Team Teaching “Gender Perspectives”: A Reflection on Feminist Pedagogy in the Interdisciplinary Classroom

© 2014 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois This paper explores the potential of collaborative interdisciplinary teaching as a mechanism for advancing feminist pedagogies. The authors, individually and collectively, engage in feminist academic work (e.g., scholarship and teaching) that challenges traditional academic expectations in our disciplines and at our institution. We do this in spite of our understanding that power relations within the academy and in traditional academic disciplines tend to marginalize methodologies that promote emancipatory and progressive ideas (see Katuna). Furthermore, we embrace academic feminism, particularly in the classroom, as having interdisciplinary potential in its ability to draw from multiple fields of thought simultaneously to help students develop critical approaches that ultimately contribute to equity and equality, within and beyond the academy. Interdisciplinarity is central to the transformative goals of women’s/gender studies, given the multi-faceted and deeply layered nature of gender construction. Feminist scholars have expressed the hope that challenging disciplinary boundaries will allow fuller methodologies to come to fruition and disrupt authoritative power structures within the academy. However, the extent to which the interdisciplinary promise of women’s/gender studies has been fulfilled in practice has been called into question. In an important Feminist Studies forum (2001), a group of feminist scholars challenged the interdisciplinarity of feminist scholarship and teaching, noting that most of these activities are typically “either disciplinary or multidisciplinary, combining disciplines in a fashion that is additive rather than integrative” (Finger and Rosner 499). Some of this can be explained as a reflection of structural realities within the academy, where job prospects in interdisciplinary fields are limited and true interdisciplinarity remains under suspicion: universities will not give up the prioritization of traditional disciplines (Katz 519). This is consequential because the inherent interdisciplinarity of women’s and gender studies has the radical potential to resist entrenched academic boundaries and to create interstitial scholarship. As Anke Finger and Victoria Rosner state, “Feminists can use interdisciplinary scholarship to challenge the forms knowledge takes in Team Teaching “Gender Perspectives”: A Reflection on Feminist Pedagogy in the Interdisciplinary Classroom