For feminist literary critics and teachers writing about and teaching literature "after feminism," the path is potentially treacherous. Feminist literary criticism, if it is applied too narrowly and used to reject complex literary texts that do not uphold an imagined feminist standard of "positive images" of women, can end up undermining other…

Online teaching and learning are becoming part of the fabric of the mainstream public and private university system. As such, more and more feminist teachers are feeling the pressure to teach online and hybrid courses or even to integrate course management software into their face-to-face classes. The strategies the authors describe in this…

The goal of this paper is to raise awareness about systems of oppression and privilege, as related to ability and disability in the classroom, and to provide tools to create instructional and institutional transformation. Feminist analyses of privilege, oppression, and intersectionality provide a framework for looking at the diverse experiences of…

Like any good story, the Sufi tale places the listener squarely in the midst of life; that is, precisely where learning takes place. The tale pointed out that learning can be both exhilarating and painful. In college classrooms, teachers (and their students) are spared neither of these emotions when they engage in the learning process. In this…

The author's partner Jay died on May 23, 2006. It was sudden and unexpected--he was 31, the author was 30. Her grief was prolonged and agonizing, and she has since learned that doctors refer to her condition as "complicated grief." Truly, she is not sure how she survived the first year after Jay's death. She certainly was not convinced she wanted…

Getting old is scary; getting old in the classroom is also scary. In this article, the authors, both beginning their seventh decade and have been connected to St. Michael's College for more than thirty years, inscribe themselves and others like them within a narrative of aging and pedagogy that mitigates the terror by contesting and refuting…

In "Teaching to Transgress," bell hooks is both welcoming and suspicious of those who would teach from a position that recognizes the limitations of personal experience. Teaching from experience can lead to a difficult and defensive essentialism that relegates students and teachers alike to categories and "types," and, as hooks argues, can obscure…

For this essay, the author takes as an organizing premise Jodi O'Brien and Judith A. Howard's notion of responsible authority--that "teaching is a value-based activity" in which educators should be striving to engage students in academic pursuits in order to create a moral citizenry. That is, educators need to acknowledge that they wield the power…

In this article, the author shares an experience during which she was not able to successfully construct a feminist space within her practice. She encountered a particular group of undergraduate students who did not like her feminist classroom, a classroom where all voices can be heard, and where knowledge is co-constructed through respectful…

In this article, the author describes her experience, hired seven years ago by a CUNY school, The College of Staten Island (CSI). She expresses that although incredibly challenging, that first year taught her an invaluable lesson. It was through these embodied experiences that she now understands the teacher's body, her body, creates a…

In this article, the author discusses action literacy, and suggests that identifying literacy as political, ideological, and connected to power structures and abuses of power is not enough for a proponent of active literacy and critical pedagogy. Action literacy is a literacy of positionality that highlights the importance of movement and flux. It…

Teacher authority is wielded in such a way that it is no longer "the" authority. Authority is used to open a space for students to find their own authority through speaking and writing--through voice. This process, so central to the feminist classroom, leads to the goals of feminist pedagogy as articulated by Robbin Crabtree and David Alan Sapp:…

In this article, the author demonstrates the very real possibility of using technology to help open up the classroom space so that students feel empowered. For her, such possibilities are at the center of feminist praxis, especially on urban campuses and at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Building a feminist pedagogy on an…

In this article, the authors ask: What is the difference between an assumed image of empowerment and a "real" image of empowerment? How can feminist educators help students to tell the difference? What do the discourses of current third-wave feminism and postfeminism teach women about representation, empowerment, and their place in the realm of…

Despite the recognition by early champions of the environmental movement in the United States that humans and the diverse ecosystems in which they live are indivisible, many environmental education policies and programs have tended to uphold the categorical distinction between "nature" and "culture" (e.g., Sessions; Soule and Press). In the late…