Intersectionality takes into account how inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality "intersect," or work in combined ways, in the lives of Black women and other women of color. As a holistic teaching approach, it also has relevance for all people, male and female, straight and gay, rich and poor, and along the various continuums between…

It is confusing to be a feminist student. Deconstruction is "de rigueur"; reconstruction less so. Awareness rises while answers recede. Feminist students seek out learning experiences that disrupt, empower, and make them feminist students not only by what they learn, but also by how they learn, by the pedagogy in which they engage. Certainly there…

Gender Issues in Counseling is a popular course in a master's program in counseling at a university in a diverse metropolitan area. An objective of the course is to examine contemporary technoconsumer culture and its institutions (such as multinational corporations and corporate economic imperatives) through an ecofeminist lens that views both the…

In this article, the author intends to focus on the ruptures that sometimes emerge when his outsider and insider identities clash, shift places, or simply exist together in the classrooms he inhabits as teacher. He provides what Jerrie Cobb Scott calls an extended "think about" where he unpacks his own uncritical dys-consciousness and how it has…

Studies on gender discourses in classrooms have specifically examined how students negotiate their individual gender identities while disregarding their lived realities within a historical context. Nevertheless, although it is difficult and uncomfortable for them, students' responses to discussing gender reveal that the discourse positively…

For decades, feminist teachers have been working in a chilly political climate. Rightwing critics claim that women's studies programs suffer from "insularity and narrowness, ideological bias, and a tendency toward misinformation." In the mainstream media, feminism is both vilified and trivialized. It's no wonder that many students doubt that…

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…

Several theoretical and pragmatic questions arise when one attempts to employ feminist pedagogy in the classroom (or to study it), such as how to strike a balance between classroom order and instructor de-centering and how to productively address student resistance. In this article, the author describes how she took on her final project for a…

Teaching students to think critically while integrating their personal experiences with feminist scholarship has become a very important objective in the Introduction to Women's Studies course. Women's studies introductory courses are designed to introduce students to feminist inquiry, using gender as the center of analysis while examining its…

The images of fat professors encountered in popular culture are few in number and negative in depiction. In this article, the author discusses on how will the professorial body affect the way in which students perceive the professor's teaching abilities. The author concludes that bias against fat professors, professors of color, and other…

From interacting with their students, many teachers are aware that the concepts of feminism and environmentalism can conjure up impoverished, deficient, and equally painful stereotypes. For some college students, feminism can mean merely equal pay for equal work. Environmentalism may trigger similarly limited associations, but inevitably…

Values are principles or standards that people have decided are desirable to live by. The question of whether values can or should be taught to college students has been debated for decades, with the pros incorporating moral concepts into curricula and the antes scorning such efforts as not only inappropriate but also intellectually dull. In this…

Mathematics, as it is currently and widely taught, is not equally accessible to girls and boys and this appears to relate to preferences of pedagogy. Boaler contends that the traditional way that mathematics is taught enhances boys learning experiences in mathematics and hinders those of girls. She argues that a progressive pedagogy in mathematics…

This article focuses on women students' perceptions of and responses to the presence of men in a Women's Studies (WS) classroom. Like other feminist scholars (Bignell; Sethna), the authors feel strongly that it is necessary to incorporate students' perspectives into the theory and practice of feminist pedagogy. But although the issue of men's…

In her 1974 essay "Toward a Woman-Centered University" Adrienne Rich notes that, contrary to popular belief, American universities are not bastions of free thought but patriarchal institutions that reinforce negative aspects of society, such as aggressive competition, domination, hierarchies of power, and gender inequity. Thirty years later Rich's…