Colloquium Roundtable: Feminist Pedagogy
Please contact facilitator Matt Russell at mrrussell@mail.utexas.edu" if you have questions about or would like to attend this panel.
Most graduate students have a working teaching philosophy in mind when they prepare to go on the job market. However, at the beginning of graduate school, new teaching assistants and assistant instructors often find themselves struggling to find their teaching approach. New instructors who identify themselves as feminists often wonder how to be feminists in the classroom. In an effort to get graduate students thinking about these issues earlier in their careers, this roundtable will workshop a feminist pedagogy website for graduate student instructors at the University of Texas.
Our website aims to be a compilation of resources to help instructors incorporate feminist teaching philosophy in the classroom. Potential content includes sample teaching philosophies, syllabi, assignments, and classroom activities as well as links to relevant journals and reference materials and related interest groups on campus. In building this website, the main challenge will be organizing content for feminist instructors across disciplines and making the website a site for community where instructors can collaborate and participate in developing content.
The participants in the workshop and collaborators on the website, CWRL instructors Erin Boade, Lee Anne Gallaway, Amanda Moulder and Jodi Relyea, will present a working framework and design of the website. We welcome anyone interested in pedagogy and technology to the workshop and look forward to any feedback and suggestions on how to design a website useful for graduate student instructors interested in feminist pedagogy across the university.
This is the third of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.
Facilitator's Report
This roundtable was lead by members of the CWRL’s Feminist Pedagogy workgroup: Erin Boade, Lee Ann Gallaway, Jodi Relyea and Amanda Moulder. In attendance were Greg Foran, Ingrid De Villiers, Kristen Dorsey, Mary Tang and Catherine Bacon.
The session was devoted to a brief presentation by the panelists on the Feminist Pedagogy web site, followed by an open discussion on both web site and the continued importance of feminism to the lab in general.
Lee Ann began the discussion with an overview of the history of feminist pedagogy in the lab. She mentioned the White Paper, “Feminist Cyborgs: Teaching like a Feminist in the Computer Classroom,” published earlier this year. She noted that there is a shortage of positions available for technically-proficient feminist instructors, and that this was a concern. While emphasizing that it was necessary to continue work already begun in the lab, it was also important to consider ways in which work involving technology could be made portable and more generally useful for instructors pursuing positions in institutions, departments or programs that were less grounded in technology.
Jodi and Amanda then turned the discussion to the information that the web site would contain. There presentations focused on limiting repetition and overlapping resources; for example, there are a number of resources already available on feminism and pedagogy here at UT and in other departments. Both presenters suggested that the web site could serve as a hub that linked to these resources, while at the same time creating a forum for interdisciplinary and community-wide discussion. Finally, they found that a number of the resources available had to do with fairly theoretical or conceptual issues regarding feminism or pedagogy. They felt that more practical resources, such as ways to develop a teaching philosophy or classroom resources, would be useful to the lab and its instructors.
Erin provided an overview of the possibilities of the web site (http://workgroups.cwrl.utexas.edu/feministpedagogy/) and its presentation of resources. Erin emphasized that the web site should be user-friendly and avoid presenting information in a way that was overwhelming or excessive. The web site should be searchable and information should be tagged in a number of ways to allow for many different kinds of searches.
All the panelists felt that the web site should also facilitate outreach to new graduate students, possibly involving some form of mentoring or support to new instructors, and to stimulate discussion on a number of issues.
Discussion was extensive:
-Practical pedagogic concerns: Discussants seemed to feel that one of the major benefits of the Feminist Pedagogy web site would be as a resource for very practical teaching methods and lesson planning that had to do with elements related to feminism and gender. The panel was encouraged to make something along the lines of a feminist blue files that contained various assignments.
-Classroom environments: The panel and the discussants were very interested in talking about the technology classroom as a particular pedagogic environment. Could the lab’s classrooms be physically organized in different ways to reflect these concerns? Discussants were encouraged to look at the White Paper, “Learning to Move: Connecting Pedagogy with Context through a Difficult Classroom,” and to continue to consider this matter.
-Terminology: Discussants were concerned with the term, “feminism,” and its conceptual usefulness in describing the kinds of activities and resources that the web site would contain. What would it mean to state to students at the beginning of the semester that the class would be a “feminist” class or that the classroom would be a “feminist” classroom? Would this hinder or facilitate discussion or interest? How does “feminism” fit into the context of an educational system devoted to objectivity and technology? Although there was no one clear consensus, the general sense of the conversation seemed to suggest that continual reflection on this term would also generate reflection on the lab itself and its ability to make these kinds of discussions available in a fairly unique way.