Turning a Comment into a Blog Post; or, more Feminism in the Classroom

Instead of commenting in my last post, I'm just going to write another post because -- well, that's just me and I'm well into my stream-of-coffee-induced consciousness and have no idea where the words will take me.

What fabulous suggestions on readings! Belle, I think you are seeing my reading list as it forms.

I feel sort of bad, like I've been cutting down my colleagues for their style of teaching, and some of that may just be my mommy issues making me very defensive. Still, I keep going over the afternoon in question to figure out exactly what my colleagues meant. I think I misunderstood something going on there, because they are all very smart and very knowledgeable and I've seen some of them in action and they are great. Whatever they think they are doing in terms of disavowing authority, they are clearly the ones in charge in their classroom and one is most certainly not as invisible as she might think she is. So, it's not that they disavow their own authority, but that they don't put it front and center. Again, that's not really the best method all of the time -- feminist or not.

To be invisible and non-authoritative is impossible and perhaps not even wise, which is what really bugged me about the conversation. Was that the ideal? It can't be, can it? I must have misunderstood something.

Anyway, in the comments to my last post, I liked Feminist Avatar's description of a feminist classroom as something flexible, something that doesn't have to adhere to a certain, rigid, definition of feminist. In fact, I grow very uncomfortable with people telling me what is truly "feminist" and what is not, but that is another subject. Like feminism in general and like teaching in general, you have to employ a number of tactics in order to achieve your end. Sometimes, you have to just stand up and lecture. Sometimes, you have to get the students to sit in a circle and discuss. Sometimes, you get them to do an exercise in identity. Sometimes, you start to lecture, and you end up discussing.

So, I'm starting to think -- as I write this -- that feminism isn't so much the pedagogy as the attitude. Perhaps "attitude" is not quite the right word. What I mean is that, whatever tactic you employ to teach, you employ it as a feminist, from a feminist point of view or way of looking at the world, which includes an awareness that there are multiple ways of looking at the world. Again, that's not precisely what I mean, either.

To illustrate: There is a debate on Tenured Radical post about that guy who was fired or not hired tenure track or something like that at Columbia, Thad Russell. Reading his own post on Huffington Post I could have a little sympathy for him, but not much simply because he seemed like That Professor, the one who has the red flag with the Che Guevara silk screen up in his office. The one who blusters about trumpeting his radicalism and his alleged sympathy with the working class, then hops in his SUV to go home to his house in the suburbs. The one who likes to say that he is a feminist right before he makes a big sexist joke.

I digress -- I'm actually describing one or two of That Professors whom I have known, not Prof. Russell, whom I never heard of before Tenured Radical's Twitter alerting me to her post. He may be fun to have a drink with, for all I know. Heck, he's even supposed to be a good scholar and might be good in the classroom for all of his bloggy bluster. So, my reaction to any discussion about him is really a reaction to the That Professors with whom I have had too much contact in the past.

Anyway, in the discussion on the post, Historiann chimed in with an (as always) sharp point: "Russell took for granted the unearned privilege of respect and deference from students, got 'cool points' that women and faculty of color couldn't get for behaving in a juvenile way, and then was surprised to learn that his colleagues didn't feel the same way as his students. Amazing!"

That seems to be quite relevant to this feminist pedagogy discussion. That Professor can go into his classroom and play this role of iconoclast anti-professor and the only stereotype he has to be aware of is the one that casts professors as boring old fuddy-duddies who can't function in the Real World. (Also, I think Russell is playing to that in his Huffington Post piece.) The rest of us? We also have to be aware of the millions of little misogynistic ways that everyone perceives women in positions of authority -- or people of color in positions of authority or aging people in positions of authority or out people or overweight people or disabled or at non-Ivy Leagues or non-near Ivy Leagues -- the rest of us.

That awareness that the rest of us carry around, well that is where the feminist part comes in. We feminists don't have to yell "shit" or "fuck" in the classroom to be "radical." If you start from an awareness of all of the ways that oppression has excluded women from power and authority, then questioned their power and authority much more harshly when women do attain such position, you've rather knocked the whole subject off "center."

Of course, you then have to point this out to the students and use it as a starting point to talk about the whole subject. Like I keep reiterating to my Women's Studies class, "this isn't so much about women as it is about power."

I actually want to write more about what is going on in that class but am conflicted. There are things that I'm going through as the teacher and I'm feeling a deep need to discuss with other teachers of similar subjects some of my frustrations and ambivalence and fears and even outright anger that comes from the class. At the same time, I actually do feel like doing so might cast the students in a different position than in the usual "bitching about students and the stunning things they do" sort of posts or tweets. I'm lucky that my complete lack of time keeps me from putting anything on the page (see my drowning post for the results of not writing). I want to be able to write as the person inside the teacher, but I don't quite know how to address the role of the student in telling that story. I want to make it about my journey, not about theirs.