“Feminist” Teaching/Teaching “Feminism”

The stakes are high for feminist teachers. Susan A. Basow, Nancy T. Silberg, Kathryn Duncan, Michael Stasio, and others have reported disturbing findings regarding the discrepancy between student evaluations of male professors and female professors. Professors who have identified themselves as feminists or committed to practicing feminist pedagogy, these findings show, consistently score especially low marks particularly—but not exclusively—from their male students. The fact that these course evaluations are used in decisions regarding salary, tenure, and promotion may help explain why many junior faculty and even some veterans, who have practiced feminist pedagogy in the past, are reevaluating their teaching methods. "The increasingly 'client-serving' environment of the contemporary university," in Robbin D. Crabtree and David Alan Sapp's terms, or "the customer is always right" attitude, in Nancy Sommers's words, has compelled many teachers to "pander to students' tastes and sensibilities rather than adopting theoretically grounded, innovative, and progressive pedagogies that encourage critical, social and self-reflection" (Crabtree and Sapp 134). Not only is one's job at stake, but the presence of women in academia—and especially those who practice feminist pedagogy—is at stake if female professors continue to receive lower evaluations than their male counterparts. In this article, I will examine a set of student evaluations in which I received low marks from some students who were skeptical about my teaching practices. I will situate these comments as indicative of the gap between what students and teaching academics constitute as teaching. These evaluations raise many complex issues, as well, surrounding the use of feminist teaching practices outside of women's studies, thus enabling me to explore the challenges therein so that we may begin to ensure a future for feminist pedagogy.

Ellen "Didn't Really Teach"

Come semester's end I usually have a sense of what to expect from my students' evaluations. There has always been a handful of comments about the difficulty of the course or the "excessive" writing I assign. I never expected that students would say that I hadn't actually taught; however two students from Women and Literature did. Women and Literature is cross-listed with the women's studies program, and is thus taken by many students with this interest. These students are joined by English majors and nonmajors alike. At the University of Pittsburgh, instructors can request that their students partake in the school's process of teaching evaluation. Evaluations for classes with more than six students are comprised of two sections. In the first section, students fill in a Scantron sheet that asks them to answer questions using a scale of one to five. In the second section, students are asked to answer a set of open-ended questions regarding the instructor and the course. Both sections of the evaluation are answered anonymously. For the sake of clarity, I include Table 1 (see page 30), which lists the questions and the students' responses (which are reprinted verbatim) I wish to explore. I will refer to the students as A, B, and C because the evaluations are anonymous.

In addition to showing what students think of the course, this chart documents students' reactions to my teaching, and more specifically my refusal to overtly exercise my authority in the classroom. Student A cites my asking questions (rather than teaching) as my weakness, but strangely enough, my strength, as well. Student B agrees with Student A, challenging my teaching practices because they are characterized by discussion rather than "actual teaching." Although Student B thinks that "more teaching" would be an improvement, she goes on to report that the class discussions were the most beneficial aspect of the course. Although Student B found the discussions useful—as did all of the students mentioned above—these discussions were not, according to her evaluation, occasions of teaching. Neither was my practice of "guid[ing] the class by asking questions" understood, as Student A claims, as a teaching practice. So, teaching is not practiced through questioning or discussion, these students suggest, but rather through some other method, presumably lecture, outlines, or summaries. You'll notice that Student C does, in fact...