Abstract
The present article describes difficulties and opportunities associated with students’ disclosure of their personal experiences in university class settings. In classes that deal with topics such as violence, racism, family dynamics, mental health or social justice, students with first-hand experience of these topics can bring valuable real-life experience to class discussion. However, bringing intimate information to class may also raise issues of appropriate boundaries and the role of the classroom setting for sharing potentially upsetting information. Drawing on principles of feminist pedagogy and using examples from classes I teach about women and psychology, I detail the challenges related to students’ personal biographies and beliefs about their experiences, and outline some strategies that may usefully find balance between respecting their experiences and providing a learning environment while teaching about the values and ethics of an academic discipline.
Highlights
Feminist PedagogyIn a seminal article on the topic, Shrewsbury wrote that “Feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching/learning – engaged with self in a continually reflective process; engaged with the material being studied; engaged with others in a struggle to get beyond our sexism and racism and classism and homophobia and other destructive hatreds and to work together to enhance our knowledge; engaged with the community, with traditional organizations, and with movements for social change” (1987, p. 6)
This article describes difficulties and opportunities associated with students’ disclosure of their personal experiences in university class settings
Students’ propensity to detail intimate challenges with issues such as mental health or family violence can be uncomfortable in a classroom setting
Summary
In a seminal article on the topic, Shrewsbury wrote that “Feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching/learning – engaged with self in a continually reflective process; engaged with the material being studied; engaged with others in a struggle to get beyond our sexism and racism and classism and homophobia and other destructive hatreds and to work together to enhance our knowledge; engaged with the community, with traditional organizations, and with movements for social change” (1987, p. 6). A feminist classroom calls into question false dichotomies such as ‘intellect’ versus ‘affect’ (Durfee & Rosenberg, 2009), foregrounds diversity and pluralism, and values the role of reflexivity and personal experience in learning (Crawley, 2008) These principles can be challenge to instructors who were trained in or adopted more traditional methods of college classroom teaching. Others assume familiarity with social issues like substance abuse, family violence, sexual assault, or suicide from their consumption of popular media, which often mines social issues for sensationalistic material, trades in gender and racial stereotypes, and ignores structural inequalities Such familiarity may lead to personal self-disclosure in humanities or social science classes in a way that may not occur in, for instance, a math class. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol 17, No 1, February 2017
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