Potentialities of Participatory Pedagogy in the Women’s Studies Classroom

Abstract

In my classroom, at the end of the semester there are a lot of hugs among peers, fist bumps, and cell phone numbers exchanged. The start of the semester, on the other hand, presents a very different scene, with a lot of cold stares, nervous toe-tapping, and eyes averted to more interesting media on cell phones. How did we, both instructor and students, manage to get to Point B (the former happy scene) from Point A (the latter beginning stages)? Much of the relaxed atmosphere of “Point B” owes itself to a loosely structured approach to student participation in my Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies course. In this essay, I will describe this approach toward participation (which helps create a welcoming, “safe space” environment) along with feedback, both positive and negative, from previous students. Within the first week of class during each semester, I ask my students to define their means and methods of their participation, how they are “allowed” or not allowed to participate in the class, as Daria mentioned in the opening quotation to this essay. Creating participation norms enables us to jointly develop explicit expectations of how we wish to interact with, and be treated by, each other in the classroom. Based on Don Blake’s “Norming Exercise” and Jim Cummins’s Negotiating Identities framework, this exercise destabilizes and refocuses power dynamics (student-teacher; student-student; safe spaces/unsafe spaces) and privileges (the speaker and the listener; agreement and disagreement). Sample questions from these frameworks that students use to construct their participation norms include, “What will we need to make our classroom discussions more effective?”, “How will we handle conflict?”, and “How will we build a positive climate where everyone feels listened to?” Through feminist pedagogical (Maher and Tetreault) analysis of classroom behavior and student interviews, I will argue for a wide range of disciplines to employ this form of participatory pedagogy in their classrooms. This essay will detail why norming classroom participation is a necessary tool for a progressive learning environment; how individual classes have created different means of communication and the benefits and detractions of each method; how norm-