Defining Feminist Pedagogy
Despite differences in definition, feminist pedagogies tend to share some common principles. The feminist classroom challenges students to
• gain an understanding of different social realities,
• identify with groups of people with whom they may have never connected,
• alter social realities with which they are dissatisfied,
• think about potential social problems in new and informed ways and to propose solutions to such problems.
Some characteristics of feminist pedagogy, which come from theories and traditions ranging from bell hooks to Paulo Friere, are:
• a student-centered or de-centered classroom,
• student ownership—on some level—of classroom projects and conversations,
• attention to a multiple learning styles and multiple intelligences,
• endorsement of collaborative learning and collaborative working styles,
• a call to reflect and apply classroom work beyond the classroom, both to destabilize the division between public and private lives and to integrate theory and practice,
• an awareness and questioning of the relations of power—how power, privilege, and knowledge are constructed and maintained, even in the classroom itself.
How does technology-rich teaching facilitate or enable feminist pedagogy? How do these technologies help us define or redefine feminist pedagogy?
First, technology helps to structure the scale of student ownership of the classroom in a way that very clear and legible for students.
• Some technologies, such as blogs or wikis, provide long-term structure. Others, like message-boards, enable more discrete, short-term experiences. (Though, of course, it depends on how you use message boards, whether posts apply to just one class session, or whether students use and refer back to the message board.)
• Some technologies provide more process-oriented experiences: Blackboard, message-boards, discussion software, bookmarking tools.
• Others unite process and product: wikis and blogs are both structures that are always process and always product. In other words, a blog may be a "product," though it is constantly in process and may never be finished.
• Because technologies usually provide a template or frame, they help structure the creative experience for students, making expectations clear while allowing considerable autonomy.
• These technologies offer structures that are strong, continuous, and concrete, yet offer flexibility through which to build knowledge through the class.
Second, technologies offer multiple modes of engagement for multiple learning styles.
• Collaborative research through bookmarking and collaborative writing through wikis are excellent tools for kinetic or delinearized styles of thinking and learning.
• Blogs encourage students to assemble materials in disparate formats (verbal commentary, photographs, audio, video) together to research and analyze a given topic. (The blog assignment, of course, must direct students to accumulate materials in multiple formats.)
• Wikis allow students to de-linearize their presentation of information, showing other modes of relationality.
Third, technology encourages collaborative research, writing, and learning:
• Bookmarking technologies, blogs, and wikis have the potential to turn solitary experiences of studentship into collaborative experiences.
Fourth, technology encourages reflection and engagement beyond the classroom.
• The scale and structure of a particular technology sets parameters for this engagement (or not), so technology can be quite confined or connect widely across the syllabus and the semester. But each particular interface is designed to either be fairly contained or to be highly connective. (This is partly an issue of scale, as discussed in the first point above, but it's also an issue of reflection and engagement, as electronic journals or blogs may encourage students to connect course information to experiences outside the classroom.
• Reflective journals written at home, perhaps at the end of the week, rather than as preparation for class, make life, rather than the classroom, the "product" or "goal" of the journal.
• Reflective journals also help blur the lines between private and public and between theory and practice.
Finally, technologies help in feminist pedagogy’s aim to raise questions about relations of power, about how power, privilege and knowledge are constructed and maintained.
• Web-based technologies democratize authorship and call on students to analyze the construction of power and authority in texts.
• Web-based technologies, unless set up to be private, are open to the public, forcing students to create "public" texts and analyze their own construction of knowledge and power in these texts.
