Abstracts
Abstract
In recent years, feminist pedagogy has been advanced as a strategy for disrupting the neoliberal corporatization of the university classroom. In this paper, we both recognize and trouble this disruptive potential, examining how the working conditions faced by adjunct instructors affect our ability to put our commitments to feminist pedagogy into practice. Based on our own experiences as sessional instructors, we argue that conditions such as heavy workloads, alongside limited access to institutional resources and community, contribute to faculty burn-out and hinder our ability to build and maintain feminist student-instructor relationships. Drawing on existing scholarship on feminist pedagogy, and emerging work exploring the challenges of teaching within the neoliberal university, we argue for the need to extend and complicate dominant understandings of feminist pedagogy as a series of values and practices that individual instructors can implement, and to recognize how its enactment is limited by the adjunctification of higher education. This paper pertains to instructors, particularly those in feminist departments, seeking to apply feminist pedagogy across the university.
Keywords:
- adjunctification,
- care,
- feminism,
- neoliberalism,
- relationality
Résumé
Au cours des dernières années, la pédagogie féministe a été mise de l’avant comme stratégie pour entraver la privatisation néo-libérale de la salle de classe de l’université. Dans cet article, nous reconnaissons et nous bouleversons ce potentiel perturbateur, en examinant la façon dont les conditions de travail des professeurs auxiliaires ont une incidence sur notre capacité à mettre en pratique nos engagements par rapport à la pédagogie féministe. En fonction de nos propres expériences à titre de chargés de cours à temps partiel, nous estimons que des conditions, comme de lourdes charges de travail, jumelées à un accès limité à des ressources pédagogiques et au milieu institutionnel, contribuent à l’épuisement professionnel du corps professoral et entravent notre capacité à forger et à entretenir des relations féministes entre les étudiants et leurs professeurs. En nous appuyant sur les connaissances existantes en matière de pédagogie féministe ainsi que sur de nouveaux ouvrages qui explorent les défis posés par l’enseignement dans une université néo-libérale, nous soutenons le besoin d’accroître et de complexifier les interprétations dominantes de la pédagogie féministe sous forme de série de valeurs et de pratiques que les professeurs peuvent mettre en oeuvre et de reconnaître les limitations de son adoption en raison de la structuration de nature agrégée et auxiliaire de l’enseignement supérieur. Cet article concerne les professeurs, surtout dans les départements universitaires féministes, qui aspirent à mettre en œuvre la pédagogie féministe dans l’ensemble de l’université.
Mots-clés :
- féminisme,
- néolibéralisme,
- professorat par association,
- relationnalité,
- soutien
Appendices
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