The Feminist Classroom: Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Privilege

by Frances A. Maher, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault

Overview

The issues explored in The Feminist Classroom are as timely and controversial today as they were when the book first appeared six years ago. This expanded edition offers new material that rereads and updates previous chapters, including a major new chapter on the role of race. The authors offer specific new classroom examples of how assumptions of privilege, specifically the workings of unacknowledged whiteness, shape classroom discourses. This edition also goes beyond the classroom, to examine the present context of American higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews and using the actual words of students and teachers, the authors take the reader into classrooms at six colleges and universities - Lewis and Clark College, Wheaton College, the University of Arizona, Towson State University, Spelman College, and San Francisco State University. The result is an intimate view of the pedagogical approaches of seventeen feminist college professors. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that American higher education has long represented a white, male, privileged minority. The professors here bring together the twin upheavals that have challenged this tradition: namely a rapidly changing student body and the more inclusive knowledge of feminist and multicultural scholarship. They uncover the voices, concerns and experiences of groups hitherto marginalized in higher education: women, people of color and working class students. Through concrete examples of classroom practice, the work of these professors challenge the traditional split between knowledge and pedagogy that has long characterized higher education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742579903
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	04/11/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	606 KB

About the Author

Frances A. Maher is professor of education at Wheaton College, where she coordinated the college's Balanced Curriculum Project, which integrated the study of women into introductory courses. She has written several articles exploring the principles and practices of feminist pedagogy and co-edited a special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly on feminist pedagogy. Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault is provost and vice president for academic affairs at Portland State University. She is the author of Women in America: Half of History.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Breaking Through Illusion, Again
Chapter 3 Creating a Kaleidoscope: Portraits of Six Institutions
Chapter 4 Mastery
Chapter 5 Voice
Chapter 6 Authority
Chapter 7 Positionality
Chapter 8 Toward Positional Pedagogies
Chapter 9 Learning in the Dark
Chapter 10 Looking Back, Looking Forward
Chapter 11 Notes
Chapter 12 Bibliography
Chapter 13 Index

What People are Saying About This

Johnnetta B. Cole

The Feminist Classroom takes us on a journey with seventeen differently situated feminist professors. As an anthropologist, I find compelling its ethnographic approach to the study of feminist classrooms in diverse institutional settings. As president of Spelman College, I applaud the classroom practices of my colleagues and their commitment to empowering Black women students.

Jonathan Kozol

What makes this book so valuable and fascinating is the extraordinarily extensive fieldwork, which creates a vivid sense not only of how questions about race and gender intersect for college undergraduates, but also how the teachers actually present their classes, how the students react to what they read, where they grow angry, why they are led so often to disguise their own beliefs. In this respect it’s a wonderfully human and believable work. . . .The book will richly fuel the national debate. It is very important and I hope it will be widely read.

Barrie Thorne

The tensions, dilemmas, and exhilarating pleasures of feminist teaching converge in this fascinating book, which documents actual classroom give-and-take. In addition to observing, the authors interviewed the teachers and several students in each class. The result is a Rashomon portrayal of the same moment, differently perceived, as well as fresh insight into interactions between social positioning, experience, and learning.

Editorial Reviews

Maher (education, Wheaton College) and Tetreault (an administrator, Portland State University) discuss the role of feminist politics, theory, and pedagogy in the contemporary classroom. Their study stems from an interest in understanding how pedagogy has been affected by what they call "...the twin upheavals shaking American universities during the past two decades: namely, the demographics of a rapidly changing student body and the struggle for a more egalitarian and inclusive knowledge...." They present portraits of six institutions, and address issues like mastery, voice, authority, positionality, positional pedagogies, the past, and the future. In the discussion of these topics the perspectives of both students and teachers are considered. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The authors provide a rich analysis of the classrooms they observed and the larger understandings they can provide. If one wants to consider the theory underlying feminist pedagogies, using a quite nuanced analysis of various kinds of feminist environments, then this expanded edition can help to think through the major issues.

Contemporary Sociology

For teachers of theology and religion newly exploring what constitutes feminist pedagogies, or for veterans of feminist pedagogy looking for an up-to-date critical treatment of feminist practices of teaching and learning, this book is a reasonably helpful resource with a wealth of practical examples and an extensive bibliography.

Teaching Theology and Religion

A fascinating glimpse of a first generation of feminist academics at work.

Journal Of Educational Thought(Jet)

The Feminist Classroom takes us on a journey with seventeen differently situated feminist professors. As an anthropologist, I find compelling its ethnographic approach to the study of feminist classrooms in diverse institutional settings. As president of Spelman College, I applaud the classroom practices of my colleagues and their commitment to empowering Black women students.

Johnnetta B. Cole

What makes this book so valuable and fascinating is the extraordinarily extensive fieldwork, which creates a vivid sense not only of how questions about race and gender intersect for college undergraduates, but also how the teachers actually present their classes, how the students react to what they read, where they grow angry, why they are led so often to disguise their own beliefs. In this respect it’s a wonderfully human and believable work. . . .The book will richly fuel the national debate. It is very important and I hope it will be widely read.

Jonathan Kozol

The tensions, dilemmas, and exhilarating pleasures of feminist teaching converge in this fascinating book, which documents actual classroom give-and-take. In addition to observing, the authors interviewed the teachers and several students in each class. The result is a Rashomon portrayal of the same moment, differently perceived, as well as fresh insight into interactions between social positioning, experience, and learning.

Barrie Thorne

A fascinating glimpse of a first generation of feminist academics at work.

Journal of Educational Thought(Jet)

For teachers of theology and religion newly exploring what constitutes feminist pedagogies, or for veterans of feminist pedagogy looking for an up-to-date critical treatment of feminist practices of teaching and learning, this book is a reasonably helpful resource with a wealth of practical examples and an extensive bibliography.

Teaching Theology & Religion