Feminist Pedagogy

So I wrote a review of Kay Siebler's book, Composing Feminisms, for yesterday, our last meeting of 601. Siebler employs a distinct feminist methodology and style, saturated with self-reflexivity and critical questioning regardless the topic of inquiry. She is adamant about the fact that feminist teachers are open about their political and social position and bias and that they operate as conscious agents in opposition to the systems responsible for constructing such bias.

What I am really thinking about today is sharing sites of online inquiry with the public.

I created a Google site for my class over Thanksgiving break so that my students could have a convenient  interface where they could read and comment on each other's project proposals. Blackboard leaves much to be desired when it comes to the forum function; maybe its just me, but I find it to be clunky and inconvenient. Besides a glitch with one of the pages, the Google site is working out wonderfully. It is more time consuming to comment on each student's contribution than I thought it would be, but I think I'll get faster as I figure out more efficient ways to utilize this space. I wish I would have been doing this for the whole semester, and I am really looking forward to implementing it in my next class.

Getting back to the feminist pedagogy, though: Siebler says that laying oneself open for critique is one of the primary tenets of feminist scholarship. In that spirit, and in light of this evaluative, assessment-filled time of the year, I offer the work I have done with this site and with my students to you, kind reader, in hopes that I might receive some suggestions and yes, even some critique. Perhaps I'll be informed that you think I have no business making our site public, or that I shouldn't comment on my students' writing publicly, or that the comments I am making are too directive, maybe too vague. If so, do tell. I won't be leaving this link up forever, but I post it now with the bold, adventurous spirit I imagine Kay Siebler to have embraced as she wrote her book. 

Here it is:

Writers Unite 

Again, any comments, suggestions, or critiques are welcomed. Also, the jury is still out on Siebler's work, but I think that her effort deserves respect.