Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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).
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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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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-
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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.
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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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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.
r es isting the discourse on resistance
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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).
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re f e r e nces
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