Fictioning authority: Writing experience in feminist teaching and learning

Abstract

This paper explores connections and tensions between practices of feminist teaching and learning and psychotherapeutic work, in relation to three areas: issues of authority, the crafting of experience into narrative account, and the production of safe (enough) spaces for exploration of (students‘/clients’) personal meanings in relation to socially structured differences and inequalities. Drawing on examples from teaching, I discuss writing as a mode of representation of personal experience that both facilitates its expression and containment, and thereby supports individual and group processes. The paper ends on a cautionary note by highlighting limits to the parallels drawn between (feminist) therapy and teaching. Nevertheless, it is argued that the challenge within both arenas is to use the power with which we as practitioners are invested to foster conditions for transforming inequalities, while maintaining the structural ambivalence of our own institutional positions.