Teaching without a Mask?: Collaborative Teaching as Feminist Practice

Abstract

This essay explores the complexities of collaborative teaching, a practice often characterized by theorists as particularly consonant with feminist and anticolonial pedagogy. Interweaving the scholarship on collaborative teaching, feminist and critical pedagogies, with narratives from faculty who taught in an innovative, interdisciplinary general education program, our essay suggests that team teaching remains a more vexed process than is typically acknowledged, precisely because our teaching personas are deeply rooted not only in our conscious choices, but also in enduring, and at times unconscious, structures of self. These structures are themselves intertwined with what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called “the politics of location”: the various axes of power that define the modalities and expressions of hierarchy in specific institutional contexts. Indeed, team teaching foregrounds conflict and differences—interpersonal, intellectual, and internal—that can become the very ground of learning. Focusing on the politics and psychodynamics of team teaching, we seek a revision of what constitutes a successful team-teaching experience, and of what makes it a promising site for the implementation of feminist and progressive pedagogies.