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Resisting the Discourse on Resistance:

Theorizing Experiences from an Action Research


Project on Feminist Pedagogy in Different
Learning Cultures in Sweden
Fred rik Bondestam

Introduction
Writers on critical, feminist, and antioppressive pedagogy criticize the repressive myths of classrooms and other formal
educational settings as neutral or unproblematic sites for production of knowledge
and identities (Freire; Lather; Kumashiro).
This vast theoretical and empirical work
has challenged teachers to work through
normative notions of power, authority, and
knowledge (Friedman; Weiler, Freire)
and develop teaching strategies aimed
at overcoming different forms of resistance in education (Lewis). This latter
aspect was intensively discussed during
the poststructuralist turn in theories of
education in general, and especially in
the inspiring debates between critical and
feminist writers on education in the early
1990s. Feminist researchers in pedagogy
and feminist teachers working in womens
studies departments adopted a critical
stance against the ideas developed in
critical pedagogy on students false consciousness when confronted with critical
knowledge (e.g., Giroux), instead pleading
for an interested, empowering, and transformative version of liberatory teaching
(Ellsworth; Lather; Orner).

At the same time, a certain ambivalence


on how to actually frame and understand
the notions of resistance to feminist
knowledge in teaching remains, as many
still claim students to be the sole problem
when teaching on feminist knowledge.
There is a continuing focus on students
reinterpreting, accusing, and refusing
feminist teachers and teachings on feminism (Markowitz 45), as well as a desire
to construct typologies on student resistance, claiming that students who resist
feminism reflect four postures concerning
womens inequality in a patriarchal society: deny, discount, distance, and dismay
(Titus 22).
It is of course true that many feminist
scholars and teachers experience a multitude of problems in teaching situations,
often related to questions of authority,
power, legitimacy, antifeminist discourses
in universities and in society at large, and
so forth. It is also important to acknowledge that teachers often need to develop
different teaching strategies in order to
overcome the problems they face, or in
order to be able to teach at all, given
the experiences they face. But what is at

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2011 by the board of trustees of the universit y of illinois

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stake here is the framing of these experiences and the consequences they have
for teaching and learning in different
respects (Ropers-Huilman; Titus). As Berenice Fisher points out, It is tempting to
assume, for example, that the pedagogical
difficulty in a given class is one of student resistance when the problem might
also be defined as one of the teachers
anger toward a student for not accepting
her point of view. ... Thus, it is important
what constitutes the problem, to allow
for the possibility that what we consider
a social justice teaching issue may be
framed and reframed a number of times
(21516; italics in orig.).
This was indeed one of the crucial
insights within the feminist poststructuralist writings on education mentioned above:
the urge to shift from student resistance to
teachers own resistance to the assumption that their problem was not buying
into our version of reality (Lather 142).
This in turn called for a deconstructive
approach in teaching, focusing on the
mutual processes of constituting, disrupting, and transforming authority, power,
subjectivity, and knowledge in classrooms, searching out not only a pedagogy
of hope (hooks, Teaching Community)
or a radical openness when confronting
critical knowledge (hooks, Teaching to
Transgress), but foremost a pedagogy of
the unknowable: My moving about
between the positions of privileged
speaking subject and Inappropriate/d
Other cannot be predicted, prescribed, or
understood beforehand by any theoretical or methodological practice. ... This
reformulation of pedagogy and knowledge removes the critical pedagogue
from two key discursive positions s/he
has constructed for her/himself in the
literaturenamely, origin of what can
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be known and origin of what should be


done (Ellsworth 323).
Thus, feminist pedagogy implies performing some kind of feminist teaching
practices, while at the same time contesting the very possibility of performing such
practices. We need to start out from the
assumption that only what cannot be foreseen will enable us not just to overcome
resistance to feminist knowledge and
teaching but also to make such experiences a vital part of teaching and learning
as such.
Notably, the development of a feminist
poststructuralist stance on education has
grown almost exclusively out of feminist
teachers experiences of the womens
studies classroom in universities (see
Gore). The same goes for the quite limited
writings on how feminist pedagogy can
overcome resistance in higher education
(Deay and Stitzel; Stake and Rose; Stake
and Hoffman). Therefore, there is a need
to explore and develop feminist teaching
strategies outside the womens studies
classroom, as well as outside the realm of
universities. In such a context, a number
of interesting questions arise: How do we
teach on feminist knowledge in non-feminist classrooms? How do we as feminist
teachers work through our experiences of
resistance in other educational settings?
What can university teachers learn from
experiences of feminist teaching in other
non-academic classrooms?
My interest in developing feminist pedagogy in teaching practices outside universities has grown out of my own experiences from trying to educate preschool,
folk high school, and other non-academic
teachers on how to teach gendered
knowledge and do feminist teaching in
a broad sense. Early on I found many of
the dilemmas in my own teaching were
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similar to the ones discussed above, and


I often tried to resolve situations by categorizing teachers responses in terms
of resistance (e.g., denial, dismay, etc.)
and then working against them through
different feminist strategies (see Knowlton; Lewis). But in some situations it was
not so much teachers resistance to my
teaching, or my resistance towards teachers antifeminist knowledge claims, that
structured reactions and discussion in
my classroom. Rather, it seemed as if
I had underestimated the pedagogical
challenges immanent in learning critical
knowledge altogether, especially feminist
knowledge. Perhaps resistance was
more a question of different and soundly
situated reactions from my teachers
rather than simple dismissals of feminist
knowledge claims. Is it then possible to
imagine a pedagogy that does not just
overcome the obstacles experienced,
but actually takes these experiences as
the starting point for teaching and learning? This led to formulating a participatory action research project (in line with
Maguire) involving three different Swedish educational settingspreschools, folk
high schools, and universitiesfocusing
on feminist teachers teaching experiences in non-feminist settings outside
the womens studies classroom. Before
discussing this project in more detail, a
brief sketch of the Swedish educational
landscape will help put the project in its
proper context.

Education in Sweden:
A Brief Background
In Sweden, questions on gender and education and feminist pedagogy have a long
but significantly marginalized history. During the 1960s and 1970s, ideas on empow-

erment through education formulated


within the womens movement set the
agenda for producing knowledge on and
by women within and beyond the formal
education system. For example, the rights
to ones own body, reproduction, sexuality, economics, and so forth involved both
a challenge to the normative positions of
women in family and society and a pedagogical challenge for teachers, students,
and educational organizations. At a time
when the formal right to education was
guaranteed to all regardless of sex, the
contrasting and systematic devaluation
of womens lives and herstories became
a springboard for political activism. Radical groups for consciousness-raising were
established, study groups on feminist
theory and activism flourished across the
country, and together with other collective
learning processes for womens emancipation the established truths on educational
norms were being challenged.
During the early 1980s the concept of
gender equality became a catalyst for
the contestation of classroom practice,
teacher-student relationships, and school
curricula. Concurrently, there was a quest
to find models for teaching and organization of education that could achieve equal
treatment. The concept of gender and
equal treatment as apart from sex differences went hand in hand even in those
days, and it reflected both the agreements
within the Swedish welfare model and a
consensus-centered pursuit of the educational field. At the same time, intensive
discussions on womens education took
place, and the need for special spaces for
womens knowledge production was being
formulated (see, for example, Gilligan).
Experiences of injustice, oppression, and
marginalization in education came up to
the surface, and the discourse on wom-

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ens relational learning grew in the wake


of international debates.
In the 1990s, legislation regulated in
more detail how teaching must incorporate knowledge on gender equality, while
a counter discourse developed advocating
voluntary and individual perspectives in
the first place. Some preschools implemented specific process-oriented gender
equality projects and thus set a new standard for change. Also, teachers at certain
folk high schools developed theoretical
knowledge and practical methods in order
to deal with their heterogeneous classrooms. In primary schools extensive work
on common values was being done, and
universities established detailed knowledge on sexual harassment and discriminatory education practices.
Gradually, the theoretical concept of gender was accepted in the 1990s, and with it
a more critical look at the structural conditions of teaching as well as marginalization,
discrimination, and injustice in education.
The difference between the construction of
a gender-sensitive teaching and teaching
on gender as theoretical knowledge was
important as a way to emphasize teaching
practices versus topic content. In recent
years, several new concepts are being elaborated on in Sweden, including multicultural education, anti-racist pedagogy, queer
pedagogy, and norm-critical pedagogy, all
of which challenge ways of understanding
the problems within education, the objects
of training, and the ways education can
contribute to social change.

The Educational Context


of the Project
Education on gender equality and gender
discrimination thus has a long prehistory
in Sweden, and it is clearly informed by
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different theoretical perspectives, changing political initiatives, and different


concrete teaching practices (see Weiner).
Within higher education, it is possible to
discern a relatively uniform development
since the mid-1980s in Sweden, where
an individual-centered, learning-focused
pedagogy is being advocated and practiced in general, and in recent years an
increasingly accentuated albeit disjointed
focus on a gender and diversity perspective can be discerned. Issues of gender
have only in recent years had a clearer
impact on policy programs, curricula,
literature lists, and so forth, especially in
the humanities and social sciences, and
today a range of local educational initiatives are documented (see Bondestam,
Gender-Sensitive). At the same time, this
development has not affected the shaping of the contents of pedagogical courses
for university teachers in general. Likewise, recent developments in research
and other documentation on feminist
pedagogy and inclusive curriculum
approaches, together with problem-based
learning (PBL), comprise a wealth of useful
knowledge that is marginalized in Swedish universities, in part due to the modest
recognition given for good teaching as
such. At the same time, gender is a matter
of concern in other contexts in higher education such as the distribution of women
and men in different disciplines and fields
of study (Bondestam, Mapping). Notably,
in order to work as a university teacher in
Sweden, researchers are only obliged to
fulfill a two-week training course on higher
education pedagogy, compared to those
teaching in folk high schools and preschools, where a formal, two-year teacher
education program must be completed.
Folk high schools are educational institutions for adult education that generally do
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not grant academic degrees, and they are


primarily developed in the Nordic countries and Germany. At the folk high schools
in Sweden, teaching practices are clearly
diversified and have a history more clearly
associated in some parts with critical pedagogical perspectives. This is particularly
true of folk high schools with a distinctly
political or critical aim, and teaching situations have long been characterized by
student populations composed of various
subordinate groups (e.g., women, working class, immigrants, disabled). Not the
least, Freire, Giroux, and other critical
pedagogues inspired power-critical forms,
a focus on participation, and an interest
in liberatory pedagogy. At the same time,
the documentation of these experiences is
significantly limited, and forums on pedagogical issues concerning feminist teaching
among folk high school teachers are still
few and lack theoretical depth.
Critical education on gender in preschools started off more systematically
during the 1990s in terms of different
gender equality projects. Prior to these
interventions, discussions were marked by
equality rhetoric and relatively unproblematic assumptions about girls, boys, and
education, which informed the need for
both gender theory and feminist intervention. Today, the situation is quite different
in preschools, and the issue of gender,
as well as other aspects of difference and
power, is without doubt an expanding
area. While it is clear that the political and
organizational resistance to gender in the
preschool area still is significant, and that
initiative to change is more often characterized by vague gender pedagogical ideas
rather than feminist teaching practices, a
number of ongoing feminist interventions
in preschool settings profoundly challenge
this situation.

In sum, feminist teaching practices


within all three educational settings discussed here are in their infancy. At the
same time there is a growing interest in
new pedagogical perspectives closely
related to feminist pedagogy in a broad
sense. Queer pedagogy, anti-oppressive
pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy and other
critical stances have gained some influence in discussions on teaching in Sweden, mainly through different educational
projects set up by non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) in Sweden such as
the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (RFSL);
Amnesty International; and Friends (see
Brave; Darj and Bromseth).

An Action Research Project


in Different Learning Cultures
Formulating and conducting a participatory action research project involves many
questions on resources, ethics, legitimacy,
scientific credibility, and other complicating aspects, as is always the case
when doing some kind of non-traditional,
transformative research. Working also
from feminist knowledge in such a project raises specific questions on norms,
power, intersectionality, and other relevant aspects of contemporary feminist
discourse. These specific questions will
be dealt with in another text, and instead
I focus here on the specific outcomes of
parts of my project.
The project involved fourteen teachers
from three different educational settings in
Swedenpreschools (5), folk high schools
(3), and universities (6)from both larger
cities and smaller communities. All fourteen participating teachers in this project
identified themselves as white heterosexual or homosexual women, mainly from

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the middle-class and ranging in age from


thirty-two to forty-five years old. All were
trained educators and had at least a couple of years teaching experience; all identified themselves as being feminists and/
or working as feminist teachers in some
sense.1 The university teachers came from
different faculties, mainly the humanities
and social science, but also from medicine
and technology departments.
The project design was set in two parallel stages aimed at creating spaces for
developing feminist teaching strategies
by enhancing fruitful dialogues and critical reflections on ones own and others
teaching experiences. In the first stage,
the fourteen teachers engaged in four
seminars on feminist theory and pedagogy; they learned to use structured
writing in personal journals, engaged in
auscultations across disciplinary and
educational borders, and tested out other
similar teacher training tools. All teachers
also participated in three joint two-day
seminars where they all elaborated on
their own documented feminist teaching
strategies as well as the feminist pedagogical discourse as such.
These processes on feminist knowledge
essentially formulated the theoretical
stance taken in this text, focusing mainly
on resistance in earlier feminist writing on
education. Reading through bell hookss
texts, especially, created a strong sense
of recognition among all of us, but also
set a framework for understanding the
similarities and differences between different learning cultures. During the second stage, the fourteen teachers set up a
teaching course of their own on feminist
teaching, which they then performed in
their respective educational settings using
the experience and knowledge attained
during the first stage. This second stage
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of the project brought questions on resistance to the fore, and it is the experiences
from this stage of the project that are
being considered here, especially the different ways resistance was understood
and dealt with by the teachers.
Currently within the context of the project, a range of texts are being written not
only by teachers in the project but also
by students and pupils from the different learning cultures. Several attempts to
identify and overcome different obstacles
in teaching feminist knowledge are being
documented in collaborative writing processes. Also, aspects such as individual
student resistance, notes and observations on body language, silences, different
aspects of desire in student-teacher relations, and several other relevant issues
are being discussed as pertinent material
for collaborative writing processes. However, in this text the aim is to reveal the
very process by which the teachers think
through their understanding of resistance
when doing feminist teaching, and to
theoretically reflect on the consequences
for teaching and learning, especially in
higher education.

Resistance to Feminist Teaching,


or Feminist Resistance
to Teaching?
In the journals written by the teachers
in this project, a general tendency was
that the university teachers differed significantly from preschool teachers as to
how they reflected upon experiences of
resistance in their own teaching. A more
interesting aspect, though, turned out to
be how the teachers reflected upon each
others experiences. One of the preschool
teachers had written extensively on her
being quite surprised when listening to
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one of the university teachers during the


first joint seminar in the project:
There seems to be a struggle going on,
a fight for survival, with every minute
being some sort of test of whether what
she [the university teacher] claims is
actually true or relevant, has any ground
in theory or research, or if it is just her
own political commitments shining
through. As if the students were trying
to dismiss not only what shes teaching
about, but the fact that she can teach at
all! At the same time, I get a bit annoyed
by her saying over and over again that
students are in the way of her teaching, that students are uninterested,
lazy, and not motivated ... . When she
claimed that teaching students was
the same as being a shepherd I got
really upset! How can she call herself a
teacher at all!? (Lisa 18)2

This university teacher discussed here


also wrote her own journal entry concerning the same episode during the joint
seminar:
It felt as if I were not being listened to
by the other teachers, at least not by
Karin, Lisa and the others who are not
university teachers ... . I think I realized too that I hadnt really listened to
what they were trying to say to me. That
they not just didnt listen to me, but that
they really did not at all recognize what I
was talking about when I described the
way my students ridiculed me over and
over again. How is that possible, how
can you be a teacher and not recognize
resistance? As a feminist teacher? I wonder if they really are feminists at all ... .
(Clara 22)

lowing after teaching a class session in


her folk high school in a course on globalization and democracy in third-world
countries: Today I tried to be aware of
any comments or gestures aimed at disapproving with me or my teaching in class. I
even video-recorded parts of my teaching
and sat down afterwards looking through
the whole seminar in order to identify the
things we talked about last week [during
the joint seminar discussed by the other
teachers above]. But all I see is engagement, critical questions being put, students elaborating on the tasks we formulated together. Some seemed to be a bit
unfocused but overall what I can see happened in my classroom today is learning
going on en masse (Anna 36).
When we all gathered for the third twoday seminar in the project, I had collected
these excerpts and many other similar
reflections done during the project, all
pointing to the radically different experiences the teachers had in their respective contexts. This led to a transformative
moment during one discussion on the second day of the seminar. One central part of
this conversation went as follows:

These two teachers comments on how


they perceived their discussion on resistance was challenged by yet another
teacher in her journal. She wrote the folfemi n ist te ach e r vo lum e 21 n um b e r 2

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Clara (university teacher): I cannot help


... but ... that ... er ... what you are
saying here is that we as university
teachers are to blame for experiencing resistance from our students?
... especially ... I think the most
engaged students ... or am I ... ?
Lisa (preschool teacher): I dont think
I put any blame on you as a teacher,
but ... it is as if you are so in to your
own ... your ideas on what the students ... need ... you see ... to me
... as a teacher in my class [Reggio
Emilia preschool, 45 year olds] Im
not in charge ... or ... every morning
we all sit down together and listen to
each other ... what do you want to
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do today? ... and eventually, this is


what we will do . . .
Bodil (folk high school teacher): Yes but
... yeah ... mm ... its obvious to
me that the difference here is that ...
your aim [turning to Lisa] is to engage
in learning with the children, and
Clara you are engaged in teaching
students what to learn . . .
Maria (university teacher): Yeah, yeah
I mean ... this is typically true ...
for me too ... students want me to
tell them ... they urge for facts, for
me to be their knowledge bank so
to speak ... mm ... and I must say
that ... er ... I cannot really see how
this could be any different I mean ...
Im responsible for the course right?
doing it your way Lisa ... I mean
[laughter] ... thats anarchy isnt it?
(Third joint seminar 1819)3

This excerpt was just part of a wider discussion going on for about twenty minutes or
so. It highlights the difficulties experienced
in university teaching compared with the
way the preschool teacher frames her own
function as a teacher. What is particularly interesting here is the demarcation
line drawn between university teaching,
being all about teaching students what to
learn, and the aim of preschool teaching
to engage in learning with the children.
It emphasizes, among other things, the
overall aim of teaching in different learning
cultures, where university teaching tends to
get stuck in its own authoritative claims on
knowledge and the teacher as the master
of that knowledge. This particular difference recurred in our discussions, but in a
slightly different context. We were engaged
in a conversation on the specific nature of
feminist teaching, and we ended up comparing the possibilities to create learning
on feminist knowledge:

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Dilba (folk high school teacher): Ok ...


so ... what youre saying is ... the
point is that what we do in our classrooms is of relevance ... I mean ...
if we set out to teach someone on
something ... no matter what ...
then we get stuck in ... er ... how
shall I put it? ... never entering a
state of learning ... and also ... we
experience students being hostile
... disapproving ... being against
the very idea of womens subordination or the knowledge we have on
... say ... male violence in heterosexual couples for instance ... is
that . . .
Interviewer (project leader): Well ... if
that is so ... what can we learn from
what you are saying? ... that in preschools ... learning . . .
Gabriella (preschool teacher): Let me
... let me put it this way ... I have
never ever experienced any hostility
or ... at least not amongst the children ... of course some parents are
a bit ... er ... and I know colleagues
from my earlier workplace ... but in
the classroom so to speak ... I have
a truly committed group of children
wanting to explore what things mean
... how they come about ... as
for instance when we talked about
lesbianism in society ... er ... children with two mums and such [referring to a situation in which Cecilia
participated during an auscultation]
there were ... not just a tolerance or
vague interest ... I think ... mm ...
but they all really tried out different
positions ... yearning to be lesbians
even [laughter] ... to feel it under
their skins ... even the boys imagined themselves being lesbian goddesses ... .
Cecilia (university teacher): Yeah I know!
... it was really astonishing! ... it
... so ... what then if ... mm ... I

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think ... the question put here is ...


er ... overall maybe ... is there at all
any resistance to feminist teaching
in preschools ... I mean ... or is it
more true to say that ... mm ... we
as university teachers, especially as
feminist teachers in our classes ... er
... we resist teaching as such? (Third
joint seminar 4142)

During our discussions it gradually


became clear to us that the question of
teaching in itself bears with it implications
for whether (if at all) and how learning
comes about, and more importantly in
this context, how we perceive and experience resistance to feminist knowledge
and feminist teaching. University teachers seem to be stuck in an educational
system not only consisting (as we know
it) of examination-driven teaching practices, a strictly limited time-budget, harsh
economic forces, and so forth, but also,
or foremost, an educational system that
promotes a teaching culture that actively
works against learning as such.
This is definitively a fact when listening to the feminist university teachers in
this project, as they experience working
not only on the margins of the university
as such, but on the margins of being able
to teach at all. This is even more obvious
when compared to the experiences from
preschool teachers, because their teaching seems to be not a question of making
children aware of the importance of critical knowledge and then confronting their
dismay and denial, but instead concerns
making this knowledge comprehensive,
connected to the everyday experiences
of the children, not a specific knowledge
claim at all but rather another phenomena
open for learning.

The Presence of Learning,


or Learning as Presence
These reflections spur, among many other
things, questions on how to create such
a learning culture within universities,
especially when working through feminist
knowledge in university classrooms. What
can university teachers learn from the
way preschool teachers deal with feminist
knowledge? Here it is instructive to read
the concluding reflections from two of the
participating university teachers because
they, from their respective horizons, formulate premises on not just overcoming
student resistance to teaching but on how
to do teaching on feminist knowledge at
all. It is hard work overcoming experiences
of student resistance, but it seems even
harder and in a way deeply paradoxical to
formulate teaching at all that will not end
up reproducing the problems identified
during the project:

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I do not know really what to do. It seems


as if I will get caught up in problems no
matter what. If I try out new, different
teaching strategies aimed at different
forms of learning, students will definitively resist both them and feminist
knowledge as such. But, I do realize that
the only possible thing to do is to resist
the way I experience student resistance.
That is, I myself must be aware of how
the knowledge I represent gets in the
way of learning. Exactly how to do that,
well, I havent got a clue. Maybe this is
not possible as teaching in universities
is being structured at the moment. (Julia
35, italics in orig.)
It has been instructive to confront ones
own teaching, both as an observer
of other teachers teaching practices
and by being observed when teaching

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myself. To me it stands clear that what is


needed (not just needed but essentially
must be done) is a redefinition of my
own view on both me as a teacher and
the idea of teaching. I am convinced that
teaching is not a question of me being a
teacher claiming knowledge that others
must accept, but rather that my role is to
make students aware that they already
possess this knowledge. I must somehow create spaces for them to acknowledge this. Or else, feminist knowledge
will never be relevant to them and therefore my work as a teacher will continue
to be a struggle against, instead of with,
them. (Cecilia 35)

These concluding excerpts point toward


more than just ways to overcome student
resistance in universities, which is commonly put forward as the sole problem
concerning feminist teaching. Rather, it
calls for a thorough redefinition of teaching as such and of the teacher as an institution within universities. This is clearly
emphasized by preschool teachers in this
project, since they also point to the need
for uncertainty in the teaching situation,
poetically formulated by Lisa in this final
excerpt:
Every morning as I sit down in front
of the children I experience a sense
of adventure. Its not so much in the
air, but between us, so to speak....
Things are not adventurous in a preschool teachers daily life, believe me,
not at all, but the feeling I sometimes
have is a true sense of exploration, of
us all being curious on what will happen
next. ... There are no straight answers,
there arent even any questions put in
that sense, as to what we need to do or
know. There is just a multitude of voices
interacting, together forming an urge to
be present, to create a meaningful presence. This is the moment I also search
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for and urge to keep alive as a teacher.


Maybe this is best done by just being,
I mean, by not being a teacher at all?
(Lisa 2526)

Lisa positions the teacher and her work as


the opposite of being, in the sense of
being present, aware, part of the ongoing
voicing of the present. This can certainly
be read as a search for the unknowable,
or at least a vision of the unnameable, the
as-yet-unformulated state of being and
learning in a classroom. I will now turn to
these aspects in some final remarks by
theorizing the teachers experiences and
by trying to point out some consequences
for feminist teaching and feminist pedagogy at universities.

Concluding Remarks
When reflecting on the experiences from
this project, listening carefully to all the
voices in the material, it seems as if current ways of imagining teaching that will
overcome student resistance to feminist
knowledge and teaching may be barking
up the wrong tree. This is not to say that
there are no problems connected with
teaching feminist knowledge. Rather it
emphasizes the possibility that teaching
in itself, and especially as it is generally
(but not always) situated and performed
in university settings, may not be just
part of the problem but intrinsically and
profoundly in the way of students learning critical knowledge at all. Perhaps the
most daring challenge facing feminist
teaching is not just realizing the way
resistant learners expose the educators
attempts to colonize their identities by
using feminist knowledge (Hughes 198)
but rather completely reconceptualizing
the core idea of teaching critical knowledge as such.
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This is in a way in line with recent discussions on how to, if at all, teach students about difference (Kumashiro). It
also points toward the practice of teaching at universities, generally understood
as a project for teachers to control and
perform. Facts, instrumentality, and correctness tend to overrule students urge
to ask stupid questions, their being
completely uncertain, or their need to be
in touch with knowledge at all. It implies
asking profound questions on what
enables learning in itself: Freedom, play,
affordance, meaning itself derive from the
wealth of mutually nontransparent possibilities for being wrong about an object
and, implicatively, about oneself (Sedgwick 107108).
As a starting point, it seems reasonable to claim that difference is not merely
something we have yet to learn, but something that we desire not to learn in order
to somehow keep things and ourselves in
order. That is, we resist learning that will
disrupt the frameworks we traditionally
use to make sense of the world and ourselves (Kumashiro 57). Therefore, what
is at stake is creating a situation where
learning involves something more than
confronting difference as some form of
otherness. Instead, learning should rather
be understood as a process of unlearning what we always already know, a form
of knowledge that in itself often is both
partial and oppressive. This calls for a
profound crisis for students, for they will
be both unstuck (i.e., distanced from
the ways they have always thought, no
longer so complicit with oppression) and
stuck (i.e., intellectually paralyzed and
needing to work through their emotions
and thoughts before moving on with the
more academic part of the lesson) in
the process of teaching (Kumashiro 63).

At least it will if this is the way we frame


teaching: that is, if we insist on separating
the unlearning of students from the academic parts of teaching, if we continually
address students attention in this divided
fashion. The conclusion then cannot only,
if at all, be that educators need to create
a space in their curriculums in which students can work through crisis (Kumashiro
63). Although this seems to be the most
realistic way to work things out, I suggest
we instead continually insist on crisis as
a normative condition of being for both
students and teachers.
This is exactly what occasionally happened in the preschool classrooms during
the project, albeit crisis was not apparent
as an obstacle or even a feared or desired
state of mind among the children. This
was instead the very core emotion of the
group in the sense that being a child is
always already being in a state of profound unlearning and learning, of being
part of a continuous (de)stabilizing process on what is and what can be. It is not
a mystifying concept sought here; nor is
it even a certain condition aimed for; it is
just a destabilizing of the core contents of
university teaching as such. This necessitates on a more profound level taking
Freires critical writing on banking educating, Fishers urge to reframe the problem of resistance endlessly, Ellsworths
claim on searching out the unknowable, or
Kumashiros desire to look beyond what
we already know. We must take these
ideas more seriously and imagine the full
consequences of what they are trying to
tell us.
The preschool teachers experiences
in this project point toward abandoning
a set of taken-for-granted ideas on university teaching. For example, it involves
recognizing the problems connected with

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teachers acting as omnipotent researchers


in the classroom. University teachers often
actively control the notion of valid knowledge and consequently teach as if the aim
of learning is to teach something to students, instead of the teacher trying to be
part of a collective learning process with
them. It also concerns realizing that teaching in academic settings often implies an
ongoing disallowance of students experience and knowledge. University teachers,
generally speaking, tend to ignore the
fact that students always already possess
relevant knowledge and are constantly in
the midst of a process of translation, of
trying to harmonize to different principles
of reality. In terms of a Swedish context
of higher education, this is no doubt an
unforeseen consequence of not recognizing the need for a thorough teacher education program for university teachers.
The experiences from preschool settings in this project, therefore, urge a
renewed politics on university teachers
standards and pedagogical skills, but also
insist on acknowledging university teaching as a misrecognized form of banking
education in Freires sense. The challenge
for university teachers seems to be to
accept students processes of knowledge
production by helping them translate
what they already know and think of. This
also implies, in the context of the project
described, being fully aware of teachers
own tendencies to situate resistance to
feminist knowledge in individual student
responses. Further, the experiences from
this project seem to imply a restoration
of preschool teachers competencies in
the context of education in Sweden, taking their experiences as a starting point
for revising university teaching in many
respects. Foremost, there is a need to
move beyond traditional power structures
150

FT 21_2 text.indd 150

in the field of education, and acknowledge


the need for university teachers to learn
from educational settings outside academia.
By learning from doing teaching in
other settings, perhaps university teachers can also work through current feminist discourses of knowledge in their own
classrooms. As university teachers, and
perhaps as teachers and educators in any
respect, we clearly need to start out by
resisting the discourse of resistance. That
is, we need to refuse to ignore the very
conditions for learning that we always
already accept when dealing with the
ways resistance is in the way of teaching. We must instead engage in, together
with our students and colleagues, a critical and never-ending redefinition of the
learning conditions set up by both our
educational organizations and the way
we choose to perform our own teaching.
Perhaps we must abandon the concept
of teaching and learning altogether, at
least in the sense of teachers performing one and students the other, for the
benefit of creating a meaningful presence
where unlearning oppression and learning critical awareness is not just a means
to an end but the sole means of engaging
in the production and consumption of
knowledge.
notes
1.Except two university teachers who had
only completed a two-week compulsory course
on pedagogy in higher education.
2.All quotes in this text from the teachers
journals have been approved by them, and
the same goes in the following for the excerpts
from recordings of the discussions we had from
the joint seminars during the project.
3.The recordings from the three seminars
were transcribed and analyzed in line with a
general discourse analytic framework (Potter

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& Wetherell 1987, Potter 1996). In this context,


I have simplified the transcriptions in order to
make them readable for an audience not used
to reading discourse analytic research.

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