Feminist Pedagogy in Women’s Studies Classrooms: Some Critical Reflections

Based on a study of five women’s studies degree programmes, this article attempts to discuss pedagogical issues that are surfacing in higher education on account of the changing social composition of students since the implementation of reservations for Other Backward Classes in higher education. Critical pedagogy has not found much space in discussions on higher education in the Indian context. The exception has been reflections on feminist pedagogy that primarily draw on Freirian thought and the scholarship of bell hooks. Against this background, the article brings out how the epistemic principles of critical disciplines like women’s studies generate ethical expectations of the feminist teacher, particularly in relation to caste in this case. It goes on to discuss the limits imposed on these ideas of feminist pedagogy by the institutional and structural inequalities in higher education and how the dominant social composition of teachers necessarily limits possibilities of feminist pedagogy.