Women’s
Caucus I:
Enacting
Our Feminist Pedagogies:
Interdisciplinarity
Session Coordinator: Linda S. Coleman
Dept. of English, Eastern
“Maintaining
Interdisciplinarity in the Classroom with Feminist Composition Theory and
Pedagogy”
In order to maintain interdisciplinarity in any classroom, teachers should diversify their texts, assignments, and lecture topics. At the same time, feminist educators would add that they should stay conscious of their own ideology and authority in the classroom. Anti-foundationalist, post-modern, and critical or resistant education theories foster this interdisciplinarity and feminist approach in the classroom.
One specific way of fostering anti-foundationalist, post-modern, and critical/resistant theory and pedagogy is through student writing and communication. Social epistemic and post-process composition theorists often reflect many feminist theories about pedagogy. Interdisciplinarity can be maintained in any classroom through a closer examination of communication, writing types, and writing topics.
Post-process composition theorists Thomas Kent, Peter Vandenberg, James Berlin, and James Gee and social epistemologists Patricia Bizzell, Kenneth Bruffee, and David Bartholomae contribute thoughtful analysis and suggestions for maintaining open areas, collaborative efforts, and critical spaces in writing. These theorists offer composition theories for maintaining interdisciplinarity in the feminist academic setting.
Kathryn Wozniak
"Ecocriticism and Interdisciplinarity: A 'Natural' Feminist
Pairing in
the English Studies Classroom”
Whether ecocriticism and ecofeminism are integrated into a freshman eco-composition class or drive the curriculum in nature writing or ecocritical theory courses, they invite (or even require) interdisciplinarity. Freshman eco-composition courses I have taught, for example, immerse students either in feminist literature of place as a way to interrogate their own narratives of place, or they engage students with contemporary environmental issues like Native American versus Euro-American worldviews and women's responses to exploitation by oil and chemical companies. To engage with these complex issues, students must read in and between disciplines, a particularly ecocritical and ecofeminist practice demonstrated even more powerfully in classes where ecocriticism and ecofeminism are at the center, as in nature writing and ecocritical theory classes. This presentation will explore the impact of an inherently interdisciplinary approach--ecocriticism/ecofeminist--on teaching practices
in composition, literature, and critical approaches courses.
Robin Murray
Eastern
“Woman on the
Scaffold: Gender, Law, and Literature”
In “ Law’s Stories as Reality and Politics,” (1996) Catherine MacKinnon remarks, “Legislation has been predicated on elided voices, the common law marching majestically by unbringable cases. In the absence of women, children, people of color, and working people, the legal mill has been working on grist that is too thin to begin with.” (232). As an academic feminist, I find my research and teaching gravitate to those narratives that expose the elisions of law, whether I’m working on figurations of widowhood and the debates over women’s status in Victorian literature and culture or the impacts then and now of South Africa’s legislated racism under apartheid in the novels of so-called “coloured” writers like Zoë Wicomb and Bessie Head. Necessarily, my research impacts my pedagogy, most directly when I teach Victorian or South African texts that foreground literary and legislative grappling with gendered and racialized identities. Yet, since for me these two discourses are inextricably linked, the texts and topics I choose for composition and general education courses, similarly, return to the ways the law’s “stories” shape, shift, or overide identities and are, in turn, imaginatively contested and transformed in literature. Examining the two discourses in tandem empowers students as they begin to see that far from being fixed the law, like literature, is contingent. The law adapts and mutates to pressure, a pressure which could well come from them as they engage with these texts in the classroom and in the world.
Dagni Bredesen
Eastern