Feminist pedagogy
Feminist pedagogy rejects this normative classroom dynamic, seeking to foster more democratic spaces functioning with the understanding that both teachers and students are subjects, not objects.
This process facilitates participatory learning, validation of personal experience, encouragement of social understanding, and activism, and the development of critical thinking and open-minds.
[5] It identifies the practical applications of feminist theory, while promoting the importance of social change, specifically within the institutional hierarchy found in academia.
In this sense, feminist pedagogy aims to restructure traditional learning environments in favor of a communal and collaborative experience of education, which ultimately views students as equal contributors and sources of expertise.
The educational climate of schools, the result of dominant neoliberal competitive ideologies, does not prioritize communal processes of learning, research, and community action.
Classroom power dynamics operating within neoliberal institutions exhibit a competitive style of engagement that employs fear and shame as a motivator for student growth.
"[4] Critical pedagogy advances the idea that knowledge is not static and unitary but rather results from an open-ended process of negotiation and interaction between teacher and student.
However feminist theorizing offers important complexities such as questioning the notion of a coherent social subject or essential identity, articulating the multifaceted and shifting nature of identities and oppressions, viewing the history and value of feminist consciousness-raising as distinct from Freirean methods, and focusing as much on the interrogation of the teacher's consciousness and social location as the student's.
[9] It addresses the need for social change and focuses on educating those who are marginalized through strategies for empowering the self, building community, and ultimately developing leadership.
[10] Feminist pedagogy embodies a theory about knowledge transfer in the classroom by providing specific educational strategies, criteria, and techniques to meet the desired course goals or outcomes.
Of the associated attributes, some of the most prominent features include the development of reflexivity, critical thinking, personal and collective empowerment, the redistribution of power within the classroom setting, and active engagement in the processes of re-imaging.
The critical skills fostered with the employment of a feminist pedagogical framework encourages recognition and active resistance to societal oppressions and exploitations.
Students are confirmed in their identities and experiences and are encouraged to share with the space personal understandings to build a diverse and intersectional base of knowledge.
Classroom spaces that operate from within a feminist pedagogical framework value integrity of the participants and the collective respect of existing differences in experiences and knowledge.
[4] At its core, feminist pedagogy aims to decenter power in the classroom to give students the opportunity to voice their perspectives, realities, knowledge, and needs.
The critiques of dominant paradigms and compensatory research efforts that characterized its early stages generated an explosion of scholarship that has significantly expanded the undergraduate women's studies curriculum, made possible the development of graduate level instruction, and propelled efforts to integrate the evolving scholarship on women across the curriculum.
[1] In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed 1968, Freire used Marxist theory to argue that the student-teacher relationship reflected and reinforced problematic societal power structures.
They also rest on a view of consciousness as more than a sum of dominating discourses, but as containing within it a critical capacity — what Antonio Gramsci called "good sense"; and both thus see human beings as subjects and actors in history and hold a strong commitment to justice and a vision of a better world and the potential for liberation.
hooks' pedagogical practices exist as an interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies and are based on freedom, "Creating a Community in the Classroom” that resembles both democratic process and healthy family life, as shaped by 'mutual willingness to listen, to argue, to disagree, and to make peace'.
[citation needed] Patti Lather has taught qualitative research, feminist methodology, and gender and education at Ohio State University since 1988.
[citation needed] Ileana Jiménez is a high school teacher in New York City who teaches courses on feminism, LGBT literature, Toni Morrison, and memoir writing.
[9] Jiménez teaches a class at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York called "Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Writers, Artists, and Activists."
At its core, feminist pedagogy aims to decenter power in the classroom to give students the opportunity to voice their perspectives, realities, knowledge, and needs.
Under this teaching method, educators seek to empower students by offering opportunities for critical thinking, self-analysis, and development of voice.
Popularized in the early 1970s, the technique is implemented usually by sitting in a circle and discussing one's own experiences and by finding commonalities that individuals thought were only personal matters of their own lives.
[4] Activist projects encourage students to identify real-life forms of oppression and to recognize the potential of feminist discourse outside of the academic realm.
The goals of this practical application of feminist pedagogy include raising students' consciousness about patriarchal oppression, empowering them to take action, and helping them learn specific political strategies for activism.
Surveys, interviewing and focus groups, too, could be considered assessments with a feminist approach provided that a student voice or knowledge is sought.
"Even those professors who embrace the tenets of critical pedagogy (many of whom are white and male) still conduct their classrooms in a manner that only reinforced bourgeois models of decorum.
Since the latter assumes and generally supports competition and an individualistic orientation toward learning, one of the first problems for the feminist teacher is to create the kind of trust which consciousness raising presupposes.
