Feminist Teachers

Women teachers were key players in twentieth century feminism. They fought for women's suffrage before the First World War and continued their vigorous campaigns for equal pay, equal promotion opportunities and abolition of the marriage bar into the less promising political environment of the 1920s and 1930s. This book is the first to offer a detailed assessment of why women teachers were so politically active, and makes an important contribution to the literature on women's politicisation. Drawing on interviews with women teachers (in state elementary and secondary schools) as well as the records of teachers' associations and central and local government, it explores the tensions in the relationship between their position at the workplace and their family lives and unravels the connections and dissonances between how they saw themselves as both women and professional teachers.

"Introduces feminist pedagogy to librarians seeking to enrich their teaching practices"--Provided by publisher.

This volume presents a case for liberatory science education from a feminist perspective. Based on a two-year teacher-research study, Feminist Science Education questions and challenges how power and knowledge relationships position teachers, students, and science with and against one another in the classroom. Using stories about life in and out of the classroom, this book describes the impact that exploring this situated nature of science and teaching has for transforming science education.

"Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist is a conversation between academics in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies about the politics of pedagogy in higher education. What does it mean to embody feminism in universities today? Written in a creative narrative style, Mackinlay explores the discursive, material and affective dimensions of what it might mean to live the personal-as-political-as-performative in our work as teachers and learners in the contemporary climate of neo-liberal universities. This book is both theory and story and aims to bring feminist theorists such as Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, Sara Ahmed and bell hooks together in conversation with Mackinlay’s own experiences, and those of women she interviewed, in their diverse roles as ‘feminist-academic-subjects’. The fluid writing style presented is a deliberate attempt to enact a ‘post-academic’ form of literature and is playfully punctuated by black and white drawings. Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist captures the precarious position of Women and Gender Studies in universities today, as well as the ‘danger’ inherent in grounding teaching and learning work in feminist politics. Mackinlay wraps herself in both and invites us to do the same. This book is designed to stimulate reflection and lively class discussion and is appropriate for courses in curriculum studies and pedagogy, education, feminism and feminist theory, gender and women’s studies, and narrative inquiry. It can also be read by individual teachers and researchers interested in feminism. “Mackinlay re-envisages how feminist knowledge can be articulated through her audacious and engaging mix of reflection, analysis, narrative, poetry, and line drawings. This is a refreshingly personal and powerfully collective analysis of doing feminism in hostile institutions. It will give heart to many.” – Alison Bartlett, The University of Western Australia, Perth “This highly readable book is a love story about feminism at the same time as a rigorous investigation ... a must read for undergraduate students and for scholars-who-don’t-identify-as-feminist, core reading for gender courses at all levels, and mandatory reading for feminist and gender academics.” – Julie White, Victoria University Elizabeth Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland."“/div> div div

"The tensions, dilemmas, and exhilarating pleasures of feminist teaching converge in this fascinating book, which documents actual classroom give-and-take. In addition to observing, the authors interviewed the teachers and several students in each class. The result is a Rashomon portrayal of the same moment, differently perceived, as well as fresh insight into interaction between social positioning, experience, and learning." Considearzioni di: Barrie Thorne, author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.

In this new collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines provide a critical context for the relationship between feminist pedagogy and academic feminism by exploring the complex ways that critical perspectives can be brought into the classroom. This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives—together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities—necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective. The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism’s role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.

The idea that gender equality in education has been achieved is now a staple of public debate. As a result, educational policies and practices often do not deal explicitly with gender issues, such as sexual abuse, harassment or violence. Exaggeration of neoliberalism’s successes in creating individual opportunity in education conceals ongoing problems and ignores the continuing need for a fair and equal education for all, regardless of gender or sexuality. In this manifesto for education, Miriam David rejects the notion that gender equality has been achieved in our age of neoliberalism. She puts the focus back onto issues such as changing patterns of women’s and girls’ participation in education across the globe, feminist strategies for policy and legal interventions around human rights, and violence against women and children. She discusses waves of feminism linked to school-teaching and pedagogies in higher education as well as an illuminating case study of an international educational programme to challenge gender-related violence. Revealing neoliberal education to be ‘misogyny masquerading as metrics’, Miriam David argues for changes in the patriarchal rules of the game, including questioning ‘gender norms’ and stereotypical binaries, and for making personal, social, health and sexuality education mainstream.

Combining feminist theory and empirical material, drawing on feminist writing and their own research experience, the authors provide an interpretation of teachers and their teaching.

Gloria Steinem, one of the most iconic feminist thinkers of the world, spent her early years in India. Her time in the country revealed to Gloria the Gandhian insight that change, like a tree, must grow from the bottom up. Subsequently, her decades of work with the feminist movement in the US and across the world taught her that violence and domination are normalized by the false division of human beings into subject and object, the dominator and the dominated, 'masculine' and 'feminine'. In As if Women Matter, Gloria Steinem and activist Ruchira Gupta bring together a selection of ground-breaking essays by Gloria which, since the time that they were first written, have transcended borders and have laid the groundwork for much of modern feminist thought. In these pages, Gloria demonstrates how racism and discrimination based on caste and class differences cannot survive without controlling women's bodies-she also describes the many ways in which women and men are fighting that control. She brilliantly analyzes Adolf Hitler's obsession with masculinity, and finds a gendered understanding of violence in the making. She distinguishes between erotica and pornography, locating the difference between the two in the inequality that governs relations between the sexes. And, in addition to a trenchant account of a few days she spent as a Playboy Bunny, this volume also carries a never-before-published essay on sex trafficking by Gloria, 'The Third Way'. As if Women Matter is scholarly, profound, and leavened by a lightness of touch which makes the most complex arguments accessible to all readers.

Through its rich and absorbing case studies, this book portrays three elementary classrooms from a feminist perspective. These classrooms demonstrate to readers the complexity of issues that teachers face over the challenges of gender and identity issues. Life stories of the three teachers, who are all feminists, enrich the analysis and present diverse perspectives. One teacher is white, one is African American, and one is a lesbian who has come out to her students and colleagues. In different ways the three teachers face the challenges of teaching, establishing rules, developing relationships, and working to transform the curriculum. Their classrooms provide a context for the rethinking of contemporary issues, complex educational problems, and promising ideas for teaching practice. Both experienced teachers and student teachers will find these studies sources for reflection and inspiration.