The Challenges of Using a Feminist Pedagogical Approach

The introduction of a pathbreaking new master’s degree in Gender, Culture, and Development required a pedagogy to match its program contents. Since the aim of the program was to cultivate the next generation of leaders with the knowledge, vision, and skills to not only implement the UN Millennium Development Goals but to set the future goals and agenda, students needed to experience an educational setting that was empowering. As such, we introduced feminist pedagogy into the first seminar, defining feminist pedagogy as the ‘extent to which a community of learners is empowered to act responsibly toward one another and the subject matter and to apply that learning to social action’ (Shrewsbury, 1997, pp. 166–173). But how do we introduce feminist pedagogy in a large class where many students had previously been subjected to the passive, rote memorization teaching utilized in most educational systems in which adult students would have participated, especially given the popularity of what Paolo Freire would call the ‘banking method of education’ in colonial regimes? We responded to that challenge by being as transparent as possible in our teaching, and by modelling feminist pedagogy in all that we did.