What would you want to see in a feminist classroom?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I've been reading a lot of blogs about teaching in HE recently, which I won't link to because 99% of what they're talking about isn't really relevant. But I've noticed there's a big thing in US universities about how important it is to actively try to teach a 'feminist classroom'.

It's not about teaching feminist theory, or insisting all your students use that one ideology - it seems to be about ways to even out the different kinds of privilege different students may have.

I thought it was a really great idea. It got me thinking of how people say that schools are very biased towards girls (which I'm not sure I believe, and which wouldn't be 'feminist' if it were true). So, how would you construct a classroom that was genuinely 'feminist', in the sense of evening out privilege and making a space where everyone's voice can be heard?

I think if we could do it, it would have such a long-term impact - because I do believe adult women suffer when they're not given the tools of debating and confident speaking. And I do believe men and women are rewarded differently for the same kind of speech.

I have lots of ideas and I'd like to know what you think would be good, or what you think is bad in schools you know of/were in.

The most basic thing I do is body language and eye contact - if I am teaching a class where a student is very dominant of the discussion but not actually making good points or helpful interaction with the others, I stop making eye contact and I angle away from them. It feels very odd the first few times but it seems to work to stop the other students from feeling they have to shut up and let the noisy one speak, and the noisy ones don't seem to notice why the dynamic has changed.

Really interesting question.

I've pondered similar whilst using feminist research methods (the evening out of privilege - in this context between the researcher / interviewer and participant in terms of content and the boundaries and direction of research) and have always been fascinated. In older youth or adults, I guess a parallel would be the privilege between the teacher and the taught, and how to manage that relationship whilst being a conduit of information...

I did cause a near riot by arguing that it was possible to use feminist methodology with male participants, though. Apparently there are boundaries...

Content and participation bias definitely, though.

Thanks everyone, this is so helpful.

messy - totally agree about the boy/girl competition. That always annoys me about the Apprentice, incidentally.

woffling - interesting, I like this idea. I do try often to use 'she' when I can (ie., when I know it's not 'he' and it is not - as is often the case - 99% likely to be 'he'). But then I have been advised this is not the best idea when you're working with students who may not be listening very well. Because if they hear 'she' and go to look up 'that amazing woman writer', sadly, they may draw a blank because everyone else has assumed (for no good reason) that it's a 'he'.

mad - ooh, that sounds juicy! Come on, dish the 'boundaries' dirt, you know you want to!

A couple of ideas I gleaned from blogs today:

One person says she does a lot of cross-gender role play when she has students constructing arguments. I like this idea and will see if I can incorportate it.

Another person was talking about making visual representations of all the groups who're not represented by texts or names that we remember. He doesn't give examples so I must work out what exactly is intended, but I imagine it's to do with reminding yourself visually that if there are ten men who we know about, who were writing about life in a village in Lincoln in 1300-1400, you can look at the whole population and see how many others there were. I'm not sure how well this would work with my discipline.

In reception classes, get rid of the pink/blue theme. My DD started in reception last week and all the girls hang their coats on a peg with a pink name label, whilst the boys all have blue labels. Then in her classroom her (as it happens blue) water bottle goes onto a pink tray, all the boys bottles sit in a blue tray. She found this all a bit weird as her favourite colour is blue (though maybe not for long now she has started school!).

Oh god, I can't. Suffice to say that I agree strongly with the 'evening out of privilege' idea, and am a huge fan of feminist research methods... but I also have wide research interests. The particular barney was whether you could use feminist research methods with trans participants. You can probably fill in the gaps. Anyway, I did, and defended my rationale. The academic jury is still out.

What it did mean, was that I became interested in research into research methodologies, as well.

I like the idea of cross gender role play, but I think it requires a degree of maturity, otherwise it descends into early teen stereotypes which is counter-productive, unless you want to spend the rest of the day ironing out slights.

Oh, right! Gosh, that sounds at least as if you're doing very 'impact'-y stuff, can't be too bad, right?!

I suspect some people whine no matter what you do.

I take your point about the warnings with role play. True. But if you chose a topic carefully, it might be fun, too?

I wonder how young children have to be, to not think about gender when they do role play or choose a character in a story to 'be'.

I assume that the water bottles are separated so that the 4 year olds are hunting for their bottle amongst approx 15 other bottles, rather than rooting through a tray with 30 bottles in. But I haven't asked the teacher about that so maybe that's not the logic behind it. I'm sure they can't possibly have single sex tables/groups though.

But why by gender Beth? Why not by eye colour. Or first letter of name. Or red group and blue on this tray, green and yellow here? I hate the way gender is treated as a natural way to group small children.

LDR - I think by the time they can role play, many incorporate gender. Sadly.

Interesting point you make there about feeling uncomfortable sitting writing. Years ago when I was doing work experience I was given one lad - 'the naughty one' - to sit with, basically because I could thus stop him from disrupting all the rest. Which I suppose is a fairly logical thing to do if you are the teacher and have an untrained teenager who's been foisted on you!

Anyway, being not especially authoritative/aware of what might really annoy the teacher, I bargained with him that he could play with a bit of playdough every few minutes so long as he tried to sit and work for the rest. And he did. And it worked. I should imagine what really worked was having someone sit over him (poor kid), but I can't help feeling that he wasn't 'just' disruptive, he genuinely found it much more difficult to stay still and to concentrate. I don't mean I think he had undiagnosed ADHD or anything like that, just common-or-garden restlessness ... but I am not sure how disruptive playing with playdough actually was, or how much it was just discouraged for the sake of it.

Lrd, that's good instincts though - it's pretty common or garden to use fiddle toys, blu tac, or dynabands on chair legs to deal with fidgeting.

Yy to 'jobs', kim. Even dd2 gets to carry stuff to the office, and she can barely get there on her own.

I can't really take a lot of credit, because I pissed off that poor teacher hugely, and because I knew back then about smugly telling my teachers I was a 'kinaesthetic learner' and needed to doodle.

I was a horrible student.

I think that having female teachers/lecturers is vitally important to young women and girls. I still have students in my university who tell me they have never been taught by a woman! I incorporate topics which focus on women and men evenly, have pictures of women on the walls (in an attempt to offset all the men they see in most other teaching spaces), I openly identify as a feminist and work really hard to make sure no one dominates discussion.

Great topic, LRD.

Am on phone, so frustratingly limited, but a couple of things spring to mind:

1. We need to move away from 'encouraging girls to speak up' by providing different ways for students to demonstrate their understanding. We should question the notion that public speaking is the only way in which to do this, as this is often dominated by boys.

1. The interactions within the classroom which do not pertain to learning need to be examined- for example excusing boys' aggression towards girls as an expression of love or affection.

1. We need to address the issues low-achieving girls face; otherwise known as The Curse of Hair and Beauty.

I have more thoughts but will end up throwing this pissing phone out of the window with frustration at this rate

I'll look for you again when you're on a proper computer, but that all makes total sense ... I will have a good thing especially about point 1.

Point 2 we shall call 'the Shades of Grey fallacy'!

I must fancy my phone something awful

At least you can put your phone on vibrate. No such luck with a man who introduces you to his todger by holding it out in his hand ...

I am in HE in the US. This is something I often think about wrt teaching. I am fortunate in that most of my classes have had an even ratio of men and women, which I think helps, and the "participation culture" in US education - they have usually been trained from high school that they have to keep actively participating.

Because for most modules here "class participation" is usually a component of the grade, we are encouraged to think of ways to provide opportunities for participation that aren't simply speaking up in class or answering a question. Most classes will also have "office hours" where you can drop in and speak to the lecturer privately, which I always encourage students to see as a resource of the class which they should make use of.

The most important thing is to stay sensitive to the dynamics of the class.

I have had a couple of young male students who have been quite hostile to having a young(ish!) woman taking the class and who have subtly tried to challenge my competence in the classroom. I was totally taken aback by this when I started teaching - how naive of me!

Another dimension of privilege to take into account is the experiences of students of colour - sadly I have noticed that African American women in particular are very reticent in the classroom, so it is very important to also keep thinking about whether there are class or race dynamics that are inhibiting some students, and what you should be doing to make the class one everyone can fully participate in.

It's really interesting you say that about 'participation culture' - I've heard this from others too, and the claim that, typically, US students are better taught to discuss and debate tactfully, which is not a skill my lot are explicitly taught.

I do notice how automatically some kind of polite 'I thought [classmate's] point was excellent, but ...' phrase comes to my US mates and how good it is for just giving the sense to shyer students that they're not being talked over. OTOH, I think sometimes if you do this too much, they get less ability to work out for themselves when an argument is good. There should be a way to do both, of course, but it's not easy.

For mine previously, participation has counted to their grades, which is tough on the shy ones. They can do formal presentations as well as informal chat, though (or they can with me). And I did do a modified version of 'office hours' but they don't like it.

I was hoping someone would have something to say about dynamics other than male/female. I've noticed interesting dynamics in terms of sexuality. It's really difficult to walk that line between 'oh, I'm so glad you feel able to relate this to your own life and tell us so' and 'um ... queer theory might work better for you than getting (over-) personal'!

It seems to make a big difference what religion(s) they were brought up with, too (because I teach a course that has to deal explicitly with religion). Some of them really find that intrusive.

I am just rambling/considering ... it's really useful hearing from everyone, because now I'm building up a sense of what experiences my lot might be reacting to, and what we might need to do in schools to make it a bit better. Fun.

My ds's school has dramatically improved it's GCSE maths results for both genders by teaching boys and girsl separately in year 11. I don't have any helpful analysis to offer- sadly, just that bald fact.

That is sad, but hard to argue against if it's getting results short-term.

How did they come to the decision?! It seems like a fairly dramatic thing to do, to me.

I don't know that US students are taught to discuss and debate, but in general they are very motivated by short-term academic point-scoring, and being active in class is one way they see of collecting brownie points, as it were. I've no idea what happens in high school to foster this culture (am British and most of knowledge of the US high school system comes from ... er ... Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but it is striking. I'm not at all sure it is a good thing overall - they are all too frequently focused on their GPA and half-points on homeworks and tend to lose sight of whether they are cumulatively developing any kind of intellectual independence. I think the US degree experience really lacks that sense of "putting it all together" at the end of 3 or 4 years that you get in Britain. So the unfortunate corollary to having a lively class is that it may actually in a way entrench that short-termism - ideally you should be contributing in class because you're energized by the topic and want to enter into the academic discourse on it, not because you're thinking "oh God, I must say something because otherwise I'll be graded down for participation."

It may also be the type of student we get - they have typically always been super-high achievers wherever they have been and are keen to please!

It's funny you say how polite US students are. It is actually quite hard to get them to do constructive criticism of each other's work! There seems to be an idea circulating that "all opinions are valuable" and it's quite hard to get them to criticise things that are substantively wrong - they are often a bit shocked if I really make them defend something they say.

The religion aspect must be a tricky one to handle. I sometimes have to walk quite a fine line about students' personal backgrounds too because I teach about languages, so I always like to know what languages are in the class other than English and encourage people to bring up non-English examples if they have any. So you walk a fine line between "othering" students who are non-native English speakers or who perhaps are 2nd generation immigrants, and getting them to make insightful contributions about the languages they know or their language experiences.

As long as you don't pick on any one person too much, it is generally OK though - there are usually high numbers of students with another language, and they often quite enjoy relating something in class to their language and telling people about it. It can be a bit of an eye-opener for them that a language which perhaps doesn't enjoy privileged status in society is interesting in its own right and worthy of serious study. I had a woman student once who was really thrilled to be doing an essay on an African language she spoke at home, and she was able to interview her mother and grandmother for data for the essay. So you can sometimes end up giving students a sense of validation of their own linguistic practice or experience, and it often produces really good work when they are so personally invested in an assignment.

I also have to think about this sort of privilege issue when I do my own research too, as I work with very socio-economically marginalized groups. The approach now in my field is to think of the "interviewer-subject" relationship as a joint research partnership, because you are both knowledge-holders working together towards a project. This means that the actual topic of research also comes under scrutiny from various ethics committees and is evaluated partly on what benefits it will bring to the individuals/community you work with - it's not just a vanity project for the researcher which never ends up benefiting the community.

I also think being a woman helps my research - I think if I had all the baggage of white male privilege I simply wouldn't get some of the access I do - the dynamic would be too oppressive.

That's great, Phyllis. I wish schools would, in general, show more interest in students' home/other languages from an early age, and not just in the high-status ones.