Feminist Pedagogy: Not Just for Women Anymore

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Your responsibilities as teachers at this community college are very important in educating the dedicated students that attend your school. As an aging baby-boomer approaching retirement, no doubt like some of you in this room today, I recognize the importance of providing opportunities for growth and experiential learning in our young adults that will affect not only their lives, but those of everyone else around them. It is this distinguished group of graduates that will become our leaders, policy makers, doctors, lawyers and business people. The focus on learning moving towards a learner-centered approach and away from a teacher based will become increasingly important to this new generation of learners.

Critical pedagogy is defined by philosophical education scholar Henry Giroux (Critical Pedagogy, 2011), as “an educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action”. Many of us who were students of days gone by only know of traditional methods of schooling. What a critical pedagogy approach can do is create a learning environment for those individuals who have been disenfranchised by a traditional teaching methods because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or cultural beliefs. Such an environment fosters the capacity for critical thinking and reflection. One method of critical pedagogy is the feminist approach. I will explain the root of critical pedagogy in the feminist approach. I will then discuss feminist pedagogy and its practical applications in the classroom. Lastly, I will demonstrate that it is not exclusively for or about w...

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...gress: Education as the practice of freedom, London: Routledge.

Hudalla, J. (2005). Transforming My Curriculum, Transforming My Classroom. EdChange and the

Multicultural Pavilion. Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.EdChange.org/multicultural

Shrewsbury, C. (1997). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s studies quarterly, 25 (1,2), pp.166-173.

Smith, M.K. (2002). Paulo Freire and informal education. The encyclopedia of informal education.

Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm

Stage, F., Muller, P., Kinzie, J, Simmons, A. (1998). Creating learning centered classrooms: What

does learning theory have to say? George Washington Univ. Washington, DC.

Waller, A. (2005). What is feminist pedagogy and how can it be used in CSET education? Retrieved

November 27, 2011 from http://fie-conference.org/fie2005/papers/1585.pdf

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