Introduction to High-Impact Feminist Pedagogies: Points of Encounter, Tactics of Change
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This four-paper cluster takes up bell hooks’s challenge in “Theory as a Liberatory Practice” to dismantle the perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. We analyze specific theory-based feminist pedagogical practices, which we employ on four very different campuses with four content areas (general education, body politics, environmental studies, and women’s history) that engage with students’ frequent (and understandable) resistance to feminism’s unsettling work. Drawing upon theorists such as Kuh, Zeilinger, Alaimo and Heckman, and others, our courses use “high-impact practices” (HIPs) that invite students to “walk the (feminist) walk” through exercises in collaborative learning, role-playing and identification, material alterations and corporeal actions, and re-inventing daily tactics. These high-engagement classroom activities anticipate preconceptions students bring to our classrooms, support them as they enact often unsettling critiques of hegemony, and provide contexts in which they can “come closer” to feminist histories and communities as they discover the pleasures of feminist engagement.
Through our analysis of pedagogical strategies, we argue that an analytic understanding of ideology is insufficient in effecting change. “Doing” feminism, then, means crafting goals and assignments that challenge and inspire students as they take risks with intellectual and material engagement with feminism within and beyond the classroom. Such practices are consistent with the increasing national demand for colleges to foster active student engagement, to use “high-impact” transformational learning for student retention and success, and to cultivate empowered personhood and citizenship. [End Page 207]
April Lidinsky is an associate professor and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at IU South Bend. Her expertise is feminist theory, women’s autobiography, the transatlantic nineteenth century, and creative nonfiction. She serves as the faculty adviser to a campus-community readers’ theater project, the Michiana Monologues, contributes radio commentaries on feminist topics to WVPE, and is active in reproductive rights work in the community.
T. Christine Jespersen is a professor of English at Western State Colorado University, where she teaches a broad range of courses. Her research interests include gender studies, environmental justice literature, and literatures of globalization. She is coeditor of The Anatomy of Body Worlds and most recently has published an article on Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.
Rachel Stein is a professor of English and women’s studies at Siena College. She is the author of Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers’ Revisions of Nature, Gender, and Race, editor of New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, and coeditor of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Her scholarship focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, environmental justice, and biocolonialism in literature and film.
Katie Hogan is the director of women’s and gender studies and a professor of English at UNC Charlotte. She is the author and coeditor of several books on gender, race, and the culture of AIDS and has several publications on the interconnection between homophobia and place as an environmental injustice.
