"I Could Have Told You That Wouldn't Work": Cyberfeminist Pedagogy in Action

When I walk into my college classroom to teach, I immediately head to the teacher computer station in the corner of the room to boot up the computer and LCD projector. I switch my smart phone to vibrate so that it will notify me when the class is five minutes from concluding. I log onto the course management system—Moodle at my college—and download the files that the class will use for that lesson. I pass the wireless keyboard and mouse to the first student volunteer—a practice we use for collective note-taking and to facilitate greater class participation for those who need a visual guide. I hook up my personal laptop to the teacher station to run a parallel system so that I can access documents during the class without disrupting the display on the projector screen. Once all of those items are set, I flip through note cards to take attendance and sit down in a circle with my students. I am finally ready to teach.

As I participate in this preteaching ritual, I am extremely conscious of how different this scene is from those that bell hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress and other texts about feminist pedagogy. While I ask for personal "check-ins" with my students, encourage nondyadic conversation patterns, and take time to acknowledge bodies in the classroom before engaging our topic for the day, I cannot help but feel that my feminist teaching might be compromised by the fact that technology in the classroom seems to be of equal or greater importance to acknowledging each other's physical presence in a shared space. Differently stated, attending to and communicating through technology has superseded attending to and communicating through our embodiment.

As new media proliferate and converge, feminist teachers are increasingly engaging in a technologized teaching practice. For more than a decade, I have taught high school and college, and in both contexts it almost goes without saying that many feminist teachers will use some form of course management system (CMS) like Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn. Students and instructors alike have come to rely on digital and continuous access to course materials, as well as asynchronous class activities (those that do not require real-time interaction) such as message boards and synchronous activities (real-time interactions) such as chat rooms through CMSs. Furthermore, if feminist teachers so choose, CMSs allow them to make visible how power and hierarchy play out in the classroom by employing a public grade book functionality, collecting and sharing digital resources, or even exposing the often-panoptic ability to run reports of online participation and IP addresses.

Meanwhile, hybrid and fully online courses continue to increase in number and scope. Many times the stated objectives of these courses fit well with the goals of feminist pedagogy because they claim to engage diverse populations who would otherwise have difficulties attending a traditional face-to-face (f2f) course. This rationale led me to construct an online version of my professional writing course; I wanted to make what I do more accessible to those who are better served through distance education (DE).

However, the push behind classroom-based technologies and hybrid and online courses is not merely to engage populations of underrepresented students or to differentiate instruction. I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman's recent report on online education—"Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011"—shows that slightly more than one-third of all college students will take at least one online course before graduation. But it is not just students who are pushing for these courses. More than half of academic leaders, i.e., teachers and administrators, believe that online education's outcomes are "the same or superior to those in face-to-face" (5). Allen and Seaman also report that 65 percent of the institutions studied responded that online DE was a critical component to their overall, long-term mission (4). Additionally, while the report shows some sign of slowing, enrollment for online classes continues to outpace enrollment in traditional f2f courses, providing a highly...