Fall 2004/Winter 2005

Volume 34
Numbers 1-2

Engagement, Resistance
and Student Learning

When it emerged as a challenge to the traditional lecture mode of academia in the late 1960's and early 1970's, feminist pedagogy was considered radical. Today, the very core tenets it espoused--and still espouses--are considered simply good teaching: cultivating student voice and empowerment, endorsing students as creators and not merely receivers of knowledge, de-centering the classroom to promote more active and collaborative learning, engaging in dialogue across differences, and applying knowledge to address real world issues. Feminist teachers understood then as higher education researchers do today that such learning is a key to a student's satisfaction, academic achievement, and long-term activism in civic life.

Today, for instance, consider the current popularity of the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE), which is seen by many as a benchmark indicator of good teaching at colleges and universities. NSSE measures, for example, active and collaborative learning by asking such things as whether students participate in class, are challenged to see things from multiple perspectives, work with other students on projects in and out of class, and engage regularly with their faculty. These and other factors, NSSE argues, are linked to grades and graduation rates. The positive benefits resulting from feminist pedagogy are now therefore mainstream, but feminist pedagogy is still largely unacknowledged for its transformative impact on enhancing student learning.

Feminist Teaching Breaks New Ground
Feminist pedagogy's evolution parallels that of women's studies as a discipline, although one can be a feminist teacher in any field. When the first women's studies program was established at San Diego State University in 1970, it represented more than a new body of scholarship. In addition to filling a theoretical void and offering a new analytical lens, it also represented a new way of teaching by radically re-defining the professor's relationship to students. Through their intense focus on how to teach differently, feminists were pushed to investigate how students learn. Women's Ways of Knowing is but one example of the deep questions being asked, especially about the female half of the student population routinely excluded from most studies. The shift from the teaching paradigm to the learning paradigm has now fully come into vogue, though it is not yet practiced in every classroom.

Feminist professors were student-centered because they wanted to empower women students. They also wanted to build new analytical capacities in their male and female students and enable them to recognize how gender has operated over time as a primary mode of organizing society and allocating power. Central to this understanding was emphasizing the intersections between gender and other stratifications such as race, class, religion, and sexuality. Courses were constructed to give students opportunities to be change agents as well as knowers. The latest generalized iteration of those goals is found in AAC&U's Greater Expectations (2002) report, which argues that the goal for a 21st century liberal education is to produce intentional learners who are empowered, informed, and socially responsible.

Feminist teachers led the way toward that vision three decades ago when they deliberately de-centered the professor as the sole authority in the classroom and challenged students, as Adrienne Rich put it, to claim their education rather than simply receive it. Typically, feminist teachers redesigned seating arrangements, lectured less, had students participate more, devised tools for ensuring all students spoke, used journals and group projects, validated experiential knowledge, engaged students in addressing pressing problems, and created assignments that required students to act as a result of their newly acquired knowledge. In other words, feminists created more democratic classrooms where students practiced the arts of democracy in order to remedy inequalities and make full justice available equally to all men and women.

AAC&U's Courage to Question: Women's Studies and Student Learning (1992), funded by FIPSE, confirmed that two decades after its emergence, women's studies classes were still leading the way in developing critical questioning, greater student engagement, and a stronger commitment to remedying inequities across race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and other differences. Among other findings, the research showed that women's studies students debate issues far more frequently both in and out of the classroom. At Wellesley College, for example, 80% of the students in women's studies courses said they debated or argued with one another, while only 55% in non-women's studies did so. Wellesley students also reported that 84% of them continued to discuss course material outside of classes as opposed to only 63% in non-women's studies classes. In feminist classrooms, students typically moved from voice to empowerment to social responsibility, acknowledging a heightened understanding about how systemic inequalities across differences marred our democracy.

Resistance: An Everyday Occurrence
Even though what were identified as particularly feminist modes of teaching are today more commonplace, students as well as faculty and administrators did not always applaud the experimentation. Even now, some students resist, some faculty dismiss, and some administrators penalize. The subject matter and how it is taught in women's studies courses often disrupt many students' ways of understanding the world. More incidences of student resistance began to occur when women's studies courses were less elective in the late eighties and early nineties after becoming part of general education courses and requirements for majors. In addition, the likelihood that some students will act out disruptively in class is increased by the relentless assault on women's studies and its practitioners by conservative critics.

While such resistance intensifies the challenge for feminist teachers, the core commitments of feminist pedagogy offer a tool bag of approaches to address resistance and a philosophy of constructive engagement. Both the strategies and the philosophy could be adapted by others today in non-women's studies courses as well to transform student resistance into student engagement. A feminist classroom, for instance, assumes that disagreements will surface and therefore strives to construct ways to engage difficult differences respectfully. Critique is cultivated and investigating multiple perspectives is seen as fostering what Patricia Hill Collins calls "an epistemology of dialogue." Self-reflection is encouraged as students engage with others and with the material of the course.

The article by Ximena Zúñiga and Jane Mildred in the current issue of OCWW acknowledges that teaching in the face of resistance is difficult, but they go on to analyze why students might resist and how to turn that resistance into engagement. Moreover, for the past three decades feminists have been steadily publishing books about feminist pedagogy with practical strategies for addressing resistance. Similarly, women have established a number of journals that focus on teaching, among the most notable: Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Teacher, and NWSA Journal.

The innovative teaching so characteristic of women's studies classes from the seventies onwards may now be commonplace, but the content of women's studies courses and courses taught with feminist perspectives are not. By focusing on an analysis of how power is differentiated, how justice is meted out unevenly, and how group stratifications produce profound inequalities, feminist classrooms continue to be spaces that disturb, unsettle, and provoke. When that kind of space becomes commonplace for students, we will indeed have a transformed academy.