The workshop is motivated by the questions:

• How can feminist theory help us design innovative research into teaching and learning?
• How can feminist theory help us develop creative pedagogic practices?
• What difference can feminism make to our students and to us as educationalists?

Purpose

This workshop offers a space to discuss a range of feminist theories which, to us, provide a counterpoint to an increasing neo-liberal, positivist reliance on outcomes, measurements and standardization which is becoming more pervasive in education across Europe. We explore what feminist theory offers for re-thinking pedagogic theory, practice and research though a focus on the body, materiality, affect, emotion and the phenomenal.  

The four workshop discussion papers are:

Carol Taylor: Matter and Meaning in the Multiple Curriculum

This paper uses new feminist materialist theory to re-think the production of the curriculum in higher education. The paper draws on key concepts from Barad (2007), such as intra-activity, entanglement and apparatus, to argue for the concept and practice of ‘the multiple curriculum’. Using empirical evidence from two undergraduate modules in a UK university, the paper highlights the enactment of the multiple curriculum as a feminist practice, showing how this recasts knowledge, reworks student-staff relations, and remakes the curriculum as a matter of human and non-human agencies.

Anja Kraus and Anna Lund: Defining the Tacit in the Tacit Turn

In the last few decades the tacit side of pedagogy has become a central topic in ethnographical, phenomenological and poststructuralist analyses. The diverse forms of “tacit knowledge” are not interpreted in terms of categories to describe phenomena of social life or characteristics of human beings, but as analytical tools helping us to understand the constitution of certain educational practices and appreciated knowledge domains at hand. Our contribution will focus the body-phenomenological approach and discuss its potential in terms to cipher out the impacts of the category “gender” as well as to empirically investigate its modes of performance.

Maud Hietzge: The Unisex Teacher

In Germany, teacher studies is reformulating early teaching practice through supervision of lesson planning, didactics and analysis. In seminar discussions, mentors are developing a critique of teacher trainees’ behaviour in two main directions, forcing women to act more like men and vice versa. This paper considers whether there an underlying scheme of a not gendered teacher role model. As periods of practice under pressure usually urge to doxa (Bourdieu) I consider the practical processes of reification left out in output oriented BA programmes. I use video material to illustrate the theoretical vocabulary of the materialist approach, to give insight into body phenomenology, and to analyze how practical reifications/ neutralizations in concrete situations of teacher education occur (Hietzge, 2013; Pille, 2013).

Anna Herbert and Maria Olsson: The construction of gender in didactical research using film analysis and posthumanist theory

Focusing on a film sequence where two girls and a boy film each other, we use an approach from Metz of ‘reading’ the film as ‘text’ to ask: How might we understand the constitution of the gendered body through intra-action with the film camera and the Gaze? What is the relationship of this ‘constituted’ body to ‘the emergence of the subject’ through didactics (c.f. Lacan)? From this, we create a polyphone conversation between Lacan, Deleuze, Barad and Haraway to develop a deeper understanding of the ‘gendered body’ and the subject. We relate neuroscience to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to re-think the relations between didactics, the gendered body and the subject, given that didactics relies heavily on the conscious subject. We ask: Is didactics possible at all within the context of a society of ‘cyborgs’ or is didactics dying? 

Alkemeyer, Th. & Pille, Th. (2012-2015). Die Körperlichkeit der Anerkennung. Subjektkonstitutionen im Sport- und Mathematikunterricht. DFG-Research Programm University of Oldenburg [http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/sport/forschung/soziologie-und-sportsoziologie/anerkennung]. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London, Duke University Press. Hietzge, M. (2013) “Fundamental corporal competences” in: A. Kraus (ed.), Praxeology as a Challenge in Pedagogy (S. 75-94). Münster: Waxmann. Lund, A. (2013) ‘Staging gender: the articulation of tacit gender dimensions in drama classes in a Swedish context’, Gender and Education, ifirst, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2013.860430 Pille, T. (2013): Das Referendariat. Eine ethnographische Studie der Lehr-erbildung. Bielefeld: transcript. Taylor, C. A. (2013) ‘Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom’, Gender and Education, Vol. 25, issue 6, pp. 688 – 703.