Team Teaching with Undergraduate Students: Feminist Pedagogy in a Peer Education Project

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.

—bell hooks

This essay examines feminist educational praxis in an undergraduate course based on peer learning and student empowerment. Public education in the United States frequently fails to promote creativity, critical thinking, leadership, and student initiative. This study analyzes our experiences in the Student Discussion Leader (SDL) Program, a peer education project designed to heighten student agency, engaged learning, and cultural analysis. A cohort of undergraduate students, two faculty members, and a graduate student worked together to provide the instruction for four sections of Women's Studies 101 at California State University San Marcos. The authors—one student and one professor who taught together in Fall 2010—discuss how peer education can inform engaged and innovative pedagogy in a feminist university classroom. We investigate critical feminist pedagogical strategies and methods, power dynamics, and problems we encountered in working with first-year college students.

California State University San Marcos is a twenty-two-year-old campus situated approximately thirty-five miles north of San Diego and sixty miles south of Orange County. Nearly two-thirds of the students, over half the faculty, as well as the current president and provost, are female. However, Introduction to Women's Studies (Women's Studies 101) is a particularly challenging course to teach in this conservative socio-political terrain.¹

The region has been shaped by a long history of racism and U.S./Mexican border politics, militarism (there are eleven military bases in the area), and conservative local and regional governments, which have fostered an environment particularly hostile to critical thinking and educational praxes that challenge the status quo. Students without any prior exposure to women's studies often initially respond by resisting the cultural critique and student-centered pedagogy central to the course.

In an effort to encourage participatory education and experiential learning, the Women's Studies Department at California State University San Marcos implemented the SDL Program to team teach multiple sections of Women's Studies 101. Building on the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and other scholars of transformational education, the program is based on the premise that reclaiming one's own education and sharing knowledge with others can be an important and empowering educational experience. Students and faculty engage in collaborative learning designed to deconstruct systems of power and oppression. We merged concepts from critical and feminist pedagogy to create an alternative teaching praxis, a "pedagogy of resistance" that employs Freire's pivotal concept of "conscientization" and hooks's emphasis on "critical awareness and engagement" (Freire 36, hooks 14). With an explicit ideology that promotes social change, feminist pedagogy has as its goal the liberation of learners via the development of critical thought. While diminishing the authority of the teacher, feminist pedagogy encourages critical awareness about racism, sexism, oppression, and domination (Crabtree and Sapp 131-32). Esther Ngan-Ling Chow and her co-authors delineate the many ways that feminist educators often face resistance because encouraging dialogue in the classroom can upset students' understandings of how the educational system works (270). Wanting to fully engage students, our methodology highlighted dialogue, participation, and experience as central features. Like Chow and her co-authors, one of our goals was to create a learning environment that would enable students to transform themselves from "passive knowledge-consumers" to "empowered knowledge-producers" (260).

In the Fall of 2010, eleven students earning majors or minors in women's studies did extensive reading and met with two faculty members and a graduate assistant in order to prepare to serve as student discussion leaders in sections of Women's Studies 101. Women's studies faculty members were...