Online Feminist Pedagogy: A New Doorway into Our Brick-and-Mortar Classrooms?

My own journey into online teaching began about a decade ago. As a mid-career feminist professor, I wasn't pressured into it by dwindling enrollments in my department's face-to-face classes, nor was I attracted to it because I harbored some incipient fascination with online technology. Rather, I decided that, like smartphones and climate change, it was probably here to stay, and so I might as well dive in and learn more about it. With decades of feminist teaching under my belt, first in a philosophy department and then in a gender and women's studies department, I have felt many of the misgivings about online teaching that I now hear from friends and colleagues. Some are fairly generic: "Isn't it just a fast food version of college?" "Doesn't it just dilute students' learning experience?" But others' questions are more distinctively feminist, and it is these that have caught and have held my attention. At bottom, they ask: "Is it really possible to do online teaching in a way that remains true to the values of feminist pedagogy?"

One of the main ways that feminist instructors identify and connect with one another across our disciplines is by our commitment to feminist pedagogical strategies and values. Though we may rarely be called upon to explicitly name or explicate them, much of what creates our sense of being feminist teachers is our acknowledgment of and attempts to enact some basic values and goals. Feminist teaching, then, tends:

• • To be nonhierarchical, challenging patriarchal power models suggesting that the professor is more important than, or more deserving of respect than, the students. In many feminist classrooms, the professor is more likely to be regarded as "the guide on the side" than "the sage on the stage." This may be reflected in the use of physical space, say, a circular configuration of desks, and in the course content and structure. For example, some instructors deliberately solicit student input about the syllabus, including suggested readings, assignment parameters, and deadlines.

• • To take seriously the feminist principle that the personal is political and prioritize the personal experience of students and professor, as well as course content featuring firsthand personal experience. Far from being a merely tangential or incidental feature of readings and discussions, connecting the readings to participants' lives is deliberately facilitated and regarded as epistemologically relevant. So classroom participants often share details about their identities and positionality and are encouraged to engage in direct exchanges with one another to further explore such connections and to make new ones with one another and with the material.

• • To be rooted in praxis and so challenge the distinction between activism and intellectualism—for example, nurturing substantive links with nonprofit organizations and initiatives, especially feminist ones. So, for instance, internships and other hands-on educational experiences are quite common in feminist courses, and community activists and organizers may be invited to speak in feminist classrooms or even to serve as instructors in college classes.

• • To confront elitism, and so reflect awareness of the structural inequities that may make academic achievement more difficult for the oppressed. Feminist professors, then, often set up their courses to acknowledge the particular challenges, and honor the strengths, of students from marginalized groups. Such instructors also avoid making assumptions about cultural knowledge based merely on the position of privileged students. Further, they may pay special attention to, for example, textbook costs and assignments that may turn out to be a greater burden for marginalized students—such as field trips requiring mobility or childcare.

• • To prioritize values and goals central to the feminist movement, even when doing so requires creativity. So, for example, a science instructor might assign and discuss readings about the challenges faced by graduate students of color or how sexual harassment impacts female medical residents. A feminist economics instructor may lead students on a study abroad to visit collectively owned women's businesses in the global South. One's teaching work, in short, serves as a vehicle for enacting one's feminism, not in numbly ideological fashion, but in ways responsible to...