Teaching Resources | African Feminist Pedagogies

African Feminist Pedagogies in Higher Education: Some Reflections
by Jane Bennett

[Reflections in this essay arose from the process and deliberations of the teaching working meetings.]

Introduction

At first glance, the phrase African feminist pedagogies might make one laugh. It seems such a high-falutin, almost pompous, way of engaging the rich (even ancient) complex webs of teaching processes embedded into continental histories of creating people within the imagination, material and political organisation, and languages of diverse communities. There is a long and complex story to be told about these teaching processes, one that would need to explore “pedagogical” wars between colonial operatives and indigenous authorities, spiritual and cultural initiations, the models of induction deployed by military and movement-building initiatives, and the centuries-old kaleidoscope of oral performance – consciously full to the brim with the need to teach, and the need to learn, as an integral thread of human being.

Recently, the notion of “life-long learning” has entered the vocabulary of some African universities through statements of mission and vision. Commitment to life-long learning is, however, nothing new to African epistemological traditions. In the face of globalised demands on African higher education, what may be re-newed is the importance of conscious, fully alert, reflection on what we teach, to whom, why and how. These notes on theories of teaching and learning come from the perspective of commitment to Gender and Women's Studies (G/WS), within the space of African higher education. As explained below, they are rooted in debates which took place during two discussions on curriculum-building in G/WS in 2003, and are offered here simply as an invitation to begin wider conversations about the idea of African feminist pedagogies.

Section 1: Background on critical pedagogy

African higher education is linked to the histories of class-formation in our societies, and because of this, those of us who work within the walls of the university, college, or technikon are especially vulnerable to amnesia when it comes to the pedagogical theories embedded within our contextual histories. The suppression of local languages in the academic space, the need to develop intellectual mobility across international, national, and cultural borders, the weight of canonical pedagogic methods institutionalised through colonialism, and the socially constructed gap between those given access to higher education and those refused access make it hard to remember deeply-rooted approaches to what it means to teach and what it means to learn in ways dedicated to social harmony, justice, and self-sustainability.

In addition, lateral barriers between academic spaces and other zones of teaching/learning in which we are engaged may prevent us from noticing the diverse realities of pedagogic practice in our everyday lives. We may simultaneously work with faith-based pedagogies, methods of teaching/learning deployed by mass media, other approaches conventionalised within “workshops” or “trainings”, and yet not ever get the opportunity to compare the myriad of techniques – and their assumptions about teaching and learning – we participate in (there is more commentary on this point in Section 2).

There is also the fact of our individual lives, saturated as they are in the processes of learning. While it may sometimes be possible to recall and analyse learning that has occurred within formal educational spaces, other experiences may not be as easy to hold within reflective, theorising, memory. A serious interest in pedagogy entails a level of personal work that is intensely demanding, and very rarely supported in academic territory. This may well be another reason for the fact that while there is much writing about African-based theories of gender and feminism, and about their implications, very few public discussions on pedagogy in higher education are available. How we, as individuals, have learned the most important lessons of our lives (and how we, in turn, engage in trying to share those lessons with those we love as friends, family, and allies) is rarely material for the seminar room, or lecture theatre.

In order to begin a conversation about G/WS teachers' approaches to pedagogy, it might be useful therefore to suggest some connections between African feminist pedagogies in higher education and other intellectual traditions of thinking about how, and why, teaching should be engaged with as a social practice. The conviction that pedagogies carry political interests, and that it is possible to design and implement teaching and learning strategies which challenge the status quo, is embedded in a long history of critical thinking about the connections between teaching, class, and transformation. [1] The following list of trajectories with which thought on African feminist pedagogies might be linked merely sketches the skein:

•  In Africa, it is difficult to think of a tradition of African philosophy dedicated to the deconstruction of colonialism except as a pedagogical initiative. The invitation to “think differently” about history, economics, psychology, and politics of culture, essentially invitations to “re-learn”, “re-member” comes from a diverse range of philosophers, historians, and political thinkers (e.g.Senghor, Nkrumah, Cabral, Fanon).

•  In the North, African-American traditions of critical pedagogy draw heavily on African philosophy/deconstruction of colonial minds and praxis and seek to discover knowledges which can counteract northern racism, and to embed those knowledges into curricula and educational cultures.

•  Northern feminist discourses on pedagogy are multiple. One thread deconstructs androcentric knowledges and patriarchal educational cultures; a second challenges the first by locating epistemological transformation in the deconstruction of imperialism, and demanding more sophisticated analyses of class and race; a third is acutely attentive to teaching practice itself, attempting to “walk the talk” in the classroom.

•  Freirean ideas on pedagogy are hard to locate by geography alone. The principles of participative pedagogies which seek to illuminate the knowledge and experiences of those systematically erased from dominant forms of “knowledge” are grounded in Freire's Latin American work, but have been adopted very widely within contexts where epistemological work is seen as quintessentially linked to revolutionary action against class oppression.

•  In Africa, the most obvious debates on gender and pedagogy have taken place in the field of gender and development – gender training is a well-established route to adult education, and there is a body of literature on the dominant approaches drawn upon. Most indigenous approaches are rooted in principles around participatory learning consciously connected to specific goals for social change.

•  In the African academy, feminist activism rooted in the politics of epistemology and organisations committed to rethinking the production of knowledge within African social sciences were established in the early 1980s (e.g. AAWORD, etc.). In addition, there has been increasing attention given to questions of taking women seriously as faculty members, researchers, educational leaders, and students. The need to theorise gender and education in the past ten years has led to a substantial body of writing about access, participation, and the difficulty of achieving gender equality in educational leadership and in certain disciplinary areas (such as science, agriculture, economics, and technology). There is much less research on the curriculum, per se, or on pedagogical strategies, but these are emerging.

These notes constitute, as far as we know, the first initiative to identify the need to theorise African feminist pedagogies in higher education. We want to start making explicit the links between a commitment to creating societies free of oppression, structures of educational opportunities, the politics of epistemology, and our teaching/learning practices. The vision is ambitious, but we offer the notes as a way of asking for more input on these links from the wide African community of those who “teach”, all of us who are “learning”, and those involved with gender activism and feminist work in our contexts.

Section 2: Towards African feminist pedagogies

Section 1 hints at the rich context in which our initial thoughts about African feminist pedagogies are embedded. There have been decades of research on gender issues central to disciplinary-based scholarship in politics, history, sociology, literature, and so on. There is also a body of research on gender and educational institutions in Africa and there are decades of experience derived from the design and implementation of “gender trainings” in a vast variety of contexts. To these three areas, we must add two more.

•  Firstly, the need to take gender seriously has animated, in various ways, discourse within political struggles for national independence, and within state-based negotiations with democracy. Communication about gender issues has occurred as much within parliamentary, NGO, military, and corporate spaces as it has within educational ones. While the details of this communication (and the links between gender-talk in educational spaces and gender-talk elsewhere) are context-determined and context-specific, it is safe to say that myriad sources influence what is known, taught, and learned about gender. Those currently employed formally as “gender educators” within African HE have, in all likelihood, been pedagogically active in many sites: NGO training rooms, policy committees, religious fora, advocacy campaigns, activist organising. This means that African feminist pedagogies are connected what it means to “speak/hear gender” – towards transformative ends – in spaces largely unconcerned with degrees, diplomas, or educational certificates.

•  Secondly, the experience of teaching about gender within African HE has been, on the whole, one of isolation. Up until very recently, individuals have usually been located within disciplinary-based departments, and identified as the “gender specialist”, responsible for designing and delivering courses without much collegial support (and often without appropriate institutional resources). Very few gender and women's studies faculty have had the opportunity to study issues of pedagogy itself, and most have been trained as lecturing faculty simply through the experience of being students themselves or though conforming to the norms of teaching practice encountered in their own departments and universities. There are still no professional organisations, nationally or cross-nationally constituted, responsible for the support and institutional strengthening of African feminists as teachers. Despite this, there has been an increase in the number of Women and Gender Studies teaching centres and departments. What this suggests is the extraordinary ingenuity, energy, and commitment of those who have been teaching women and gender studies courses in African HE for at least three decades. Each one of these teachers would have a story to tell about “pedagogy”, and about how she has managed the connection between a conviction that understanding gender is central to the education of critically engaged youth and standing in lecture halls with the responsibility of “delivering a course”. These stories form the backbone of African feminist pedagogies in HE.

The Teaching Resources Group (TRG) was one of several projects designed through a programme on strengthening gender and women's studies. Funded by the Ford Foundation, and hosted through the African Gender Institute, the programme aimed to create resources which would support the work of African feminist researchers active as teachers and writers in higher education. The focus on pedagogy was channeled though discussions which explored gender and women's studies curricula, and opened up a wide range of topics concerning the interactions between teaching, learning, and the value of gender analysis as a transformational paradigm.

Section 3: Teaching Resources Group

•  Introduction to Teaching Resources Group: As part of the effort to strengthen transformative teaching and research in the field of G/WS, a group of 14 experienced teaching faculty members from GWS teaching sites in Nigeria, South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Two discussions were held in 2003 one at the University of Ghana, (hosted by the Institute of African Studies); one in Cape Town (hosted by the African Gender Institute) to explore curriculum-creation in two critical (and inter-dependent) areas of G/WS: sexuality, identity, and culture and law and policy-making

•  Objectives of TRG: view

•  From the outset of the group's work, interest in the curriculum was embedded in the recognition that G/WS teaching has the power to stimulate, engage, and challenge students. Curricula were conceptualised as route-maps, responsible for illuminating teaching strategies for negotiation with students' experience, opinions, knowledge, goals and desires. Such route-maps, guidelines, or blueprints summarise a wealth of assumptions concerning pedagogic principles and processes. The TRG meetings unpacked some of these assumptions, and the following notes on African feminist pedagogies come from the TRG discussions. They are offered not as conclusive ideas about the “why” and “how” of transformative G/WS teaching, but, as has already been suggested, as the beginning of a conversation which deserves expansion.

TRDG discussions suggest that African feminist pedagogies can be approached through consideration of broad teaching principles, objectives, and tools.

•  Principles:

The TRDG discussions did not, at any point, have discussion specifically targeted at naming the principles individuals were working with in their G/WS teaching. The collective discourse, however, suggests that many at the discussion shared the following principles as African feminists who teach in higher education:

•  We value resources directed towards the support of African independence, democratic vibrancy, material self-sufficiency and resilient social harmony;

•  African Higher Education is one such resource, and has the potential to develop a wealth of professional talent, skill, creativity and innovation;

•  Teachers and learners in AHE share responsibility for creating safe, supportive, stimulating, participatory, grounded and critically active education;

•  Such education is impossible without serious, well-informed, challenging engagement with gender.

•  Gender analysis is a powerful skill, and an essential one in the design and implementation of any projects interested in eradicating poverty, inequity, injustice, and violence (what we are referring to as “transformational” projects).

•  Objectives

Within the TRG discussions, several objectives could be seen to guide thinking on engagement with teaching spaces and participants: our work seeks:

•  To create educational spaces in which teaching/learning can critically engage issues of poverty, inequity, injustice and violence;

•  To draw upon gender analysis as a vital paradigm through which to understand history and experience, and with which to imagine new models of social organisation and human being;

•  To strengthen teachers'/learners' capacity to engage – actively, critically, and confidently – with contextualised African transformation;

•  To develop teaching/learning processes congruent with our principles.

•  Tools

The TRG discussions were packed with ideas about what constituted tools for strong G/WS teaching and learning. A crude categorisation of these tools might look like this:

In order to develop strong G/WS teaching/learning spaces, we need:

•  History Tools: the resources of past and present experiences: (textual) “knowledge” (research, library holdings, journals, ICT resources, etc.); “knowledges” of local context – the experiences of participants; materials available through access to the media; materials developed by NGOs and policy-makers; life-stories of activists; poetry and cultural performance.

• 'People' Tools: colleagues in AHE, local context activism at a range of levels, students themselves, international allies and friends, and so on. It was agreed that a people-centred curriculum was vital to introduce the vitality, relevance, and viability of G/WS teaching and learning.

•  Process Tools: how to approach teaching environment, how to design/deliver curricula, how to nourish professional/personal strength of teachers/learners

Thinking about the process of teaching/learning was identified as a key aspect of any African feminist pedagogical practice. While it was critical to nourish the development of histories (the representation of experiences), and to maintain strong and dynamic communication with people actively engaged with work locally and internationally relevant to G/WS courses, the TRDG agreed that strategising the process of teaching and learning was the central tool within the package of African feminist pedagogical skills. Section 5 explores TRG ideas about this process (ideas about histories and people as vital energies with Strengthening G/WS for Africa 's Transformation can be found at www.gwsafrica.org).

Section 5: Process Tools

This section is based on discussions about building curricula which could be used for teaching gender and women's studies in African higher education. This section aims to offer a summary of key guidelines on pedagogical processes which emerged these very vigorous discussions on teaching resources. The guidelines (and some of the observations which accompany them) are offered only as an introduction to conversations about what it means to teach gender and women's studies as an “African feminist”. Not everyone in the discussions would agree with all the guidelines below, and many deserve fuller exploration, and more input from others.

Guidelines on how to approach the teaching environment

Contextual intelligence  

• One of the most powerful theories of gender is that becoming gendered , and engaging in the implications of being gendered , are contextually specific processes. Comparison of these processes (across time and space) often reveal interesting similarities, but they also reveal the dangers of making swift assumptions about gender dynamics. A critical guideline here is that curriculum design must speak to the contextual realities of the people who will participate in the course. It is always important to move beyond your own context, and learn the skills of engaging with new ideas and experiences, but it is very hard to do this without grounding in the analysis of what is familiar.
• As noted above, teaching G/WS in African higher education is a relatively recent initiative. What is not so recent is the idea of “gender training” and “capacity-building”. In many contexts, there are NGOs with a long history of talking about gender issues with the aim of teaching other people. It is often valuable to explore these resources of experience, asking questions about “what works,” “what doesn't work”, in these trainings.
• NGOs are also a critical source of information which can be used in the design of gender and women's studies curricula. They tend to be more in touch with challenges of policy-implementation, advocacy, and service delivery than academics, and are thus well positioned to guide curriculum designers towards locally interesting sites of debate. Some NGOs are also often willing to enter the university-space and contribute to teaching; others struggle with this because of the pressures of their own work, or because of historically-located divisions between “academics” and “civil society” workers.
• From the time they are very young, students are usually deeply tutored in being gendered and in gender dynamics. They are educated through family norms, peer negotiations, affiliation with religious and cultural institutions, engagement with the popular media, and through their own experiments in becoming fully active and alive in their own contexts. Their knowledge is vast, under constant discussion with one another (e.g. through talk about relationships, options in life, pain, and optimisms), and operative at multiple levels of their consciousness. Good G/WS curriculum design often initiates scholarship on gender and women's studies by offering a formal, organised, space for discussion of issues treated as “informal” or “non-academic” outside the classroom walls. Building curricula design and delivery through what students may already know is a strong route to relevance and contextualisation. It can also, however, (1) raise issues of what can, and cannot, be discussed in an academic space (2) alert students to new ways of thinking and being, which are challenging – these questions will be addressed below under Section 2.

Institutional intelligence  

• The structure of the institution will have a powerful impact on how, and to whom gender and women's studies can be taught. Most opportunities to teach gender and women's studies courses emerge through the energy of a single individual, located in a particular discipline (e.g. sociology or education). Where this individual is supported by his/her institution, the gender and women's studies course will then tend to be offered within that discipline. This, in turn, influences the level at which the course can be taught, the number of students involved, and who gets access to the learning. Where there is no support for the individual who wants to initiate a ‘G/WS'-course, introduction to gender issues may have to be integrated into the material already part of the courses taught. The lesson for curriculum-design here is clear: it is important to understand, from within your institutional context, what can be included in your curriculum as “legitimate” information, how much flexibility you have in introducing new information, the intellectual background of your students, and what they expect to encounter in a teaching environment.
• The resources available to academics who want to teach gender and women's studies are usually institutionally-specific. This includes teaching resources for students (library holdings, computer access, and so on), plant resources (teaching equipment, classroom size, movability of furniture in classroom space), and of course budget resources for staffing. The more resources there are, the more possibilities there are to develop curricula that truly meet all the interests of students taking G/WS. Where resources are constrained, the shape of the curriculum must dove-tail with what students can actually access, and with what it will take for the faculty member to deliver excellent teaching.
• Diverse studies on gender and women's studies teaching and research initiatives suggest that the space to teach G/WS always involves political negotiations with the institution. The shape, and outcomes, of these negotiations differ, but this reality means that your teaching work is often ‘visible' to institutional eyes in a way that would be unusual for other study-areas. This means that there is a special burden on G/WS teachers to be fully aware of how their courses are designed and delivered. Poorly designed curricula, or dissatisfied students, can threaten the sustainability of institutional interest in the whole area of G/WS teaching and research.

Contextual and Institutional realities, therefore, impact on curriculum design, and while it is vital to share knowledge about strong curricular practice, it is also useful to remember that syllabuses may not readily be transferred from one contextual/institutional space straight into another one. This is not a guideline “against” the use of theories and materials indigenous to spaces you are not immediately familiar with. It is guideline towards the power and value of local experience for gender and women's studies curriculum design.

How to design and deliver gender and women's studies curricula

Understanding the meaning of a “curriculum”

•  Most of us get introduced to curricula as though they were schedules, or itineraries – sequenced descriptions of topics, through which learning is approached as steps through time. Most curricula (starting from primary school) are lists of topics and sub-topics, where information is designed to be “fed” – one piece at a time – into the minds of learners. Dominant presentations of curricula disguise the fact that much thought has gone into planning which piece of information should build on which information (e.g. about sexuality) should be contained in high schools under a topic called “Biology” and which information should lie under the umbrella of a topic called “Christian Religious Education”, and what constitutes valuable information in the first place. Dominant presentations of curricula also tend to disguise their own assumptions about how learning happens. It is rare to find curricula in African Higher Education which explain in depth the nature of assignments learners will experience, the objectives of those assignments, and the learners' options for approaching challenges which may arise in the course of their journey through the time spent with the curriculum. In other words, conventional curricula do not look like blueprints for consciousness-change, strategically designed maps to move learners from point A to point B, along a path embedded into traditions of what constitutes real knowledge. The political interests of the curriculum are naturalised, and only get noticed in debates about curriculum change or re-organisation.

Curricula are, nonetheless, proposals about the best way to organise consciousness. Travel through a curriculum is designed to develop someone's mind (give them more information, enable them to perform new cognitive tasks, offer them access to power as “knowers”). This development is aimed at creating knowledge-citizens, people qualified through formal educational initiation, to be taken seriously in dominant processes of social organisation. Curricula are therefore political creatures: designs for engaging with learning which prioritise particular values and particular ways of seeing, and which offer rewards to those who comply with the programmes of cognitive action they prescribe.

G/WS curricula are also proposals for engagement with consciousness. The difference, however, between G/WS curricula and most other curricula is that their designers are – by and large – completely aware that the mind-activities they plan intend learners to enter unfamiliar territory. They are aware that the journey at which the curriculum hints will not merely “add” information to a learner's mind; it may well – in a sort of alchemy – transform aspects of his or her mind altogether. Familiar information may require re-analysis, new and challenging questions may emerge, and the connection between the identity of the learner and the material “learned” will be live with energy (creating a whole range of possibilities for learners' relationship to their contexts).

Designing a G/WS curriculum means understanding that you are offering learners a route through unfamiliar territory, and that you are doing this consciously as a strategy towards improving access to what it would mean to live in a world free of gendered (and other) oppressions.

Understanding learning as a non-linear process

“Learning takes place in formal and informal places and is not always an incremental process, there are zigzags and slippages, one learns through rebellion and resistance”
TRG Discussion Report, p 4

One of the early exercises the TRDG group did was to answer the question:
If you were in a classroom and someone wanted to guarantee that you did not learn, what would have to happen to ensure that you did not learn ?

Responses to the question included experience with imposed curricula, authoritarianism, discrimination, language barriers, rote learning techniques, peer pressure to ignore the teacher as well as sexism and gender discrimination both in the teaching space and in the materials used. There was a sense that learning in a classroom space took the form of a negotiation --- you identified what was essential to evade punishment, sought surreptitiously for information that was valuable, hid nuggets of something relevant or precious away from others, experimented with illicit routes to information, tried to “do well” but to stay “below the radar” of teacher and peer attention. Something was often only retrospectively acknowleged as a “learning”, and was the result of multiple formal, and informal, sources of information and experience.

The guideline here for G/WS curriculum design is that there may be value to extended discussions of single topics, and room for debates to be visited more than once in the course of a (for example) 14 week syllabus. Cyclical approaches to the presentation of material, and strong opportunities for learner participation, might be important to ensure that individuals' own patterns of “learning” can be accommodated. Finding ways to keep track of participants' opinions and ideas about the course as they go through the curriculum (through journals, or – for large lecture classes – regular opportunities to have ‘open discussion' sessions) is very important. Debate and even conflict (if well-managed) in the classroom space may be very useful to learning: resistance is interesting, and offers critical insight into what is important to learners (and, often, what may be “in transition” for them).

It is important that your curriculum has its own logic – a place from which you expect learners to “begin” engagement with the material, a pattern of chronologically-organised steps which follow that “beginning”, and a moment at which you call a (temporary) closure to the work. If it is true, however, that deep learning is not a linear, step by step, process, that means that your curriculum should ensure learners have opportunities to think about G/WS beyond the demands of their coursework. It might also mean that you cannot expect all your course participants to grasp everything you would like them to at once. When it comes to G/WS, some participants will “get it” much faster than others, and it is important to find ways to nourish those who are pushing hard towards the full potential of what gender analysis can offer while still supporting those with less enthusiasm.

Understanding that learning about gender has already occurred for students in diverse spaces, not all of them easily aligned with G/WS materials and ideas

Students have been fully engaged with “understanding gender” since they were born, and began integration into their families and communities as “boys” and “girls.” They are fully familiar, often, with religious and cultural discourses about gender, and are also familiar with media-driven ideas about the possibilities available for growing up as a “man” or a “woman” within their contexts. Three things flow from this: (1) a G/WS syllabus, especially an introductory syllabus, should draw heavily on students' own experiences to unpack ideas about gender and its influence on society – the use of popular magazines, local newspapers, current debates in talk shows, songs, and so on can illuminate as “academic issues” questions with which students are already engaged as people growing into adulthood in their contexts. (2) Ideas about gender (such as those about appropriate gender roles or taboo issues) may hold deep value for students, in their personal or spiritual lives. It is critical to find ways to offer information about gender in ways that encourage exploration, but do not stigmatise particular positions as “old-fashioned” or “stupid”. The goal is to open the classroom space for students themselves to ask questions about how gender is actually operating within their lives, and the lives of others. This means accepting that students themselves are not a homogeneous group when it comes to their current experience with gender analysis – the syllabus needs to encourage exposure to diverse positions, and to stimulate debate. (3) It is important that the curriculum is willing to engage with difficult material (such as discussion of gender-based violence), and to find ways for students to develop “voices” in naming, and analysing, issues previously consigned to informal, intimate, discussions between peers (such as sexual rights, masculinities and initiation, reproductive health, or questions of justice between men and women).

Understanding that the presentation of G/WS materials will impact on students' minds, hearts, and spirits

The goal of a transformational approach to G/WS is to offer something of concrete value to students' intellectual and professional growth, something which will move them from being passive “consumers” of information to active members of a society committed to building contexts free of discrimination at all levels. This is a goal that is explicitly committed to a version of “consciousness-raising”, within the boundaries of academic space. Such a commitment means that the curriculum-designer will need to think about how to approach topics, and questions, that students have not encountered before in academic settings, and how to accommodate individual students' reactions to these topics. The process of “seeing” gender often involves a sense of shock, or distress, as dynamics assumed to be “just the way things are” are revealed as political forces, actively working towards the exploitation of women, poor people, or other constituencies. It is important that where a curriculum invites students to become conscious of exploitative realities (for e.g., the structure of the sex trade, or the implications of privatisation on labourers' lives), it also offers them access to avenues of active engagement with those who do concrete work on changing conditions of cruelty, pain, or discrimination. It is never appropriate to build a curriculum that simply bombards students with new information about oppression – the effect of this can only be to create a sense of victimhood, despair, or (in defence) indifference/victim-blaming among the participants.

The key to designing good G/WS curricula lies in the students' hands

Dominant debates in theory on education note that “assessment” plays a critical role in curriculum design, and ask questions about how to ensure that student participation in a course gets evaluated fairly, consistently, and with reference to the course objectives. For G/WS courses, these issues dove-tail with a core guideline of curriculum design: the power of the course lies in what it is that the curriculum demands of the student, through class participation, assignments, essay-writing, groupwork, diary-writing, exercises, examinations, and so on. The more interaction demanded by the syllabus, the more likely it is that the course can develop a rich relationship with students. Where it is possible to include for every class, exercises, assignments, and opportunities for live discussion, it is much easier to understand students' approach to the material and to strengthen their participation as “co-activists” within the pedagogic space. Where traditional methods of assessment are used (such as the demand to write a long essay on a given topic, with pre-assigned materials attached), students' minds are much more likely to be focused on “getting the task done on time” than on actually engaging with the issues at hand. Where shorter assignments, encouraging regular writing and reflection on both individual experience and on assigned materials, are possible, this has a dramatic effect on students' willingness to see beyond “the course” to the meaning of the knowledge being explored.

Clearly, a curriculum-designers' ability to design assignments that offer students avenues for creativity and exploration has to do with the numbers of students in a course, the teaching-format (45 minute lectures, 2 hour seminars, etc), and the disciplinary framework in which the G/WS class is located. A module on “gender and literature” taught through an English department, attended by literature students, will probably have to ask students to do assignments similar to others familiar to them through literary studies (e.g., writing critical analyses of novels); a course offered as an independent G/WS course will have more flexibility about the style of assignments possible. Where the institutional environment is heavily dependent on examinations for assessing students and/or where classes consist of hundreds of students, it takes special ingenuity to design some assignments which can offer students an opportunity to engage with G/WS material. Most faculty embedded into institutional frameworks which rely heavily on exams stress that it is important to develop a range of diverse mini-assignments students can do to complement the weekly progress of the curriculum. Even if the institution has no way of weighting these assignments through a grade, students can be warned that doing the assignments will prepare them well for the examination questions (and questions can reflect the concerns explored in the assignments, so that after the course has been on offer for a while, word of mouth will alert students to the reality that doing the assignments does in fact support exam-based learning).

The bottom line is that good G/WS teaching is assessment intensive – the more opportunities students have to write, to give presentations in class, to speak about issues in front of/with others – and to receive interesting, individual, honest, and directed feedback – the stronger the process of their learning will be. This puts a heavy demand on the lecturer, and many G/WS teachers are already “adding” G/WS teaching to a demanding load, so the difficulties are real.

Footnote: 

[1] This section concentrates on traditions which have, largely, operated within the zone of adult education, especially in zones formally identified as “educational”. There are of course powerful religious traditions of pedagogy (some of which do interact with educational spaces), and vigorous debates within different faith-based traditions about how, and why, teaching and learning should be occur. These debates are very important, but beyond the scope of this section.