Penn, Michael

English

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PPPENN 12/05/97 3:57 PM217FEMINIST PEDAGOGY AS PRAXISMICHAEL PENN*Jane Roland Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women,and Curriculum (Routledge, 1994)bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom(Routledge, 1994)Jean O’Barr and Mary Wyer, eds., Engaging Feminism: Students Speak Up andSpeak Out (The University Press of Virginia, 1992)Teaching is inherently conservative. Teachers tend to lecture, run seminars,and grade exams the way they were lectured to, precepted, and graded. Yetsomething has changed. The increased diversity of the educational environment,both in terms of students and teachers, has challenged the status quo. This ismost apparent in curriculum transformation, as course material is beginning toreflect the experiences of marginalized groups. Changing content, however, isonly half of the picture. To change what we teach requires us to change how weteach.Feminist pedagogy encompasses a wide range of responses to this chal-lenge of restructuring education. There are as many answers to the question“What is feminist pedagogy?” as there are feminist teachers. While no set ofwritings can do justice to the wide diversity of views that fall under the termfeminist pedagogy, recent works by Jane Roland Martin, bell hooks, and JeanO’Barr and Mary Wyer illustrate three different approaches of using feministanalysis to challenge the current educational system and to advocate alternativepractices.Jane Roland Martin’s Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women,and Curriculum is a collection of essays written between 1969 and 1993. In theseworks Martin critiques the philosophical framework underlying contemporaryeducation. Examining the works of educational theorists such as Jean-JacquesRousseau, John Stuart Mill, R.S. Peters, Paul Hirst, Maria Montessori, and AlanBloom, Martin notes that our vision of liberal education promotes a hidden cur-riculum of misogyny and anti-domesticity. Liberal education is solely intellec-tual, excluding what Martin calls the reproductive values of society: everythingfrom child rearing to running a household and maintaining healthy relation-ships. Because society equates liberal education with valuable education, what-ever the definition of liberal education excludes, society deems unimportant. Thecurrent ideal of an educated person coincides with cultural stereotypes of a male* Ph.D. candidate, Department of Religion, Duke University.PPPENN 12/05/97  3:57 PM218    DUKE JOURNAL OF GENDER LAW & POLICY Volume 4:217 1997human being. This ideal values those traits society attributes to men and ex-cludes those it attributes to women. This educational framework, by preparingpeople for only the public, not the private world, reproduces a mind-body dual-ism and results in ivory tower minds, not educated people. Because of societalexpectations, this puts women in a double bind. They must give up their cultur-ally assigned world view and be ostracized for becoming like men, or they mustremain uneducated.This definition of liberal education is self-perpetuating. While beingschooled, people are indoctrinated into the belief that “the present configurationof education is one of this world’s brute facts.”1 They forget that academic sub-ject matters and disciplines are constructed, not found. Martin challenges us toredraw the boundaries of education. We must redefine liberal education to jointhought and action and mind and body. Education’s goal must be liberated peo-ple, not disembodied intellects. Martin sees the study of gender as a key to trans-forming education. Including women as subjects allows us to pay attention tounderrepresented subject entities. A gender sensitive education includes as aneducational goal the development of a person as a member of home and family,it promotes the three Cs of caring, concern, and connection, examines the hiddencurriculum of misogyny, and values domestic practices. According to Martin,unless we address liberal education’s failure to transmit to the next generation,one-half of our cultural heritage, the misogyny and anti-domesticity of the statusquo will continue.While Martin critiques the definition of liberal education, bell hooks focuseson teaching practice. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,hooks examines the classroom as a locus of oppression and as a potential site forliberation. Too often contemporary education is based on the “banking system ofeducation.”2 In this model, the professor has the currency of knowledge and de-posits it into the students’ minds where it is stored and withdrawn at a laterdate. Classroom rituals of control and the unjust exercise of power frequentlyreinforce this dynamic of the powerful professor and the passive, objectifiedstudent. This results in the students’ primary lesson being obedience to author-ity. Such a classroom reinforces societal hierarchies and domination.Although it can teach and perpetuate oppression, the classroom, for hooks,“remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”3 Learning can beliberating; education can become the practice of freedom. Instead of being thesite for reproducing elite values, the university should encourage students andteachers to transgress “those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote,assembly-line approach to learning.”4 Throughout her work, hooks looks atways to make learning an exciting process based on collective effort. Central toher vision of classroom transformation is the goal of the classroom becoming ademocratic setting where everyone’s presence is affirmed and valued. hookssees teaching as a performatory act serving “as a catalyst that calls everyone to1. JANE ROLAND MARTIN, CHANGING THE EDUCATIONAL LANDSCAPE: PHILOSOPHY, WOMEN,AND CURRICULUM 27 (1994).2. BELL HOOKS, TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS: EDUCATION AS THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM 5 (1994).3. Id. at 12.4. Id. at 13.PPPENN 12/05/97  3:57 PMFEMINIST PEDAGOGY AS PRAXIS 219become more and more engaged . . . .”5 This engaged pedagogy presupposesthat all members of a learning community are responsible for classroom dy-namics. Recognizing that authority and experience can exclude and silence, theprofessor must move attention away from her own voice to that of her students’.At the same time, she must enter the classroom as a whole individual, not a dis-embodied spirit whose erasure of body creates the illusion of objectivity. hooks’democratic classroom challenges the fundamental assumptions of hierarchicaleducation and she recognizes that this decentralization of authority will un-doubtedly meet resistance from students and academe as a whole.Engaging Feminism: Students Speak Up and Speak Out takes hooks’ prioritiza-tion of student voice one step further. Editors Jean O’Barr and Mary Wyer askwhy all works on feminist pedagogy are written by teachers. If we take seriouslythe authority of experience, if one believes that learning is a collaborative, inter-active process, it is inexcusable to ignore and silence student perspectives. Togive voice to students, O’Barr and Wyer reprint excerpts from student journalsthat present candid, unsolicited critiques of education. O’Barr and Wyer framethese excerpts with a powerful introduction and a collection of three longer stu-dent works reflecting on specific moments of student initiated changes in aca-deme.O’Barr and Wyer see students offering a unique and valuable perspective.By focusing on student based critiques of learning, Engaging Feminism challengesthe underlying power dynamics of teacher-student relations. Student journalentries approach teaching and feminism from a variety of viewpoints. For ex-ample, excerpts explore how “Truth has a ‘look’: seen from a different angle,truth might wear a different style;”6 the creation of a two-classed society with a“class of knowers while others must be the recipients of knowledge;”7 and theideal classroom as “a huge womb—a private, safe place where we are all givingbirth to ourselves and to each other and to a new way of looking at the world.”8The writings protest an educational system based on “competition, isolation, andself-doubt.”9 Student entries talk of their disempowerment and, in the words ofO’Barr and Wyer, students “despair of the waste of their talents.”10Despite their varied approaches, Martin, a professor of philosophy, hooks,a professor of English, and O’Barr and Wyer, professors of women’s studies, alladvocate liberating, student centered, collaborative, active education. Recog-nizing that theory and practice are inseparable, they challenge us to see feministpedagogy as praxis, the synthesis of critical, self-reflective thought with concreteactions. Only through recognizing the inadequacies of the status quo, formulat-ing a new vision of learning, and altering our teaching methods, not just ourcontent, can we truly transform education.5. Id. at 11.6. ENGAGING FEMINISM: STUDENTS SPEAK UP AND SPEAK OUT 56 (Jean O’Barr & Mary Wyer,eds., 1992) (quoting Ann Burlein).7. Connie E. Pearcy, The Class of Knowers, in ENGAGING FEMINISM, supra note 6, at 18, 19.8. Judith W. Dorminey, Midwives to Each Other, in ENGAGING FEMINISM, supra note 6, at 69, 72.9. ENGAGING FEMINISM, supra note 6, at 10.10. Id. at 1.

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