Building Feminist Community in the Classroom
While we haven’t been very active lately in updating this blog (midterms, final papers, teaching, you know…), we wanted to make up for it by having a guest contributor share their words of wisdom with us.
We are very excited to present Anne, the first ever guest contributor on this blog. Anne is a doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies. She describes herself as “a black feminist lesbian who still has hope for the world.”
Enjoy her post below.
This year, I have been thinking about what it means to build feminist community in the classroom. You would think that this would be easy to do within a department of Women’s Studies; however, it is not. Like many feminist goals, this one takes a lot of work in terms of challenging norms, changing minds, and re-directing the momentum of the group.
In trying to create a feminist community, I am often reminded that there is a difference between Women’s Studies and feminism. Women’s Studies is about looking for women wherever they might be and asking questions about the economic, social, cultural, and historical impact of their existence. Feminism, for me, is a political project that seeks to end all forms of domination, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, ableism, heterosexism, capitalism, discrimination based on national identity, and create a socially just world.
What this means for me as a teacher, is that I am invested in my students seeing these ‘isms’ through a personal lens. Because I teach a class on Autobiography, it is easier for me to get to know the students on a personal level because I make their stories a part of my lesson plans. But I do not demand that they tell their stories and they can always refuse to share them with the class at no penalty. Also through their discussion questions and reading comments, I encourage my students to connect the readings to their personal experiences and create questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. My hope (yes, I still have hope) is that by the end of the term my students are able to look at autobiographies and current events through thinking about the ways that domination/ oppression figures into what is happening.
With that said, there are some major struggles in getting these goals accomplished. One is that I am a graduate student at a Research university, where teachers and students are encouraged to treat classroom interaction as a transaction. My students come to my class wanting to watch me, like I am on the television. When I ask them share their 3-page autobiographies they are nervous, and they groan like teenagers. Once they have read it to the class, I ask the students to ask them questions. This allows them to begin connecting with each other. It is awkward at first, but over time the students open up, share with each other, and hopefully create relationships that last after the class is over. They don’t have to like each other, but this exercise is about building a community. I see this as a part of my resistance to the norms of the university. I want the classroom to be a space where their humanity is affirmed, not denied. Students are not drones. And education, as Paulo Freire argues, is at its best when it rejects the dehumanization of students because at its worst it reifies the oppressive power dynamics.
I try to get my class to accomplish a lot of feminist goals, but I also want to educate the students about the particularities of feminist thought, which means making sure that they understand the readings. To do this, I fall back on the old ‘banking model’ where I lecture the students about the major points of the foundational readings.
There is an enemy that attempts to keep me from doing this crazy balancing act of building feminist community and banking. The enemy is time.
In the US, we are obsessed with time. William Roy argues that we treat time as a thing, “a commodity to be bought and sold.” We live our lives by a regimented sense of time. And yes, our Western sense of time is intricately linked with capitalism and its goals of constant productivity Roy writes that when he explains this to his students, “they persisted in thinking that the source of the problem is “time,” not the social relations that put demands on them.” Roy says that “many cultures do not think of time as a quantifiable thing but regard it as something that we pass through, like a boat passes through water.”
Our ideology about time is important to teaching and building feminist communities in the classroom because it drives us to behave in ways that are antithetical to our goals as feminists. We have hard and fast deadlines for assignments because we ‘must’ have this information to report to the registrar by a certain time. I would love to really get to know my students and luxuriate in their understandings of the world before I begin teaching them, but Western time (read: capitalism) will not let me. There is an expectation for me to do the work of sorting my students along a scale of excellence called grading. This sorting must be done in a certain amount of time. And the whole thing takes place on a campus that even uses bells to let us all know when classes begin and when they end. William Roy and Bowles and Gintis trace this kind of organization of schools to a time when schools wanted to mirror the ways that work in a factory was structured.
So, what I have in my class are some assignments with hard deadlines, and other assignments, with soft deadlines that need to be completed by the last official day of the course. This allows me to give them feedback on skill sets that they are developing in my course, while allowing them to marinate with other assignments. There are few factories left in the US, so let’s start thinking about school in new ways.
Imagine a campus where grades were not given.
Or one where students concentrate on one area for a certain amount of time, instead of taking multiple classes at once. Imagine a university where you could get to know your students and customize the course to their needs, with enough time to cover the topics that you think are important too. What if we were not pressured to give grades and could write narratives as evaluations that addressed the students’ strengths and areas that need improvement.
One of my favorite graduate instructors said something to the effect of ‘imagine the way that you want things to be, and behave as if you are there.’ So, I do what I have to do to maintain university standards, but I infuse my class with the elements necessary to breakdown the walls between us as human beings in order to create a space for building feminist community in the classroom.
Pedagogies for the Revolution 
Ally said,
May 21, 2010 at 19:14 +07:00
Anne!
I really like what you said about time. And it seems especially pertinent given that we are at the end of the traditional American University spring semester/quarter and we are all pressed against deadlines. What would happen if we just said, “This is the ultimate goal of my class and it will take each student however long it takes”. As a student, I would probably hate that because I’ve been conditioned in a system that values deadlines and measuring myself against others in order to understand how far I’ve come. BUT is it possible to create a learning institution comprised of soft deadlines? Hampshire College is the closest I can think of in terms of this kind of thing….
deems said,
May 21, 2010 at 19:14 +07:00
Thanks for your post, Anne!
End of quarters really make it visible how much like a factory schools run. And the saddest part about this, come to think of it, is that my professors understand how exhausted we are, and we understand how exhausted our undergrad students are; everyone sympathizes with everyone else, but there is very litte we can do. Because this is the way the system works.
And Ally, as somebody who disovers again and again that I do need the pressure of deadlines to be productive, but understands that not all people work like me, maybe what we need is to create a learning environment that embraces both hard and soft deadlines?
Also, I would very much like to imagine a university where there are no grades. I hate how much pressure some of these kids put on themselves (or some sports team or another puts on them) to “excel”. But I also seem to always find myself in a position where I am trying to tell my students not to worry about their grades, while feeling repeatedly frustrated that they’re not doing their readings, or that they’re not using the concepts and theories we learned in class in their papers and exams. I understand that I am using grading here as a means of reward and punishment, and I think I hate that. But are there ways in which we can just encourage students to learn more without dwelling on their grades. Esp if they’re just in your class becomes it fulfills their required credit hours.