Pedagogy Part II

I’m not sure I have a cogent response this week, but rather impressions I had from the reading.

  1. If I were to do am ethnographically inspired study—and I suppose I am, since I’m hoping my dissertation will make use of case studies or focus groups—I’d be (and am) absolutely petrified of receiving an email similar to the one Kay Siebler received from Lynn Worsham. On page 112, Worsham understandably tells Siebler that she “was perplexed you didn’t discuss them [16 feminist pedagogy themes] with me, if not before the visit then after. Why didn’t I tell you that I was nervous about your approach? You didn’t tell me what your approach was […] it didn’t feel very ‘feminist’ of me to be kept in the dark about the measure through which I was being interpreted.” Siebler handles this well, I think, by acknowledging her own error of not offering full disclosure. But her rationale for not providing full disclosure in the first place also seems sound (she didn’t want her 16 principles to potentially influence the way her case studies taught/acted in the classroom). The way Siebler owns up is laudable, writing “After receiving Lynn’s email, I knew I had made a wrong decision in not sharing the themes with her (and others). If I were to do the research again, I would use the historical definition/themes to begin a conversation about what feminist pedagogy is” (113). I’d feel badly if I made a similar, well-intentioned error in my own study. Still, I know if I had been on Siebler’s end, my face would have turned awfully red after reading that email.
  2. I’m really curious how Siebler would respond if someone enacted only one of the sixteen principles in their pedagogy and called themselves feminist instructors. I’ve been talking about this point before, but Siebler seems pretty disconcerted that many people enact principles of feminist pedagogy and instead call it critical or libratory pedagogy. I’m so curious, in fact, that I may just email her.   
Published in: Uncategorized on November 29, 2010 at11:41 am Comments (5)

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