Feminist Pedagogy and Research in a Culturally Diverse Classroom in a Women’s University in Bangladesh
At the Center: Feminism, Social Science and Knowledge
ISBN: 978-1-78560-079-1, eISBN: 978-1-78560-078-4
Publication date: 21 August 2015
Abstract
Purpose
This
Authors’ note: To capture the collaborative feminist process in writing this article, we list authors’ name alphabetically rather than the traditional presentation of lead author first.
Methodology/approach
We use Third World, Materialist, and Poststructuralist feminist perspectives with an intersectional transnational lens to analyze our self-reflections about feminist pedagogy and the messy business of conducting our research. We draw on student participant interviews and responses to follow-up questions to support key arguments.
Findings
Much feminist pedagogy discourse constructs consciousness-raising and empowerment as positive. However, our research indicates our students’ experiences of these processes as well as our own as teachers and researchers is contradictory; outcomes are often unintended and not always positive, despite our best intentions.
Social implications
Our work seeks to destabilize problematic notions of empowerment and consciousness-raising by contributing accounts of how feminist pedagogy impacts students in sometimes negative, unintended ways. These contributions should be utilized to better understand power relations between students and teachers, as well as refine pedagogical approaches to best address and reevaluate their impacts on students.
Originality/value
Rather than perpetuate decontextualized and overly optimistic notions of feminist pedagogy, consciousness-raising, and empowerment that fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and the gendered relations in which they participate, this chapter stands as a call to feminists to problematize their key concepts and practices and lay them open to critique.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the 11 AUW students who participated in this study. Our deepest gratitude for entrusting us with your stories and for the opportunity to better understand your lives. We would also like to thank AUW for supporting our research and teaching, and for the many faculty members who helped our project grow.
Citation
Daniel, M. and Saroca☆ , C. (2015), "Feminist Pedagogy and Research in a Culturally Diverse Classroom in a Women’s University in Bangladesh", At the Center: Feminism, Social Science and Knowledge (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 223-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620150000020021
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited