Pub Date : 2014-11-14DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.2.0083
Emek Ergun
In the spring of 2009, I started my feminist teaching career by designing and offering GWST 340—Global Perspectives on Gender and Women in the Gender and Women’s Studies (GWST) Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). As a teacher simultaneously otherized on multiple fronts of identity and power formations, I encountered challenging incidents of student resistance while offering the course in 2009, 2010, and 2011. This article, by focusing on the geopolitics of student resistance that I experienced in these classes, discusses my pedagogical negotiations with it. In the rest of this introduction, I describe the scarce literature on student resistance to feminist pedagogies and situate my work in dialogue with feminist scholars whose experiential pedagogical pieces have helped me in the design and teaching of GWST 340. Then I provide some background information on the teacher, the course structure, the student composition of the classes, and the institutional site. Finally, I analyze the key components of the course and explore both my pedagogical intentions and the students’ reactions to them. I end the article by offering insights on how to manage and diminish student resistance in global gender studies courses and inviting further knowledge production on the subject matter. Reflecting bell hooks’s conception of teaching as liberatory and transformative, I wanted to create a participatory classroom setting for GWST 340, where knowledges, experiences, and emotions would be provided by both the teacher and the students. This partnership would be fashioned to gain a more in-depth understanding of intermingling imperialist and patriarchal forms and structures of oppression both globally and locally. Such a critical perspective would necessarily center on a critique of U.S. hegemony, which in today’s intensely globalized world implies a substantial scope of economic, political, cultural, and military power. In addition to understanding gendered structures of global domination, which I believed were always already implicated in the local, I also wanted students to develop a sense of women’s agency (especially women living in the so-called Third World who are too often represented as victims in hegemonic Western discourses). Gaining such awareness on women’s initiative and
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169 multicultural) audience. Another strength is her inclusion of nonliterary/nonhumanities disciplines such as biology and ecology. Her development and diction is very clear. We are called to “legitimize” our discipline, and we become preventative through this behavior. With humanities funding on the chopping block as frighteningly outlined by the New York Times over the past few years, this allows a way for our side of the campus to become real agents of progress. My primary concern with a text such as this is the very practical side: how do we, as twenty-first century feminist educators, get administrators and school districts/ universities to bite? How can student achievement be tied to the marginalized American voice? Our students’ assessments must be an extension of these texts, so if Ammons is to see real social change and environmental responsibility, we need testing centers to recognize their significance as well. There might be hope in this respect, as the College Board’s list of texts to use for the free-response section of the AP Literature exam now includes up to 40 percent multicultural texts compared to the very few that were present in the early 1990s. Perhaps this agenda can extend to administration and school boards as well. In the text addressed by Ammons, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee asks, “Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?” New humanism is the movement away from the Protagorean idea that man is the measure of all things to the idea that social change and environmental freedom are the measure of all things. Can we write to prevent social injustice? Would that impact form? Does that even matter? Though it is absent of an actual method by which we may practically implement these changes, Ammons’s text demands that we actually step up and live as agents of change as opposed to merely embodying the vocabulary while in the classrooms. If we are willing to accept this personal responsibility, the humanities may be saved after all. Perhaps we need to learn from O’Connor a bit—engage pathos, shock our audience, look to our feminist foremothers in the early years of the twentieth century. We can’t continue to be quiet, Ammons says, if we are to save our discipline and our world.
169多元文化)观众。她的另一个优势是涵盖了非文学/非人文学科，如生物学和生态学。她的发展和措辞非常清晰。我们被呼召使我们的纪律“合法化”，并且通过这种行为我们变得预防性。《纽约时报》(New York Times)在过去几年里可怕地概述了人文学科的资金被削减的情况，这为我们这一边的校园成为真正的进步推动者提供了一条途径。我对这样一篇文章的主要关注是非常实际的一面:作为21世纪的女权主义教育者，我们如何让行政人员和学区/大学咬人?学生的成绩怎么能和被边缘化的美国人的声音联系在一起呢?我们学生的评估必须是这些文本的延伸，所以如果阿蒙斯要看到真正的社会变革和环境责任，我们需要考试中心也认识到它们的重要性。这方面还是有希望的，因为美国大学理事会(College Board)的AP文学考试自由回答部分的文本清单现在包含了多达40%的多元文化文本，而在20世纪90年代初，这种文本很少。也许这个议程也可以延伸到行政部门和学校董事会。在阿蒙斯的《让我们现在赞美名人》一书中，詹姆斯·阿吉问道:“不是每个人都既是科学家又是艺术家吗?在书写人类经验时，认识到这一事实并同时使用这两种方法，难道不是有很多值得说的吗?”新人文主义是一场运动，它从普罗泰哥式的“人是万物的尺度”转变为“社会变革和环境自由是万物的尺度”。我们可以通过写作来防止社会不公吗?这会影响形式吗?这有什么关系吗?虽然它没有一个实际的方法，我们可以实际实施这些变化，阿蒙斯的文本要求我们实际上加紧行动，生活作为变革的代理人，而不是仅仅体现词汇在课堂上。如果我们愿意承担这种个人责任，那么人文学科可能最终会得到拯救。也许我们需要向奥康纳学习一种有点引人入胜的感伤，震撼我们的观众，向二十世纪早期的女权主义先辈们学习。阿蒙斯说，如果我们想拯救我们的纪律和我们的世界，我们就不能继续保持沉默。
{"title":"Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts ed. by Paul C. Gorski et al. (review)","authors":"Alice E. Ginsberg","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-6884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-6884","url":null,"abstract":"169 multicultural) audience. Another strength is her inclusion of nonliterary/nonhumanities disciplines such as biology and ecology. Her development and diction is very clear. We are called to “legitimize” our discipline, and we become preventative through this behavior. With humanities funding on the chopping block as frighteningly outlined by the New York Times over the past few years, this allows a way for our side of the campus to become real agents of progress. My primary concern with a text such as this is the very practical side: how do we, as twenty-first century feminist educators, get administrators and school districts/ universities to bite? How can student achievement be tied to the marginalized American voice? Our students’ assessments must be an extension of these texts, so if Ammons is to see real social change and environmental responsibility, we need testing centers to recognize their significance as well. There might be hope in this respect, as the College Board’s list of texts to use for the free-response section of the AP Literature exam now includes up to 40 percent multicultural texts compared to the very few that were present in the early 1990s. Perhaps this agenda can extend to administration and school boards as well. In the text addressed by Ammons, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee asks, “Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?” New humanism is the movement away from the Protagorean idea that man is the measure of all things to the idea that social change and environmental freedom are the measure of all things. Can we write to prevent social injustice? Would that impact form? Does that even matter? Though it is absent of an actual method by which we may practically implement these changes, Ammons’s text demands that we actually step up and live as agents of change as opposed to merely embodying the vocabulary while in the classrooms. If we are willing to accept this personal responsibility, the humanities may be saved after all. Perhaps we need to learn from O’Connor a bit—engage pathos, shock our audience, look to our feminist foremothers in the early years of the twentieth century. We can’t continue to be quiet, Ammons says, if we are to save our discipline and our world.","PeriodicalId":287450,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Teacher","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126460431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-11-27DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0031
Maurice Hamington
Students take turns leaving their seats and coming to the front of the class to sit on a simulated bus bench next to one of their classmates, ostensibly to wait for the next bus. After five minutes or so, one person “leaves” on the imaginary bus and another student comes up to sit on the bench. As they sit waiting for the bus, each student enters a conversation with the other person waiting. Each role plays as a different character with a distinct backstory—a mother going home to her children, a first-year student meeting a friend, an older adult on his way to work. Each encounter is an opportunity to explore the verbal and physical cues of caring as well as examine noncaring interactions. Students are asked to attend to the subtleties of embodiment and the nuances of communication. After each person has had a turn at the bench conversation, students return their chairs to a circle in the room. Playacting is energizing and an eagerness to discuss what just transpired charges the room. A conversation begins. Students address what they experienced but they also apply past and present course readings about ethics, ontology, and epistemology. The students are involved in meaning making and knowledge creation as they critically consider how to care for unfamiliar others. All the while, they are learning and caring about one another.
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Pub Date : 2013-11-27DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0063
Kristin Rodier, M. Meagher, Randelle Nixon
Though this exercise was originally designed for a first year course in women’s studies that emphasizes representations of girls and women, it is also entirely appropriate to students considering matters of gender and sexuality in the fields of media studies, communications, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. This teaching activity is part of a unit entitled “Framing and Re-framing Violence” where we introduce a feminist language for understanding sexual violence. We discuss cultural discourse as well as practical and activist strategies to resisting sexual violence. Since the course is focused on representation, we ask our students to use their newly acquired feminist language to critically view a music video.
{"title":"Cultivating a Critical Classroom for Viewing Gendered Violence in Music Video","authors":"Kristin Rodier, M. Meagher, Randelle Nixon","doi":"10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0063","url":null,"abstract":"Though this exercise was originally designed for a first year course in women’s studies that emphasizes representations of girls and women, it is also entirely appropriate to students considering matters of gender and sexuality in the fields of media studies, communications, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. This teaching activity is part of a unit entitled “Framing and Re-framing Violence” where we introduce a feminist language for understanding sexual violence. We discuss cultural discourse as well as practical and activist strategies to resisting sexual violence. Since the course is focused on representation, we ask our students to use their newly acquired feminist language to critically view a music video.","PeriodicalId":287450,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Teacher","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131540065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-11-27DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0050
Julianne Guillard
In my classroom, at the end of the semester there are a lot of hugs among peers, fist bumps, and cell phone numbers exchanged. The start of the semester, on the other hand, presents a very different scene, with a lot of cold stares, nervous toe-tapping, and eyes averted to more interesting media on cell phones. How did we, both instructor and students, manage to get to Point B (the former happy scene) from Point A (the latter beginning stages)? Much of the relaxed atmosphere of “Point B” owes itself to a loosely structured approach to student participation in my Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies course. In this essay, I will describe this approach toward participation (which helps create a welcoming, “safe space” environment) along with feedback, both positive and negative, from previous students. Within the first week of class during each semester, I ask my students to define their means and methods of their participation, how they are “allowed” or not allowed to participate in the class, as Daria mentioned in the opening quotation to this essay. Creating participation norms enables us to jointly develop explicit expectations of how we wish to interact with, and be treated by, each other in the classroom. Based on Don Blake’s “Norming Exercise” and Jim Cummins’s Negotiating Identities framework, this exercise destabilizes and refocuses power dynamics (student-teacher; student-student; safe spaces/unsafe spaces) and privileges (the speaker and the listener; agreement and disagreement). Sample questions from these frameworks that students use to construct their participation norms include, “What will we need to make our classroom discussions more effective?”, “How will we handle conflict?”, and “How will we build a positive climate where everyone feels listened to?” Through feminist pedagogical (Maher and Tetreault) analysis of classroom behavior and student interviews, I will argue for a wide range of disciplines to employ this form of participatory pedagogy in their classrooms. This essay will detail why norming classroom participation is a necessary tool for a progressive learning environment; how individual classes have created different means of communication and the benefits and detractions of each method; how norm-
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Pub Date : 2013-11-27DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0017
B. W. Capo
Imagine a dark stage with, one by one, seven women stepping forward to declare their name and country of origin. They then sit and interweave seven monologues of their individual struggles for gender justice in Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Guatemala. “What can I do?” asks Farida, an Afghani woman who feels powerless; “Maybe I can help the women of my country,” Mukhtar Mai from Pakistan realizes later in the play (Cizmar et al. 14, 27). These voices intersect, themes overlapping from speaker to speaker even as the seven stories belong to different places and times. Each woman begins by telling her story directly to the audience; but by the end, the actresses include each other in their gazes and respond to each other’s words, a symbol of their joint suffering, shared strength, and the solidarity necessary for lasting change. At the play’s conclusion, Guatemalan Congresswoman Anabella De Leon’s declaration “No more silence!” is a call to the entire audience (37). Women’s voices are heard, individually and collectively, throwing a spotlight on global gender issues and women’s crucial role in social change. What I have briefly described is the documentary play Seven, the collaboration of seven female playwrights with seven women activists connected in 2006 by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization supporting the development of female leaders (Vital).1 The stated mission of Vital Voices, to “identify, invest in and bring visibility to extraordinary women around the world by unleashing their leadership potential to transform lives and accelerate peace and prosperity in their communities,” is well served by the creative drama Seven (Vital). Like the more well-known Vagina Monologues, Seven is an ensemble piece of documentary theatre based on interviews. Also like Vagina Monologues, the play has minimal staging—usually just seven women, scripts in hand, on a stage devoid of props or sets. Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and writer known for her “journalism-based theatre” (Pressley), interviewed Nigerian activist Hafsat Abiola, and is perhaps the best known of the playwrights attached to the project, who also include Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, and Susan Yankowitz. Each playwright interviewed
想象一下，在一个黑暗的舞台上，七个女人一个接一个地走上前来，宣布她们的名字和原籍国。然后，她们坐在一起，讲述她们在柬埔寨、北爱尔兰、俄罗斯、尼日利亚、巴基斯坦、阿富汗和危地马拉为性别正义而奋斗的七段独白。“我能做什么?”感到无能为力的阿富汗妇女法里达问道;“也许我可以帮助我们国家的女性，”来自巴基斯坦的Mukhtar Mai在剧中后来意识到(Cizmar et al. 14,27)。这些声音相互交叉，尽管七个故事属于不同的地点和时代，但演讲者之间的主题重叠。每个女人都以直接向观众讲述自己的故事开始;但到最后，女演员们互相凝视，互相回应，这象征着她们共同的痛苦，共同的力量，以及持久变革所必需的团结。在戏剧的结尾，危地马拉国会女议员安娜贝拉·德莱昂(Anabella De Leon)的宣言“不要再沉默了!”是对全体听众的号召(37)。无论是个人还是集体，妇女的声音都能得到倾听，使全球性别问题和妇女在社会变革中的关键作用成为人们关注的焦点。我所简要介绍的是纪录片《七》(Seven)，由七位女剧作家与七位女性活动家在2006年通过支持女性领导者发展的非营利性非政府组织“生命之声全球伙伴关系”(Vital)联系在一起“生命之声”的使命是“发掘、投资世界各地的杰出女性，释放她们的领导潜力，改变她们的生活，加速她们所在社区的和平与繁荣，从而提高她们的知名度”。这部创意剧《生命之声》很好地体现了这一使命。和更著名的《阴道独白》一样，《七》是一部基于访谈的纪录片合奏剧。和《阴道独白》一样，这部剧的舞台布景也很少——通常只有七个女人，手里拿着剧本，舞台上没有道具或布景。安娜·迪弗尔·史密斯，一位以“以新闻为基础的戏剧”(Pressley)而闻名的女演员兼作家，采访了尼日利亚活动家哈夫萨特·阿比奥拉，她可能是该项目中最知名的剧作家，其他剧作家还包括保拉·奇兹玛、凯瑟琳·菲洛克斯、盖尔·克里格尔、卡罗尔·k·麦克、露丝·玛格拉夫和苏珊·扬科维茨。每一位接受采访的剧作家
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Pub Date : 2013-11-27DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.23.1.0001
L. Haigwood
“The voice of women needs to be heard” because “when we truly take their lives seriously it changes our whole understanding of who we are and what we are called to become” (Chilcote 10). The revolutionary impact of feminist theory and practice in all areas of contemporary culture illustrates the world-transforming potential of women’s voices. It is now essential to any liberal education, as well as to the intellectual development of individual women students, that women’s voices be richly and intentionally integrated into general education core skills and knowledge requirements, beyond gender and women’s studies programs. Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, one of about fifty women’s colleges remaining in the United States, has designed a new general education structure, the Sophia Program in Liberal Learning, which foregrounds women’s voices in precisely this way.1 Our general model and the lessons we have learned in implementing it are easily adaptable to coeducational and/or secular institutions, even though our distinctive identity as a Catholic women’s college has shaped the specific details of our curriculum. The women’s voices requirement is a “cognitive and communicative skill” that does not add credit hours. Rather, students typically fulfill it by taking courses that also fulfill one of the four general education area requirements: “science for the citizen,” “arts for living,” “cultures and systems,” and “traditions and worldviews.” I say “typically” because a strength of our new general education program is its flexible responsiveness to each individual student’s desire to construct her own education. Students are required to have a total of four women’s voices learning experiences, but only three of them must be three-credit courses taken from at least three of the four general education areas. These areas are represented by the four arms of the French cross, a graphic design taken from the college seal (see Figure 1, next page). The fourth women’s voices learning experience may also be a course, but, alternatively, it may also be an out-of-class learning experience, such as volunteering at Sex Offense Services (S.O.S.), a local sexual assault prevention, and victim assistance, agency. Many Saint Mary’s students currently volunteer
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