Becoming Scholars in an Interdisciplinary, Feminist Learning Context

Feminist classrooms have become scholarly spaces where instructors, committed to the principles and processes of feminism, are able to seek out and employ creative ways to engage with teaching and learning processes (Gardiner 411). These classrooms are designed to be responsive to students’ needs, experiences, and ways of being (Bryson and Bennet-Anylkwa 133; Hobbs and Rice, “Rethinking” 139), while also inviting instructors to “experiment with new, sometimes risky, pedagogical approaches” (Mahar and Thompson Tetreault 2). Feminist pedagogues value, recognize, and encourage each student’s voice, and they view students as active participants in the learning process (hooks, qtd. in Donadey 83). Transformative processes are implicated in undertaking, establishing, and instituting change on individual, collective, and structural levels in feminist classrooms (Hobbs and Rice, “Introduction” xviii). On a structural level, Carolyn Shrewsbury writes: “[f]eminist pedagogy ultimately seeks a transformation of the academy and points toward steps, however small, that we can all take in each of our classrooms to facilitate that transformation . . . [By centralizing] three concepts, community, empowerment, and leadership . . . [as] a way of organizing our exploration into the meaning of feminist pedagogy” (9–10). Shrewsbury encourages feminist pedagogues to resist the structural constraints inherent in traditional learning environments and to create spaces that generate transformative learning for students and instructors. In so doing, feminist pedagogies can shift orthodox arrangements and practices in the academy. By creating a learning environment that is attuned to power dynamics and structures, feminist pedagogy can generate provisional communities. Shrewsbury conceptualizes such communities as those wherein “both autonomy of self and mutuality” (12) of members’ learning and developmental needs can be met by consensual “participatory and democratic” (13) processes, regardless of Becoming Scholars in an Interdisciplinary, Feminist Learning Context