feminist pedagogy and partnership practice, an important example of student-faculty partnership as a transgressive and liberatory practice

Summary

Introduction

In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. This article explores the shared values of collaborative partnerships and feminist teaching as they serve to revise paradigms of power and prioritize student agency, enrich curriculum and scholarship, and sustain reciprocally empowered learning communities that challenge institutional compartmentalization. We mean to demonstrate how a partnership orientation encompasses an ethic and practice of feminist teaching and enter a framework of feminist pedagogy and praxis into conversations of partnership in order to exemplify possibilities of these practices as important steps towards a (re)vision of liberatory learning

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Discussion

Conclusion