Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching

Abstract

The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching is a col lection of essays written during the past decade and edited by Margo Culley and Catherine Portuges, both of whom teach at the University of Massachusetts.The essays articulate in diverse voices a pedagogical method based to a great extent on progressive educa tional theory and the radical critique of education which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Many of the contributors credit or refer to the work of Paulo Freire, and most trace their political and intellectual development back to the various movements of rebel lion and resistance that arose in the 1960s.The essays reflect many of the ideas of radical educators such as Freire, Holt, Kozol, and Farber.There is the rejection of the "banking" concept of education and of the commodification of knowledge.There is a rejection of rigid hierarchical structures in the school and a call for greater at tention to personal experience and process in the classroom.There is a focus on the social/political/psychological oppression of individ uals and groups, and on the way, knowledge is socially constituted and historically conditioned.There is a critique of competitiveness and technological consciousness as these are fostered in schools.Finally, there is an emphasis placed on empowering students and teachers.What makes the overall critique of education and school ing and the pedagogical method presented in Gendered Subjects different from the radical educational critiques to which they tip their hat is that they infuse or imbue that radical critique with femi nist theory.In many respects feminist pedagogy is a reformulated and represented version of radical pedagogy.Feminist pedagogy, the educational theory of the female outcast, has forced radical ped agogy to become conscious of itself.All those rebellious sons who questioned the Father from an unquestioned stance have been forced to look at their own collusion in the patriarchy.The essays in this collection give credit to radical pedagogical theory, but they subsume it and move beyond it.One of the great values of this book is that it does breathe life into the older progressive or radical educational movement and stands in opposition to what is increasingly becoming the dominant discourse on schooling and education in the United States.When Secretary of Education, Bennett, the Superintendent of California's state Phenomenologv + Peda&o~v Volume 4 Number 9 19P.~

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