Introduction to High-Impact Feminist Pedagogies: Points of Encounter, Tactics of Change

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois This four-paper cluster takes up bell hooks’s challenge in “Theory as a Liberatory Practice” to dismantle the perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. We analyze specific theory-based feminist pedagogical practices, which we employ on four very different campuses with four content areas (general education, body politics, environmental studies, and women’s history) that engage with students’ frequent (and understandable) resistance to feminism’s unsettling work. Drawing upon theorists such as Kuh, Zeilinger, Alaimo and Heckman, and others, our courses use “high-impact practices” (HIPs) that invite students to “walk the (feminist) walk” through exercises in collaborative learning, role-playing and identification, material alterations and corporeal actions, and re-inventing daily tactics. These high-engagement classroom activities anticipate preconceptions students bring to our classrooms, support them as they enact often unsettling critiques of hegemony, and provide contexts in which they can “come closer” to feminist histories and communities as they discover the pleasures of feminist engagement. Through our analysis of pedagogical strategies, we argue that an analytic understanding of ideology is insufficient in effecting change. “Doing” feminism, then, means crafting goals and assignments that challenge and inspire students as they take risks with intellectual and material engagement with feminism within and beyond the classroom. Such practices are consistent with the increasing national demand for colleges to foster active student engagement, to use “high-impact” transformational learning for student retention and success, and to cultivate empowered personhood and citizenship. teaching cluster