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  • Introduction—Teaching in the Gaps:Authority, Ideology, and Identity
  • Meredith Miller (bio)

Discussions of feminist pedagogy betray a discomfort with authority that ultimately stems from the very gendered constructions from which we seek to free ourselves. We are aware that our students have been culturally silenced, often violently, and we seek to create an atmosphere in which they can regain the power to speak and be heard. Yet our reactions to abuses of cultural and institutional power have caused us to throw out the pedagogical baby with the bathwater. We cannot, in fact, act as mere facilitators in discussions around the most explosive and potentially damaging realities of our culture. Cynthia Hogue, Kim Parker, and Meredith Miller have discussed classroom situations in which white female and male students felt free and empowered to express violently racist and misogynist sentiments in response to issues raised by teachers who did not exercise their authority by establishing rules of classroom conduct at the outset. Some students were then subjected to the worst forms of discursive violence. The authors suggest that the exercise of feminist teacher authority is a crucial component of our very respect and caring for our students.

Ideology and Feminist Teaching

What struck me as I worked with the essays in this volume is that, as feminist educators, the work we do is ideological. Although feminist theory has revealed the dangers of the objective pose, we sometimes participate in our own fiction of neutrality with regard to our positions at the front of classrooms. We do, in fact, have a set of beliefs that we hope our students will come to view as valid, and we are, in this sense, exercising authority whether we avow it or not. We believe that our culture has created a number of fixed identity positions that constrain us and often leave us open to physical, economic, and discursive violence. We would like our students to leave us with this understanding. We would also like them to become more critical thinkers, to feel comfortable questioning those in authority, including ourselves. In order for this to happen, we must acknowledge and account for the [End Page 1] way in which feminism itself functions as a regime of truth within our teaching practice, with all of the enabling and disabling characteristics that implies. As an editor of this volume, I have felt an ambiguous reaction to my own authority: a commitment to some kind of feminist truth in interaction with my feminist desire to create space for an array of positions around teaching and feminism. Each of the writers here describes similar struggles in teaching feminism.

We are engaging in ideological work in the sense that we seek to foster an understanding of the relations of power in our culture that would help shift those relations. We seek to convey this understanding to our students and to change their relationship to knowledge. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks describes her sense of loss after the move to an integrated southern school during her childhood.

School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle.

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Here, hooks describes the sudden shock of learning and teaching that is not actively engaged with ideology. The passion and zeal that she describes in the all-black schools of her childhood is the very kind of meaning and struggle that many of us cherish in our feminist learning and teaching. Yet the atmosphere of passion and struggle requires leadership. At the very least it requires that we exercise authority to keep our students safe in our classrooms, which do not exist outside of the power relationships that pervade our institutions and our wider culture. As Carol J. Moeller puts it, educational practices "reproduce social life, inculcating norms of behaviour, values, beliefs and ways of thinking about the world" (168). As feminist educators we must take responsibility for our classrooms as spaces within a wider culture that oppresses and privileges...

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