Building a Home for Feminist Pedagogy

Pedagogy is not about envy, right? Such a connection would be strained and inappropriate. Or rather, is envy natural and maybe even productive? Last spring, members of the student-run Feminist Studies Group at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) began to discuss how feminist scholarship and activism might relate to the teaching that is such a significant part of our collective experience. Our discussion brought out these and other pressing questions: How can we integrate women's studies into more traditional disciplinary teaching? What are ways in which we can teach feminism within our areas of specialization? How might one design a women's studies syllabus that doesn't just reflect an awareness of global, racialized, class, and sexual differences, but embodies it? Unsatisfied with limiting this important discussion to our group, we decided to expand our exploration of feminist pedagogy by organizing and hosting a small conference titled Women, Gender, Pedagogy: A Conference on Feminist Pedagogy. In planning the conference, we had two primary goals: (1) to share pedagogical methods and ideas for teaching women's and gender studies and feminist approaches to teaching in various disciplines and (2) to discuss the various issues of concern for those teaching women's studies, gender studies, or sexuality in the academy. At the same time, we hoped to strengthen the sense of community among students and scholars interested in feminist approaches to teaching, not only by bringing together a group of educators with varying degrees of experience and widely different human and academic perspectives, but also by developing more lasting means of working together and sharing our experiences. Our motivations, we thought, were nothing but practical and professional. Now we're convinced that an unacknowledged envy did indeed play a role in our desire to organize a conference devoted entirely to feminist pedagogy. We enjoy the interdisciplinarity of women's studies, but traditional disciplines, within which most of us are housed, often provide a community with whose members we can discuss our teaching practices or problems and from which we, particularly as graduate students and new professors, receive education and guidance in pedagogy. When we step outside our disciplines, we can feel homeless and adrift. The conference, we can now see, was an attempt to create the home we felt deprived of. Others, apparently, felt a similar need. Just days after the call for papers was sent out, responses began to pour in via e-mail. What we had first envisioned as a one-afternoon, single-room event began to outgrow its originally modest britches. Within several weeks it was clear that we would have more than one hundred proposals from which to build our conference. When the Feminist Studies Group met to discuss these unexpected developments, an expanded version of the conference began to take form, resulting in a symposium that took place on February 24, 2006, and featured fifty-eight presenters-from undergraduates to full professors-traveling to New York City from as far away as Texas and even Canada. More than two hundred people attended the conference, underscoring a pressing need for this type of forum on the epistemologies and the issues of pedagogy facing differentiated and dispersed communities of feminist scholars and educators. Because women's studies is a field that is by nature interdisciplinary, forums for discussion among feminst scholars at individual colleges or universities can be difficult to establish. The opportunies presented for conversation about feminist pedagogies at disciplinary conferences also tend to be infrequent. Scholarship trumps pedagogy repeatedly as the focus of professionalization. Yet pedagogy certainly is, and should be, a priority for feminist scholars. Teaching tends to walk hand in hand with the creation of scholarly works and is, in fact, the arena in which we can make the greatest contributions to the preservation and growth of feminism in both academia and society, through our effects on the curriculum in our respective departments; on the intellectual atmosphere of our institutions; and, most important, on our students, female and male. …

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