The Feminist Classroom

Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Privilege

Frances A Maher author Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Rowman & Littlefield

Published:11th Apr '01

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The Feminist Classroom cover

The issues explored in The Feminist Classroom are as timely and controversial today as they were when the book first appeared six years ago. This expanded edition offers new material that rereads and updates previous chapters, including a major new chapter on the role of race. The authors offer specific new classroom examples of how assumptions of privilege, specifically the workings of unacknowledged whiteness, shape classroom discourses. This edition also goes beyond the classroom, to examine the present context of American higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews and using the actual words of students and teachers, the authors take the reader into classrooms at six colleges and universities - Lewis and Clark College, Wheaton College, the University of Arizona, Towson State University, Spelman College, and San Francisco State University. The result is an intimate view of the pedagogical approaches of seventeen feminist college professors. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that American higher education has long represented a white, male, privileged minority. The professors here bring together the twin upheavals that have challenged this tradition: namely a rapidly changing student body and the more inclusive knowledge of feminist and multicultural scholarship. They uncover the voices, concerns and experiences of groups hitherto marginalized in higher education: women, people of color and working class students. Through concrete examples of classroom practice, the work of these professors challenge the traditional split between knowledge and pedagogy that has long characterized higher education.

The Feminist Classroom takes us on a journey with seventeen differently situated feminist professors. As an anthropologist, I find compelling its ethnographic approach to the study of feminist classrooms in diverse institutional settings. As president of Spelman College, I applaud the classroom practices of my colleagues and their commitment to empowering Black women students. -- Johnnetta B. Cole, president, Spelman College
What makes this book so valuable and fascinating is the extraordinarily extensive fieldwork, which creates a vivid sense not only of how questions about race and gender intersect for college undergraduates, but also how the teachers actually present their classes, how the students react to what they read, where they grow angry, why they are led so often to disguise their own beliefs. In this respect it’s a wonderfully human and believable work. . . .The book will richly fuel the national debate. It is very important and I hope it will be widely read. -- Jonathan Kozol, National Book Award winner and author of "Savage Inequalities"
The authors provide a rich analysis of the classrooms they observed and the larger understandings they can provide. If one wants to consider the theory underlying feminist pedagogies, using a quite nuanced analysis of various kinds of feminist environments, then this expanded edition can help to think through the major issues. * Contemporary Sociology *
For teachers of theology and religion newly exploring what constitutes feminist pedagogies, or for veterans of feminist pedagogy looking for an up-to-date critical treatment of feminist practices of teaching and learning, this book is a reasonably helpful resource with a wealth of practical examples and an extensive bibliography. * Teaching Theology & Religion *
A fascinating glimpse of a first generation of feminist academics at work. * Journal Of Educational Thought(Jet) *
The tensions, dilemmas, and exhilarating pleasures of feminist teaching converge in this fascinating book, which documents actual classroom give-and-take. In addition to observing, the authors interviewed the teachers and several students in each class. The result is a Rashomon portrayal of the same moment, differently perceived, as well as fresh insight into interactions between social positioning, experience, and learning. -- Barrie Thorne, author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School

ISBN: 9780742509979

Dimensions: 230mm x 146mm x 18mm

Weight: 440g

336 pages