Fear of Violence in the Classroom: Feminist Backlash and Feminist Pedagogy
by Angela K. Simon
Hello DWCers! I'd like to begin by thanking everyone who submitted suggestions for the Graduate Student Corner, as well as to the many graduate students who have contacted me, and the many members who have been so helpful in their responses. Without all of you, this column would not be possible.
I received a few suggestions from tenured faculty about what they thought graduate students needed, and at first, I had only received a few responses from graduate students telling me what they needed. I say at first, because that all changed in the days following the tragedy at Northern Illinois University on Feb. 14th, 2008. For those of you unaware of the events that unfolded at NIU on the 14th, according to university officials, shortly after 3 p.m. a student entered a class in one of the lecture halls on campus and began shooting. Five NIU students were killed and 18 other students were injured before the shooter took his own life.
It the days following this horrific event I began to receive many emails from the graduate student members of the DWC. Graduate students began to voice their concerns about feminist backlash in the classroom, and their concerns that the backlash might take the form of a school shooting. Emails read: " I know it is rare, but it is scary! All I've been able to think in the past 24 hours is if I have a student, current or past, who might have found what I had to say in the classroom so unpleasing or uncomfortable that he or she could be driven to quiet my voice in the way that the voices at NIU have been silenced… I was thinking that maybe you could ask the DWC how they deal with these issues and fears and include that in the column. I mean, if others are thinking similar things."
And indeed others were thinking similar things. Another email read:
"I wondered if you might include something in the graduate student corner about feminist backlash in college classrooms. The horrible atrocity at Northern Illinois University Thursday has gotten me thinking. I've been thinking because I pride myself on pushing students to think outside of the box. It is no secret that it can be uncomfortable when students are first faced with patriarchal realities, and sometimes students naturally get angry when they first begin to grapple with those ideas and concepts. That anger has many forms in the classroom, and recent events on college campuses have had me wondering how far I'm willing to go to educate my students. I love teaching, but I love living, and I would never want anyone to get hurt because of something I said in the classroom. Do I stop pushing my students or stop pushing them so hard? It is all a bit overwhelming and a lot to digest and I just wondered what others were thinking about it all."
Another graduate student emailed and explained the violent opposition she has already faced in the classroom "in response to introducing feminist ideas" and expressed her concerns when she said:
"I try to push my students, but now I have to ask myself how far I am willing to push my students-figuratively-even with the best of intentions, if they are going to shoot back-literally."
Finally, one graduate student wrote:
"I really care about teaching, and I really care about getting my students 'out of their box', especially when it comes to gender issues, but I don't know that I am passionate enough about fighting patriarchy to enter a counter-hegemonic war where students shoot back!"
In the end, I received 32 emails from graduate students asking if I could incorporate their concerns about feminist backlash in the classroom and school shootings into the graduate student corner for the next issue. Being a graduate student myself, I could understand their concern and how, paired with everyday lived experiences of facing feminist backlash, the event at NIU could have seemed scary and potentially overwhelming.
In response to the emails I received from the graduate students voicing their concerns about feminist backlash in the classroom and their fear of future school shootings, I posted a call for advice to the list-serve and solicited thoughts from the membership on this topic. The call I posted read:
"…So, my question goes to members of the division who have some experience teaching on gender issues in the classroom, be it criminal justice courses, sociology courses, or something else; or to members who identify clearly as a feminist in academia, despite the classroom content of their courses. My question is "What would you all say to graduate students, or other colleagues, who are suddenly ultra-aware of backlash against feminist/progressive thought in the classroom/academia today?" I'd ask that you keep the context of this question in mind– recent shootings on college/university campuses, but also allow yourselves to be broad enough to include whatever experiences of backlash/violence this question brings to mind…"
The responses I got to this call varied quite a bit, but there were certainly themes amongst the responses. It seemed that many of the respondents wanted to remind graduate students, and colleagues in general, who might be concerned about their safety after this event, to "keep it in perspective". That is, many people sent a message asking that I remind people of the rarity of these sorts of events (these being school shootings) and that while it's always good to be aware of our surroundings that everyone living in fear would be a sad result.
One DWCer wrote:
"My advice is more general, that is, is not necessarily confined to students concerned about feminist backlash, but it might be helpful. I would encourage graduate students in criminology to apply the skills they are learning to the problem. I am as horrified as anyone else by the NIU shootings (and those at Virginia Tech and elsewhere), but I also know the risk that I will become the victim of such an event is tiny. The Almanac of Higher Education indicates that there were 17, 487, 475 college students enrolled in 4,392 institutions. If we assume that 20 persons were victims of the types of offenses that occurred at NIU, the murder rate is .11 per 100,000 students. I know this is simplistic, but we are all prone to exaggerate our personal risk of victimization when we can identify with the victims. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there were 23-occupation related fatalities for all persons in 'Education, training and library occupations' in 2006, for a rate of .3 per 100,000."
In a similar fashion, another DWCer wrote and offered the following advice:
"Remember that we are social scientists who know about probabilities and about the manipulation of populations. As frightening as they are, school shoots are extraordinarily rare events, certainly rarer than homicides in general and even they are rare. Incidents such as these are excellent vehicles to advance conservative, punitive agendas and have been used in this manner in the past. If we live our lives from a place of fear, especially fear of rare events, we are lost as change will no longer be possible. Certainly anything is possible and bad things do happen, but it's far more likely that feminist teachers will change more people's lives for the good than to be an excuse for one angry and crazy bully to shoot others. Life is way too short and precious to live in isolated fear."
A DWC member also mentioned that while it may be easy for some to feel a personal connection with others in the classroom who have experienced violence, and while feminist backlash is a very real issue, that "Another issue that needs consideration is whether we should regard these events as the extreme end of a continuum of feminist backlash (I haven't seen any information on NIU regarding the motives of the offender) or as qualitatively different from less catastrophic events." This member raises the very good point, that while I am discussing the two (school shootings and feminist backlash) in relation to one another in this column that there is no evidence to suggest that the two were necessarily connected at all in the events at NIU.
In addition to acknowledging the fear, but reminding us all of the rarity of the events, another theme which was strong in the responses was that of feminist pedagogy. Many DWCers responded with sympathy and empathy to those who are concerned about their risk in the classroom and offered tips of feminist pedagogy as a vehicle to facilitate conversations about gender and feminism, with even the most resistant classroom, as a way to broach the subject with a reduced risk of the animosity that is sometimes faced by instructors, both graduate students and faculty alike.
One DWCer wrote and told me that this was a need for "feminist pedagogy, times 10" and encouraged me to include teaching tips in the column. Others shared their tips with me to pass along to the membership. Those tips included:
"I have developed a strategy that is essentially what I think of as de-clawing the lion. I start with ways that males are disadvantaged in the system before I even begin to introduce women. That seems to get the defenses down. And, interestingly, in my evaluations the number one comment that I get is that they had no idea about the pathways women follow into crime nor the disadvantages they face in the system. Most say they think it is the most thought-provoking thing they have faced in their entire college career."
"I ask students whether they believe men and women should receive the same pay for doing the same job. Then I congratulate them on being willing to be liberal feminists. That is how I introduce my lectures on feminist theories. So, instead of introducing the word feminism first, I lead them slowly into the subject matter."
"I tell my students that I am not there to change their beliefs but they will have informed beliefs as a result of the class. They seem to be much more open to changing their minds because they know up front they can take any position they want but also have to know what the data and research say."
"I would recommend that someone keeps in mind the ideas of feminist pedagogy. This is of special importance during class exercises and discussions. I would encourage each of us to be sure, no matter how patriarchal or offensive a student's comment might be, that they don't feel attacked for having shared. Remember to learn to use teachable moments in the classroom. They can be precious gifts offered to us by the teaching gods. No matter how 'out there' student's comments might feel to us, they are living their own (that is the student collective) lived experience, where patriarchy is very real, and where feminism is all too often a foreign land that has been created as an axis of evil. What seems like a surprising question or comment is almost always present somewhere it at least one other person's mind in the classroom. As such, to attack that student, you have shut down an important discourse, and slammed the door on an important teachable moment. Instead, try to find something good about the comment, even if the best you can do is thank them for being brave enough to share, and then gently try to steer the class as a whole to finding the alternative (feminist) response. By using feminist pedagogy when actually teaching about feminism and gender in the classroom, we stand a chance of decreasing the reactive aggression that the topic can sometimes create."
DWCers also sent lists of teaching resources that they thought might be helpful to graduate students who are entering the classroom for the first time, or who are fairly new to teaching. Those resources are listed below.
In the end, I think that it is both important, as stated above, to remember to keep things-including risk of feminist backlash-in perspective, as well as to incorporate feminist pedagogy into our classrooms. We need to learn from our colleagues and their experiences of backlash and violence, but simply remembering those experiences is not enough. We need to be reflexive about the teaching methods and experiences of both others and ourselves. In addition, we need to continually find new ways to employ feminist pedagogy. In turn we stand to both reduce negative experiences for ourselves and our students, and to increase the meaningful education we hope to provide to our students. And finally, we need to encourage feminist mentoring of new faculty and graduate students so that they have the tools and resources in their criminological, sociological, pedagogical, and feminist toolboxes necessary to make the transitions recommended above.
Again, thank you to everyone who has responded to my calls for suggestions for the column, and a special thank you to all of the graduate students who sent me your questions, and all of the members who sent me responses to the questions I've put on the list-serve. Remember if you have a question or problem you would like to see included in the graduate student corner, email me at angela.simon@wmich.edu.
Resources on Feminist Pedagogy
Member-Recommended Books
Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, & Pat Griffin, eds. 1997. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook. San Francisco- Jossey Bass.
Berenice Malka Fisher. 2001. No Angel in the Classroom: Teaching through Feminist Discourse.
Paulo Freire. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Berman Ramos.
bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
Amie MacDonald & Susan Sánchez-Casal, eds. 2002. Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference.
Nancy Naples. 2002. Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field.
Wilbert McKeachie and Graham Gibbs. 1998. McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 10th edition.
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard University Press.
Caplan, Paula J. Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving in the Academic World. University of Toronto Press.
Member-Recommended Online Resources
Resources compiled by Penny Welch at the University of Wolverhampton
"Feminist Pedagogy & the Integration of Knowledge" by Diana M.A. Relke, University of Saskatchewan
"Why Not A Feminist Overhaul of Higher Education?" by Daphne Patai, Chronicle of Higher Education
WMST-L, a discussion forum on Women's Studies teaching, research, and program administration
National Women's Studies Association