PhD thesis -
School of Education -
Faculty of Humanities / In an attempt to add the voices of African feminist educators to the narrative field, and to
address the critique that feminist discourses have generally been couched in theoretical
abstraction, this study, which was conducted with five university women educators from various
parts of Southern Africa, explores the enactment of feminist pedagogies in English language
classrooms. The study was guided by the principles of feminist research methodologies, which
advocate sensitivity to the subjective, emotional and biographic factors that shape the
researcher and researched. Drawing from a suite of data sources, which comprised
autobiographical and biographical narratives, lecture observations and interviews the study
explores how the social variables of race, class, gender, politics, religion, etc. have influenced
the participants’ feminist and language identity formation, and by extension how these inform
their teaching of English from a feminist perspective, in terms of What they teach; How they
teach, and Why they teach the curriculum content that they do.
Taking the view that the personal is political and potentially pedagogical, the study
provides a cursory commentary on the participants’ childhood and early adulthood, with the
intention of exploring the potential a retrospective gaze of their identity formation has in terms of
how they frame interpersonal relations with students and colleagues, and the enactment of their
teaching identities. Identifying for more nuanced investigation the study tracks the trajectories of
the participants’ coming to feminist consciousness, with a special focus on their adoption of
project identities which they enact through their theorizing and teaching of English from a
feminist perspective.
Given their subscription and investment in narratives of emancipation that subvert social
injustices and repressive domination, the study explores, at length, the complexities of feminist
teacher identity in relation to the themes of difference, dialogue, and epistemologies of
experience, all of which invariably encompass the overarching theme of feminist teacher
authority. Acknowledging the slippery terrain of teacher and student identity calibrations, the
study differentiates three ways in which authority is generally conceived of in feminist pedagogy,
viz. authority versus nurturance, authority as authorship, and authority as power. In discussing
the authority versus nurturance I argue for unhinging the female teacher from traditional
associations of her with care-giver and intellectualised mammy. Urging for recognition of the
woman teacher as female but non-maternal, I argue for a recontextualised and
reconceptualised understanding of the female teacher – one that foregrounds her capability of
offering critical intellectual nurturance. In exploring the delineation authority as authorship,
which entails the mutual sharing of teacher-student personal experience in relation to broader
public and academic discourses, the study cautions against the potential for personal
epistemology to circulate within the realm of the familiar, narcissistic and sentimental, in the
absence of meaningful critical and contextual pedagogic and educative relevance. In this regard, I suggest the consideration of two pertinent questions: viz. i) is there a shared
assumption that the personal is good and the impersonal bad? and ii) given that other
discourses of the personal are operating in the feminist classroom, exactly which personal are
we referring to when we seek to validate the epistemology of experience? I argue that the
pedagogic and educative worth of both teacher and students’ personal disclosures need to be
subject to critical, analytical, and productive reflection to assess their value as knowledge.
Critiquing enclaves of feminist pedagogical scholarship that suggest divesting the
classroom of teacher authority as a way of rendering it more democratic, the discussion on
authority as power agitates for an unmasking of the inevitable pedagogic and educative
authority that the feminist teacher wields in the classroom. Through empirical evidence it
illustrates variants of teacher authority that operate in the classroom and supports Gore’s
(2002), proposition to develop a theory of pedagogy and power by acknowledging that:
pedagogy is the enactment of power relations between teacher, student and other significant
partners; bodies are the objects of pedagogical power relations, and in pedagogy, different
differences matter; the kind of knowledge produced in pedagogy interacts with the institutional
site and the techniques of power employed there; and pedagogy proceeds via a limited set of
specific techniques of power.
The study concludes with a theoretical and methodological reflective synthesis. The
theoretical synthesis presents the central lines of argument that emerged from the issues
investigated. The methodological reflective synthesis presents the participants’ comments on
the validity of the study and the value that accrued to them by virtue of participating in the study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/1837 |
| Date | 17 November 2006 |
| Creators | Perumal, Juliet Christine |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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