Critical Pedagogy and Personal Struggles: Feminist Scholarship outside Women's Studies.

This article was inspired by our attempts to impact student responses to feminist theorizing in a third-year social psychology course. It was grounded in our participant observation, over a three-year period, as instructors at York University in Toronto, Canada. In our respective roles as professor and tutorial assistant, we, Debra and Deborah, enjoyed a friendly, collegial relationship that was characterized by a collaborative approach to and research. In our experience in a university setting1 we had seen how infiltration of feminist ideas into nonfeminist courses was met with hostility from many students.2 We wanted to enhance course experience, not only for disgruntled students, but also for ourselves. As noted by Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn, The lecture podium can be a lonely place at best of times, and anti-feminist resistance can be devastating (68). During three years we describe here, we implemented a number of pedagogical techniques to facilitate and learning of feminist theory with outcomes, overall, that were rewarding both to us and to students. We understood that feminist pedagogy is teaching that engages students in political discussion of gender justice (Fisher 44) and that the feminist teacher can be a potent agent of (Culley 211). However, we also understood that a change in consciousness was a precursor to a social change toward greater equality; thus, we wanted to raise student consciousness about feminism so that social change would be more likely. To his end we encouraged feminist analyses that critiqued how features of identity (gender, race, class, age, ability, and sexual preference) affect life experiences. Hence, our ultimate goal was to bring about changes not only in consciousness but also in practice at micro level of social relationships. This goal necessitated our efforts to have students recognize and interrogate their resistance to feminist ideas, a reflective exercise with which students struggled, but also ultimately enjoyed. Throughout course, we also reflected on and analyzed our own struggles in this process. Considerable research has been done on resistance to, or ambiguity around, identification with feminism or a feminist identity (Volman and Ten Dam; Budgeon; Bulbeck; Titus). Some re earch has taken place within educational settings, where feminist theorizing is guiding perspective of course. A central theme in literature is that, regardless of feminist teachers' efforts to have students appreciate how social structures perpetuate inequality and relate to their own lives, for most students oppressive structures of society remain vague. Although they acknowledge feminist goals of equality, students also seem to have little or no interest in examining barriers to achieving that equality even after they have been exposed to feminist analyses of structural

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