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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) 218-221



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Book Review

No Angel in the Classroom:
Teaching through Feminist Discourse

Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies:
Expectations and Strategies


No Angel in the Classroom: Teaching through Feminist Discourse by Berenice Malka Fisher. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001, 315 pp., $18.95.
Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies: Expectations and Strategies edited by Barbara Scott Winkler and Carolyn DiPalma. Westport, CT: Begin & Garvey, 1999, 273 pp., $59.95.

The world is quite a different place in 2001 than it was in the late 1970s when feminists created women's studies programs. Some of the goals of the women's movement have been realized. Many universities incorporate women's studies courses as part of a general education core to fulfill diversity requirements that are themselves the result of the efforts of women's studies faculty. However, while institutional climates may at least nominally be more welcoming to women's studies, the political and social climate has chilled considerably. The women's movement seems currently to be in abeyance. Feminism has morphed into a startling variety of feminisms with varying and sometimes conflicting perspectives and goals. Other social changes also affect feminist pedagogy in women's studies classes. More students now attend universities, and students' expectations of and preparation for higher education are different. Students in the twenty-first century are both more technologically sophisticated and more politically naïve or conservative than were students in the 1970s. They read less and watch television more. Most students seem to think of themselves as consumers rather than scholars.

The two books reviewed here both reflect and address the changes and the continuing paradoxes inherent in developing effective feminist pedagogy. Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies edited by Barbara Scott Winkler and Carolyn DiPalma is a volume focused exclusively on teaching the introductory women's studies course. No Angel in the Classroom: Teaching through Feminist Discourse by Berenice Malka Fisher offers guidance from experience garnered through a lifetime of activism and teaching women's studies at all levels. Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies refracts feminist pedagogy through many lenses, while No Angel in the Classroom provides a coherent, focused vision of feminist pedagogy.

A new generation of women's studies scholars continue the struggle to engage students in meaningful intellectual and social endeavors. These faculty, building on the foundations laid by their predecessors, have at their disposal a wide variety of teaching resources as well as a rich and complex on-going dialogue on feminist pedagogy. However, new instructors [End Page 218] face many of the same challenges that plagued their foremothers. How can we best engage students in critical thinking about the topics of inequality, privilege, and power? How can we create a classroom climate in which students are free to express their ideas and at the same time protect students from being hurt by thoughtless or spiteful opinions? How can we deal with resistance and willful ignorance?

Reading No Angel in the Classroom feels like participating in a scholarly discussion with a thoughtful mentor. Fisher grounds her approach firmly in feminist discourse on social justice and models her pedagogy on the practice of consciousness raising. She begins by defining feminist pedagogy and then moves through the basic challenges faced by women's studies faculty who work within typical bureaucratic university structures with students who bring to the classroom a wide variety of backgrounds, prejudices, and abilities. Each chapter begins with vignettes of classroom situations that embody the central theme of the chapter: ways of knowing, questioning authority, ethic of care, safety and self-disclosure, difference and community. The writing blends incisive analysis of basic concepts such as safety and community with stories and reflections in a fascinatingly readable, yet eminently scholarly mixture of concern for students and self. Sharing her doubts and failures as well as her successes and insights, Fisher addresses issues of race, ethnicity, social class and sexuality as they impact the choices that teachers must make in their careers...

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