"The Union of Theory and Practice": Using Team-Based Learning in the Feminist Literary Theory Classroom

Feminist education—the feminist classroom—is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgement of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.

—bell hooks, Talking Back, 51

This essay discusses my experiences using team-based learning (TBL) in the course Feminist Literary Theory and Women's Writing. It details the adaptation of a pedagogy used mainly in the sciences and social sciences, my methods and approaches, the risks and tensions involved, the resulting outcomes, and my reflections on TBL's adaptability as a feminist pedagogy. In 2005, I joined the faculty at Augustana Campus, a small liberal arts faculty of the University of Alberta.

As the first woman to be hired tenure-stream in the English program, one of my early tasks was the creation of several courses, starting with Feminist Literary Theory and Women's Writing. The course is cross-listed between English and wo men's studies, and it is designated as one of the courses that could fill our three-credit theory requirement in the English major or as three credits toward a women's studies minor. Teaching my students the varying schools of feminist thought and approaches to literature by women was the goal, of course, but I also wanted them to own the material, to take away from the course useable tools that would help them understand, as feminists, the texts of their life. I wanted, as bell hooks describes it, a working union of theory and practice that would matter to my students long after they received their final grade.

As I prepared to teach it the first time, therefore, I cast about for appropriate student-centered active learning strategies that worked alongside a feminist ethos. Because I knew that students would be engaging with challenging theoretical texts to examine literature that would be emotionally challenging, for example Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Toni Morrison's Mercy, I needed to ensure the safest and most secure classroom environment possible. Students would need to be completely comfortable before I could ask them to take the necessary risks involved to engage fully with these texts. In short, I wanted to follow Amy Spangler Gerald, Kathleen McEvoy, and Pamela Whitfield who, in a 2004 Feminist Teacher article, describe a feminist pedagogy that "encourages inclusion, collaboration, sensitivity, and personal empowerment and rejects oppression in any form" (48).

I discussed my plans with Dr. Paula Marentette, then Associate Dean of Teaching and Research, also a professor of psychology, colleague, friend, and member of the women's writing circle I founded. She suggested that if I really wanted to put students at the center of this course, then I should think about using team-based learning. After it became clear that TBL could work as a feminist pedagogy, I adapted it for the course and was more than satisfied with the results. The class environment was inclusive and collaborative; projected learning outcomes were met and usually exceeded, and my students' experience was nothing short of transformative. As one of them, an environmental science major, commented with an apt metaphor, her teammates helped her make sense of the course material: "I have come to realize that the ostensible swamp of feminist literary theory is actually a wetland. What was once a backwood bog has become in my eyes a true, useful functioning system."¹ The results were so extraordinary that in the following term I adapted TBL for my first-year survey courses and a senior course in ecofeminist theory with the same positive results, and I continue to use it in many of my courses.

Foundations and Objectives

In the foundational TBL text, Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching, Larry K. Michaelsen, Arletta Bauman Knight, and L. Dee Fink emphasize the ability of this pedagogy to transform learning as it turns small groups of students into effective...