Recently I attended an online conference presented by ACUE called “Creating an Inclusive Online Learning Environment”. I thought most of the information was very useful, except there was one line that stood out to me: “Structure helps everyone and hurts no one”. It reminded me of when Barabara Omolade says, “the absence of structure leaves students without a clear sense of where the course is going. It is like telling students to drive to California from New York without knowing how to drive very well and without a road map” (39). At first I thought, ok this works, but then I also thought of hooks’ experience with college structures, “I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker… they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination… Nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion…an undercurrent of stress diminished our learning experience” (hooks 4-5).
There are times when I need structure, it keeps me accountable; however, structure can also be limiting, confining, suffocating. Some students need structure, I agree with that, but other students need the flexibility and the malleability a feminist pedagogy could provide. To say that “structure hurts no one” is a very limited perspective of not knowing what it is like to be a single mother with a sick child, writing a paper until 2am for an 8:30 am class that has an hour commute, while still wondering what to do about day care. I was unable to stay home since I had already used my only allowed absence when my car broke down. Having a sick child is scary enough, but to have to ask for an additional absence and be told that my “unexcused absence” will decrease my grade is just another stress that weakened my drive to learn.
Although hooks is writing of the boredom involved in class lectures, the struggles of a single mother also encourages teachers to “rethink teaching practices… strategies to enhance learning…[and] recognize that each classroom is different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized [sic] to address each new teaching experience” (7, 10-11).
Omolade offers three levels of structure within Black Feminist Pedagogy: 1. power being expressed through the relationships and personal connections between teacher and students, 2. assessment being complicated by ideas versus grammar and having to face uncomfortable feelings to raise the bar for her students so that grades are based on ability to communicate, without exception and 3. the institution having influence on teaching methods, content, and political understanding.
Going off these three premises, Shrewsbury has three points of teachers’ responsibility to their students; to enable empowerment, instill a sense of community, and promote leadership. Enabling empowerment consists of creating individual and collective goals, fostering independence, instilling individual responsibility to the whole, promoting the development of frontal lobe skills, and increasing students’ self-esteem and competence (Shrewsbury 10-11). Shrewsbury also brings up the notion of the joys and difficulties of learning—one such joy and difficulty is the development of self and the distancing from society. As hooks writes, “School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was tom place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone” (3). To instill a sense of community, Shrewsbury states teachers must: understand the classroom as being a collection of distinctly different individuals who are coming together in a classroom community; have awareness of the difference between men and women, according to her being that men want rules and women want connections (12); and acceptance that “Decision making when there is a community of mutuality rather than a community of isolated individuals can take place by consensus as well as by formalized decision rules” (12). In other words, rules can be made and changed when individuals decide to work together. The leadership aspect ties back into empowerment with individual and collective goals, the development of frontal lobe skills, responsibility to the whole, and a display of competence; however we need to express “our ability and our willingness to act on our beliefs” (13) because without empowerment, leadership is impossible.
hooks also promotes empowerment to transfer lessons into the world, flexible agendas, focus on individual needs, establishing community, acknowledgement of intrinsic value and collective contribution, the deconstruction of old values, putting together a collective effort for change, acceptance and discussion of individual differences that diverge from heteronormative standards, and exert an effort to stop biases and domination (6-10).
What all these reading have in common are the ideals that the teacher is not the head of power, but an active participant in the classroom community, that we must discuss what we know and reflect on our personal experiences as individuals (on topics such as abuse, sexism, discrimination, racism, and so forth) and work together in a group effort to learn about the histories and experiences of women and other oppressed communities so that we can create social change and change our reality outside of the classroom.
Three questions I want to ask in order to generate a collection of histories of our unique class are: (Note: Remember this is a public site)
- What situations have you experienced oppression for your differences as an individual, in the classroom setting or outside of it?
- What situations have you experienced in which the common norm has been challenged and successfully renegotiated?
- What can we do in our daily lives and/or as a class to instigate social change?
