Contradictions in Feminist Pedagogy: Black Women Students' Perspectives

This paper explores Black students' perspectives and subjectivities in order to understand how power and get played out in interactions between teacher and student in the feminist classroom. The ways in which the student views learning as liberatory, and the problems of contradictory practices that reproduce oppressive relations harmful to the student are considered. Cet article explore les perspectives et subjectivites d'etudiant/es noir/es afin de comprendre le jeu du pouvoir et de l'autorite l'interieur des interactions professeur/es / etudiant/es dans la salle de classe feministe. L'article examine comment l'etudiant/e voit l'apprentissage en tant que liberation, ainsi que les problemes de pratiques contradictoires qui reproduisent des relations oppressives nuisibles l'etudiant/e. *********** Feminist Pedagogy and Students' Experiences Over the past two decades, feminist scholars have increasingly taken an interest in writing about feminist pedagogy in both theory and practice. (1) Feminist educators have detailed the complexities of putting theories about feminist pedagogy into practice in the classroom, particularly when women differ in identity, location, history and race. (2) In this paper I engage Canadian Black (3) student perspective and subjectivity in order to gain an insider's view of how power and play out in interactions between teacher and student in the feminist classroom. The centrality of self-reflectivity to feminist pedagogy Carolyn M. Shrewsbury (1993) characterizes the vision of the feminist classroom as a in which both teacher-student and student-teacher act as subjects, not objects, in collaborative and learning process. Shrewsbury describes feminist and classroom dynamics as intending engaged teaching/learning.... in continuing reflective for both teacher and student (p. 8). These ideas come out of feminist praxis--a concept in that concerns the of oppressive patriarchal relations of power both outside and inside the classroom. Ann Manicom (1992) looks specifically at ideas about teaching for transformation found in normative accounts of feminist pedagogy in Canada, Britain and the United States, and then raises questions about three key themes in the literature: collaboration, and authority (p. 366). She points out that attempts to attend to experience, to foster collaborative forms of learning, and to reduce relations of in the classroom are to be valued; nonetheless, these practices are full of complexities and (p. 366). According to Manicom, self-reflectivity guides the process of rethinking practices which must be challenged and deconstructed and is central to the feminist educator's role in the classroom (p. 366). Manicom stresses that the self-reflective stance of the socially conscious teacher, who gazes inward with remarkable critical intensity, is necessary to advance the political project of feminism (pp. 365-6). I want to focus attention on these central aims in feminist pedagogy, and also on how they are implemented in the classroom with varying degrees of success. Through an analysis of student narratives, detailing lived experiences in the feminist classroom, I assess the conditions under which the student views learning as liberatory in the classroom. Then, I shift the focus to the problem of what happens when what we expect least produces oppressive relations that harm the student. I describe these least expected and harmful classroom relations as contradictions within feminist practices because patterns of oppression persist in an environment which explicitly argues against dominance. It is necessary to examine the inevitable presence of race, class and sexuality in relations between the feminist teacher and the student. On one hand, feminist educators in Canada are generally white; students, on the other hand, are increasingly racially diverse. …

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