Women’s Studies classrooms pioneered participatory pedagogy but later abandoned it

Evidence

Those classrooms were the one space where pedagogical practices were interrogated, where it was assumed that the knowledge offered students would empower them to be better scholars, to live more fully in the world beyond academe. The feminist classroom was the one space where students could raise critical questions about pedagogical process. These critiques were not always encouraged or well received, but they were allowed. That small acceptance of critical interrogation was a crucial challenge inviting us as students to think seriously about pedagogy in relation to the practice of freedom. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 22 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Critical reflection on contemporary production of feminist theory makes it apparent that the shift from early conceptualizations of feminist theory (which insisted that it was most vital when it encouraged and enabled feminist practice) begins to occur or at least becomes most obvious with the segregation and institutionalization of the feminist theorizing process in the academy, with the privileging of written feminist thought/ theory over oral narratives. … Concurrently, the efforts of black women and women of color to challenge and deconstruct the category “woman”— the insistence on recognition that gender is not the sole factor determining constructions of femaleness—was a critical intervention, one which led to a pro found revolution in feminist thought and truly interrogated and disrupted the hegemonic feminist theory produced primarily by academic women, most of whom were white. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 136 (#expands, via linked claim)

Many feminist professors, for example, begin their careers working to institutionalize more radical pedagogical practices, but when students did not appear to “respect their authority” they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and return ed to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expected that students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 270 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The early feminist classroom tolerated student critique of teaching itself, enabling pedagogy-of-freedom thinking. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 22; Early feminist classrooms uniquely allowed students to interrogate pedagogy itself — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 22; Academic institutionalization severed feminist theory from feminist practice — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 136 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Early feminist classrooms uniquely allowed students to interrogate pedagogy itself #corroborates (0.90) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 22
• Academic institutionalization severed feminist theory from feminist practice #expands (0.88) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 136
• Student pushback makes teachers abandon progressive pedagogy they once championed #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 270
• The neoliberal movement abandoned academia for direct campus organizing #complicates (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 570