Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education

Description

In this new collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines provide a critical context for the relationship between feminist pedagogy and academic feminism by exploring the complex ways that critical perspectives can be brought into the classroom.

This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives—together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities—necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective.

The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism’s role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.

Sujets

• Education

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771120982
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education

Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education
Critical Theory and Practice
Tracy Penny Light, Jane Nicholas and Renée Bondy, editors

This book was published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Feminist pedagogy in higher education : critical theory and practice / Tracy Penny Light, Jane Nicholas and Renée Bondy, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77112-114-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77112-097-5 (pdf).—
ISBN 978-1-77112-098-2 (epub)
1. Feminism and higher education. 2. Critical pedagogy. I. Nicholas, Jane, 1977–, author, editor II. Penny Light, Tracy, 1970–, author, editor III. Bondy, Renée, 1966–, author, editor
LC197.F35 2015 370.11'5 C2015-900223-0
C2015-900224-9
Cover design by hwtstudio.com. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.
© 2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education
Renée Bondy, Jane Nicholas, and Tracy Penny Light
ONE A Restorative Approach to Learning: Relational Theory as Feminist Pedagogy in Universities
Kristina R. Llewellyn and Jennifer J. Llewellyn
TWO Feminist Pedagogy in the UK University Classroom: Limitations, Challenges, and Possibilities
Jeannette Silva Flores
THREE Activist Feminist Pedagogies: Privileging Agency in Troubled Times
Linda Briskin
FOUR Classroom to Community: Reflections on Experiential Learning and Socially Just Citizenship
Carm De Santis and Toni Serafini
FIVE Fat Lessons: Fatness, Bodies, and the Politics of Feminist Classroom Practice
Amy Gullage
SIX Engaged Pedagogy Beyond the Lecture Hall: The Book Club as Teaching Strategy
Renée Bondy
SEVEN Teaching a Course on Women and Anger: Learning from College Students about Silencing and Speaking
Judith A. Dorney
EIGHT Beyond the Trolley Problem: Narrative Pedagogy in the Philosophy Classroom
Anna Gotlib
NINE The Power of the Imagination-Intellect in Teaching Feminist Research
Susan V. Iverson
TEN From Muzzu-Kummik-Quae to Jeanette Corbiere Lavell and Back Again: Indigenous and Feminist Approaches to the First-Year Course in Canadian History
Katrina Srigley
ELEVEN Don’t Mention the “F” Word: Using Images of Transgressive Texts to Teach Gendered History
Jacqueline Z. Wilson
TWELVE Rethinking “Students These Days”: Feminist Pedagogy and the Construction of Students
Jane Nicholas and Jamilee Baroud
THIRTEEN Feminist Pedagogies of Activist Compassion: Engaging the Literature and Film of Female Genital Cutting in the Undergraduate Classroom
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez 263
FOURTEEN “I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Seen That Before!”: Feminism, the “Sexualization of Culture,” and Empowerment in the Classroom
Tracy Penny Light
FIFTEEN Jane Sexes It Up … on Campus? Towards a Pedagogical Practice of Sex
Maggie Labinski
About the Contributors
Index

For Wendy

Acknowledgements
First and foremost we would like to thank our contributors for entrusting us with their fine essays. Lisa Quinn at Wilfrid Laurier University Press has been enormously supportive of this project from its inception and we thank her for her enthusiasm and guidance along the way. Thank you to Rob Kohlmeier for steering the book and the editors smoothly through production. Thank you to the copy editor, Matthew Kudelka, for his det- ailed work. The anonymous reviewers were rigorous, thoughtful, and generous. Their feedback strengthened the collection and their support of it was critical.
In preparing the manuscript we appreciated the financial support provided by St. Jerome’s University and the work of Alisha Pol in compiling it. Colleagues assisted in various ways along the way and we thank Steven Bednarski, Diana Parry, and Kristin Burnett.
The origins of the book date back to the Canadian Committee of Women’s History conference held in Vancouver in 2010, and we would like to acknowledge the work of the organizers of that conference in bringing us together. In the long road from the initial discussions in 2010 to the final product we were supported by our families. We thank them here for all the quiet and thoughtful ways they make our work possible. Finally, this book is dedicated to Wendy Mitchinson, with much gratitude.

Introduction: Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education
RENÉE BONDY , JANE NICHOLAS , AND TRACY PENNY LIGHT
Dr. Emily Howard Jennings Stowe, one of the first women to practise medicine in Canada and a tireless advocate for women’s education and suffrage, was denied entry to classes in chemistry and physiology at the University of Toronto in 1869. She then wrote to the president of University College remarking that “these university doors will open some day to women.” His reply? “Never in my day, Madam” (Feldberg). Of course, Stowe was correct in her prediction.
Through the efforts of many early women reformers and academic feminists, the past century has witnessed drastic changes to higher education (Prentice and Theobald; Smyth and Bourne). Once privileged institutions accessible to an elite few—mostly white men of the upper classes—many of today’s universities are arguably more diverse and inclusive. In fact, 56 percent of university students in Canada are women, a statistic that mirrors the trend in many developed countries (AUCC, 5, 12). Women and other groups once excluded from higher education now participate more fully in many capacities. 1
But inequities, especially as they intersect with class and race, remain. Access to higher education in Canada continues to be at best uneven. Students whose parents went to university are more than two times more likely to attend university than those whose parents did not. In the widespread complaints about Millennials, the persistent gap in participation in higher education—especially acute when intersecting with immigration— was rendered invisible. One popular and sensationalist book linked democratization of the academy to “dumbing it down” and, unfortunately, conflated access with unrelated issues like grade inflation and the lowering of entrance requirements. The same authors also argued that changes in the curriculum to make it more inclusive—changes that began in the 1960s but that they presented as recent developments—were decentring the “core curriculum” (Cote and Allahar, 119). This argument was not only misguided and ideologically driven but also historically incorrect. In ­History, for example, Bonnie G. Smith’s work has shown how that “core” (code for white, middle-class, and male) was a product of a particular time that became naturalized in the emerging structures of the modern university. Women’s contributions, like those of people of colour, were suppressed, appropriated, or dismissed because of racism and/or sexism (Smith). Yet in the recent critique, white, middle-class, and masculine was deemed to be natural and anything else an academic interloper.
Disproportionate funding for children on First Nations reserves is one persistent problem leading to structurally based inequities in education, from kindergarten to university. For Aboriginal peoples in Canada, education is haunted by the history of residential schools (“Funding gap plagues education of First Nations, says AFN”). Blair Stonechild, in documenting the long history of universities’ failure to respectfully include Aboriginal peoples as well as appropriate content and pedagogies, argues that post- secondary education must be part of a wider discussion about self- government. Other challenges are important to note. Gender imbalances remain, especially in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines (Alphonso). Yet at the turn of the twenty-first century, widespread concern was expressed at the perceived failure of white, middle-class boys. As Christopher Greig’s work suggests, the discourse of boys’ failing was based largely on uninterrogated assumpt