Against from Within: Finding Feminist Pedagogical Spaces between Academic Institutional Margins

Abstract

In this article, the author shares an experience during which she was not able to successfully construct a feminist space within her practice. She encountered a particular group of undergraduate students who did not like her feminist classroom, a classroom where all voices can be heard, and where knowledge is co-constructed through respectful sharing of knowledge and lived experiences. The author encountered passive aggressive behaviors that made it difficult to confront the resistance. There was bullying towards her and bullying towards other students. Then, through a deconstruction of the experience and an examination of the research she developed some strategies to prevent the reproduction of her experience. These strategies emerge from Maher and Tetreault's four critical themes of voice, mastery, authority, and positionality.