Feminist Pedagogy

What kinds of revolutions are possible in the classroom? How can revolutions in consciousness be stoked through artistic and critical practice in both classroom and institutional spaces? What is feminist about pedagogy? And might the modeling of feminist principles in pedagogical practice encourage revolutions in what counts as knowledge, where it emerges from, and how it might be used? Interested in these questions and with some years of classroom teaching under our belts, when invited by Holly and Sara to revisit keywords from Jill's scholarship, we chose to explore "feminist pedagogy."

Our choice of key term also reflects our shared experiences of Jill's feminist pedagogy while at the CUNY Graduate Center (GC). Jill, Sharon, and Erin all arrived at the GC in fall 1994. Sharon and Erin were first-year PhD students; Jill was JILL DOLAN! That first semester, she led us through the mandatory Research and Bibliography seminar in a windowless room. Not that the lack of natural light really mattered; classes were always in the evening at the GC, which meant leaving the 42nd Street building in the dark. More importantly, learning with Jill had the opposite effect to the interior room itself; she just kept illuminating new pathways for our thinking and new modes of engagement.

Thankfully, we have more than just our memories of our two years of coursework followed by dissertating under Jill's supervision at the GC to guide us in this return to first principles of Jill's feminist pedagogy. Jill also defines and animates "feminist pedagogy" in Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, specifically in the chapter entitled "Performance as Feminist Pedagogy." We offer here some reflections on our own engagement with this term and the evolution of its significance in our teaching and scholarship at Davidson College and McGill University. Again and as always following Jill's example, we have organized our collaborative thoughts in the modality Jill uses to conclude each chapter of the book itself: a TOP TEN list.

What we learned about feminist pedagogy from Jill Dolan: TOP TEN list!

1. Be a good citizen. Pedagogy doesn't live exclusively in the classroom, nor exclusively in the teacher-student relationship. An embrace of feminist pedagogy includes a dedication to mentorship that extends beyond the degree. It includes activities that sustain the field of theatre studies and the institutions and organizations that are our intellectual and creative homes. Stewardship of the creative practices and products of feminist artists and scholars, and of resources and structures that attend to and support them, undergirds a feminist pedagogical mandate.

2. Critically engage the context in which you labor. Feminist pedagogy takes into account the institutional context in which teaching takes place as well as all the messy implications that come along with that.

3. Be attentive to disciplinary movement and what shifting contexts might offer. We're thinking here of how Jill's professional life has been made by straddling contexts and offering "models of coalition-building" among disciplinary sites.¹ While at the GC, for instance, Jill ran the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies while also serving as executive officer of the theatre program. "Disciplinary boundaries shift continually,"² Jill writes—like those animated disciplinary boundaries, keep shifting yourself.

4. Yet be cognizant of the specific demands and expectations of your own discipline. Jill points out that students often come to theatre and to gender studies for community, connection, and identity affirmation. Those expectations become part of the labor of our pedagogy. They are often what led us to theatre studies in the first place too.

5. Forget the canon. Or at least remake it. We advise ensuring that Peggy Shaw is in it. Which leads us to …

6. Teach what you love. Pleasure is as integral to feminist pedagogy as presence. Whether it is a performance, play, or essay that you love, teach it. That you connect strongly to the material means you'll be able to compellingly communicate your engagement to students. Love matters.

7. Embrace the idea that "all teaching is advocacy."³ As Jill notes: "changing students' consciousness is important to contesting social and cultural structures that perpetuate gender, race and ethnic, class, and sexual inequities."⁴ Cultivating skills of critical thinking and analysis is political. Especially right now. Teaching students how to think means also teaching them how to take a stand—thinking critically about the meanings made of representation/s (in theatre, in popular culture, or more and more in politics) can be revolutionary.

8. Teach to learn; teach to make the room bigger. Expand everyone's reach by encouraging searching questions. Bring in emerging, decentered, and overlooked voices through citation and by direct invitation. Jill models ongoing, open, critical engagement by always formulating the best question in the room at the invited lecture or the conference presentation, whether panelists are leading scholars or graduate students.

9. Practice critical generosity. Building on David Román's work in Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indiana University Press, 1998), Jill challenged us to watch performance and read others' work to understand, not just to take apart. What does this performance (or article) accomplish, for whom, and how, we asked? Where does it come from and how does it arrive onstage or on the page? But also, this principle reminds us that we too arrive from someplace; each of us has an intellectual genealogy. As a model of relationality, critical generosity braces up feminist pedagogy and extends more broadly to our careers—a bit like an umbrella, it stretches to cover all of the work we do: teaching, service, research.

10. Wear a blazer. Because Jill always outfitted herself with one while at the GC. And perhaps more importantly, because performance matters. Being present, together, matters. Maybe even more now than before.

Footnotes

1. Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 130.

2. Ibid., 128.

3. Ibid., 131.

4. Ibid., 120.