Feminist Pedagogical Research Articles

Set Ablaze Yet Not Consumed: Tenure Seeking Blackwomxn and Black Feminist Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching and Mentoring during COVID-19

This study was designed to explore the personhood affirming approaches Blackwomxn faculty incorporate in teaching and mentoring Students of Color and the impact of COVID-19 on their efforts. Using a Black feminist perspective, we centered the pedagogical practices of Blackwomxn faculty to examine their unique experiences and interactions with Students of Color. Their narratives reflect how Blackwomxn faculty contribute worldviews that challenge Eurocentric, patriarchal and heteronormative pedagogical practices and how their approaches to teaching and mentoring demonstrate what we label as contemporary anti-slavery rebel behavior.

“Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!” Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures

“Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!” Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures

Teaching Activism: The Feminist Pedagogical Possibilities of Why We Fly

Young adult fiction possesses the pedagogical power to educate young readers about activism, and more recently, authors of the genre have answered the call from young aspiring activists to deliver narratives that are reflective of and relevant to their own lives and communities. Published in October of 2021, the novel Why We Fly illustrates the complexities of participating in social justice activism while also providing entertaining and inspiring characters. In honor of Colin Kaepernick, authors Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal craft the fictional hero Cody Knight who encourages the text’s young protagonists to look at the world around them to identify injustice. Using critical feminist theory in an analysis of the text, I highlight the ways in which the novel guides readers to understand movement building and community outreach while also requiring them to reflect on their complicity in systems of oppression. From a feminist perspective, the young adult novel Why We Fly is a narrative that would enable teachers to present students with the opportunity to analyze systems of oppression and power structures, develop a critical consciousness, and question ways we privilege knowledge and ways of knowing.

Feminist Pedagogical/ Conversational Performance Art: The Work of Mónica Mayer

Feminist Pedagogical/ Conversational Performance Art: The Work of Mónica Mayer

Feminist Pedagogical/ Conversational Performance Art

This paper shows how the early feminist pedagogical performance artworks of the Mexican artist Mónica Mayer are example of Connective Aesthetics and Conversational Art.

Feminist Pedagogical/ Conversational Performance Art: The Work of Mónica Mayer

Feminist Pedagogical/ Conversational Performance Art: The Work of Mónica Mayer

Strata and Strategies of Teaching about the Global “Other” Using Critical Feminist Pedagogical Praxis

In this paper I analyze the way “globalization” is deployed in U.S. universities as a value-addition. I explore issues of teaching about the global “other,” as well as the “third world” and other unfamiliar, objectified spaces. Through critical discourse analysis of syllabi I outline some representational and pedagogical trends. I also draw from my experience of teaching globalization-focused courses, including courses on transnational feminisms, international literature, social movements, migrations and socio-economic exchanges to undergraduate students. Teaching about "the other" often leads to a multiplier effect of "othering" within the classroom. Using transnational feminist perspectives, I argue that teaching such classes, on "global" "transnational" or "international" women, gender, sexuality and feminisms require de-centering not just dominant paradigms but also of oneself as purveyor of insider/global knowledge. I also argue, like many others before me, that a classroom can serve as a site for epistemic injustices and colonizing acts, and we must attempt to find ways in which such neo-colonial damages can be mitigated. This paper is an exercise in finding some ways to de-center and decolonize dominant discourses on the global "other” and suggest critical and compassionate pedagogical strategies.

Analog Girls in a Digital World?: Instructional Practice through Feminist Pedagogical Media Literacy

Analog Girls in a Digital World?: Instructional Practice through Feminist Pedagogical Media Literacy

Developing a Personal Leadership Theory: Exploring Feminist Pedagogical Theory and Social Justice Issues

Thirty years of my life had been devoted to teaching and administration in a suburban public schooldistrict. I retired and made plans to move on to a related career in higher education and complete mydoctoral studies in educational leadership. When I began my career as a community collegedevelopmental reading instructor, I was prepared to experience change in my leadership actions andunderstandings as I followed the spiraling path of learning that typifies reflective practice, which waskey to this study. However, I did not anticipate encountering so many forks in the road. My learning pathwas guided by my curiosities about unfamiliar theories and beliefs that I encountered during mystudies. There were so many new fields of interest to explore. I had to be selective because I could notinvestigate, even in a lifetime, all the areas of inquiry that beckoned me. My choice of concepts forfurther study was guided by answering the question, "What concepts will help me to understand theneeds of my students better and make me a more effective teacher?" Beyond the initial issues andtopics that directly related to my teaching practice, I chose two other areas for more in-depth study:feminist theory and social justice.

Against from Within: Finding Feminist Pedagogical Spaces between Academic Institutional Margins

As a teaching assistant in higher education, I acknowledge that I am subject to the particular ideological stance and pedagogical practice of the course professor. As I search to construct my own practice, I endeavor to locate a space within the traditional institutional tenets of pedagogy that characterizes the academy. Historically, these tenets are embedded in a curriculum that honors the knowledge of the hegemonic group, demanding mastery of content and reinforcement by the authority of the professoriate. Overtly, I submit to the authority of the professor and the legally binding course syllabus. I do not have any input into the curriculum, the learning outcomes, or the assessment components of the course. On occasion, the pedagogical stance of the professor is incompatible with my own pedagogical stance. Covertly, I have to find a way to work against from within. I have to create a space that helps me remain true to my own values and beliefs about myself as a teacher while at the same time working within the margins constructed by the professor. I have worked as a teaching assistant in the introductory course in women's studies for four years, a place where I have been mentored in a feminist perspective that is supported by the literature on feminist pedagogy. In their 1994 work, The F minist Classroom, Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault reveal four critical themes in feminist pedagogical spaces: voice, authority, mastery, and positionality. Other researchers reinforce the perception that the feminist classroom is a place where all voices are heard, power differentials are minimized, knowledge is collectively constructed and differences are honored (Gore; Welch; Mogadime; Lee and Johnson-Bailey). It is my experience, however, that in some contexts this classroom is an ideal that is not always attainable, a discovery that in part helps to explain the difficulty of operationalizing theory into practice, bell hooks, Dolana Mogadime, and Ming-yeh Lee and Juanita Johnson-Bailey reveal similar experiences in their research of feminist teachrs in confronting these ideal frameworks in the classroom. In this teaching note I share an experience during which I was not able to successfully construct a feminist space within my practice. I encountered a particular

Toward a Critical Rethinking of Feminist Pedagogical Praxis and Resistant Male Students

Feminist teachers increasingly confront resistant male students, but neither extant theoreti- cal nor practical literature provide much assistance in meeting this challenge. I argue that a critical theoretic analysis of masculinity that exposes its contradictions, in conjunction with an expanded concept of resistance, will help the feminist teacher develop a liberatory pedagogy for resistant male students (who are defending the status quo) by making the contradictions of masculinity visible to them; that is, by showing their position as simul- taneously oppressor and oppressed. Les enseignantes feministes se heurtent de plus en plus a la resistance de leurs etudiants masculins. Or, la documentation existante, qu’elle soit d’ordre theorique ou pratique, offre peu d’aide pour relever ce defi. L’auteure soutient qu’une analyse theorique critique de la masculinite mettant en evidence ses contradictions, de concert avec un concept elargi de la resistance, aidera l’enseignante feministe a developper une pedagogie liberatrice pour les etudiants qui defendent le statu quo en leur montrant les contradictions de la masculinite, c’est-a-dire en leur faisant voir que leur position est a la fois celle d’un op- presseur et d’un opprime.

Intersections of Race, Class and Gender: The Feminist Pedagogical Challenge

Intersections of Race, Class and Gender: The Feminist Pedagogical Challenge