After decades of the feminization of education, it has been for some time commonplace for the college classroom to move beyond a “banking concept of education” to one where authority is shared and fluid between teacher and students (Freire). Miriam Wallace, in "Beyond Love and Battle: Practicing Feminist Pedagogy," suggests this educational ideology

Similarly, Gail Stygall links collaboration and feminist practice in her article "Women and Language in the Collaborative Writing Classroom," claiming feminist "liberal ideology […] assumes that the classroom is a free, open forum, because the instructor can mediate inequalities by articulating, modeling, and enforcing the rules of respectful, relevant exchange and development of positions" (253). As an early career academic and a graduate student in rhetoric and composition, I have been trained and initiated with these philosophies at the forefront of my knowledge base. It seems intuitive to me to teach this way. I have never considered teaching any other way. Indeed, looking back on my undergraduate education, the classrooms I encountered were far more often than not examples of negotiated and collaborative spaces. Perhaps this is a product of a liberal arts/humanities education and perhaps not so common in other disciplines. I can only speak of what I know, but it seems to me that the emphasis campus-wide is on active student-centered classrooms.

I bring this up, because while I teach with a feminist philosophy and most of the people I know teach with a feminist philosophy, or at least feminist practices, I find it is rarely said out loud that what we are doing is Feminism. Of late, it seems much of what we teach appears on lists of “best practices” and is offered as examples of “good teaching” in department training manuals and other teaching resources (See list of “An Assortment of Best Practices Resources” below). This is certainly an achievement for feminist scholars to have so transformed the field of English, Rhetoric and Composition. Indeed, Elizabeth Flynn, some twenty years ago, in the opening of her 1988 article “Composing as a Woman” notes that

Flynn goes on to emphasize that such ways of thinking about writing have also influenced the primary and secondary classroom and writing across the curriculum programs (244). In more recent years, feminist ideology has expanded far beyond a feminized expressivism to include under its petticoat the theoretically-based practice of third wave feminism, ecofeminism/criticism, service-learning, discourse studies, transformative resistance, and authentic rhetoric. Feminist pedagogical methods in the teaching of writing and reading has a far-reaching scope; it has become institutionalized in the Humanities and in other disciplines. Yet, outside of such pedagogical scholarship, the connection to feminist theory and cultural studies disappears. Particularly in the examination of readily available “Best Practices” manuals, marketed to educators across grade-levels and across disciplines, we see not only a disassociation with feminism but a commodification of feminist practice as well, boxed up and shipped right to your doorstep (See List).

In this collective essay, my colleagues and I have already stated that we share a concern for the distancing from the F-word by young women and girls in recent years. It is evident in the current American presidential contest, including the first-ever bid for the White House by a female candidate, that we have indeed “come a long way, baby.” Yet it is less encouraging to observe that few young women today identify as feminists, and are in many cases put-off by the word and the identity they believe comes with it. I noted my student Claire’s reaction to the F-word in the central essay and her connotation of such women as “Femi-Nazis.” Some will and have argued that the work of feminism is clearly dead or done if little girls grow up in a world with choices their mothers and grandmothers could only imagine (Bellafante, 1998). And while I believe it is truly remarkable that today’s second graders will never question whether or not a woman can run for president, I worry for a future of women afraid of being called feminists or who are simply unaware of what it means to do feminism.

Further, I see a link between the disassociation of our teaching practices from feminism and the disassociation of young women and girls from the F-word. It seems to me that in our failure to be explicit about our methods and philosophies, we take the shaping of the F-word out of our own control, leaving it instead in the less than capable hands of mainstream media, who far too infrequently challenge social constructions of gender, not to mention race, class, and ethnicity. We leave our girls out there to be manipulated by a mass media far more concerned with backlash than frontlash, and sensationalist journalism rather than reasoned reporting.

I propose that academics are suffering from a lapse in consciousness. Academia has been accused of an elitist “ivory tower” mentality over and over again, and part of that charge involves a weakness on our part to share our work, our connections, and our understandings with the rest of the world. The unnaming of feminist pedagogy is an example of this.

In my first-year composition classroom, I strive to make the unconscious conscious for my students. This relates mostly to the writing process, but also includes the social construction of identity. I strive to call my students’ attention to how we come to label ourselves as male or female, black or white, good writers or struggling writers, as well as the range of possibilities and intersectionalities in between. This is consistent with cognitive theories emphasizing the need to build upon existing schema and reflect actively on our learning processes (Wilson & Anderson). In a classroom environment of inquiry and multiple voices, collaboration and community, I continually ask my students to learn and reflect, reflect and learn, so that they might leave my classroom as active participant-learners aware of and ready to engage the social constructions surrounding them. This, I believe, makes them better thinkers, better writers, and better citizens. And this belief and practice is rooted firmly in pedagogical research that links thinking and action, consciousness and doing (Birnbaum).

Yet, in the hurry and bother of the short semester, I too often move from the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” to the “Pedagogy of the Distressed” (Tompkins). The details of reflection and explicit connection are easy to overlook under the looming stack of papers and the pressure to research and publish, not to mention coursework, service, and community activism. In the GTA training in my master’s program, I remember being told frequently that teaching should be my last priority because the other endeavors are more respected and therefore more likely to land a job at the research university. The reality of the first-year writing program today is that the majority of the teaching is done by graduate teaching assistants and contingent faculty – those most likely to be concerned primarily with landing a more permanent and respectable position on campus. Thus, it doesn’t take a far leap to reach an inherent flaw in the system: the people who have the greatest contact with our incoming freshmen also have the least time available to reflectively and actively teach them.

We are called upon to dynamically challenge the barriers of social construction by our foremothers, hooks, Rich, Butler, Flynn, and others. And these same women also challenge us to name, uncover, and make present what is absent in an effort to be active rather than reactive (Flynn invoking Rich 253). There are calls from others (Wallace, Maher) to claim our authority in the classroom. De-centered does not and should not mean de-authorized. And yet, in an environment where teaching is devalued in favor of publishing and research, it is far too easy to let the pedagogical philosophy slip, to go unexamined, to shift to auto-pilot. In this sense what is intended to be subversive is converted instead into institutionalized mumbo-jumbo that our students fail to grasp because we fail to make the connection explicit. The result is a watered-down and flaccid pedagogy, no longer radical, but merely a shadow of its original intent.

There are certainly plenty of academics who do manage to teach reflectively and explicitly connect feminist theory with practice. But these folks are the few rather than the many. Thus, it is no wonder that our young women and girls shy away from feminism. When only a few actively voice their ideology, they become labeled as radicals, outside of the norm, extremists and theoretical terrorists (read: Femi-Nazis). If we intend to help our young women and girls to self-identify in the way we do, then we need to show them what that looks like by re-claiming and de-mystifying that which we have created. Further, if we expect our work to be valued as intellectually and monetarily valid, then we must explicitly link our practice to theory. The classroom is the ideal space for gender performance, engagement, theoretical inquiry, collaboration, discovery, social action, intersectionality, negotiation, and resistance. As teachers then, we are well suited to claim power and authority over this realm, this private made public, this narrative made rhetorical. We are well suited to engage our students in an active and ongoing conversation about cultural assumptions of language and identity, to interrogate shifting relationships of power in the classroom and beyond, and to re-claim classroom space as a contact zone. And in so doing, we may find a new revival in the F-word, a new celebration of its importance and relevance to academia and the world at large.

Twenty years after Elizabeth Flynn linked feminism and composition studies in “Composing as a Woman,” we have still more work to do to enact her calls to engage an active feminist pedagogy in the college classroom. Our challenge is to create a new kind of university, one that privileges conscious pedagogy and reflective practice, while supporting the teachers who do the bulk of the teaching, so they can do it well. As feminist teachers and academics, we must name, uncover, and make present our involvement in the “best practices” of teaching. We must re-claim teacher training programs so that connections between praxis and theory are made explicit and front-of-mind for the next generation of teachers. If we as feminist practitioners are successful in this re-authorization of pedagogy, we may find in another ten or twenty years that second graders proudly display a budding feminist identity.