voice, difference and feminist pedagogy

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Curriculum Studies, Volume 2, Number 2, 1994

Julie McLeod , Lyn Yates & Karen Halasa (1994) Voice, Difference and Feminist Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, 2:2, 189-202

Journal now entitled Pedagogy, Culture and Society To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0965975940020203

Voice, Difference and Feminist Pedagogy JULIE McLEOD Deakin University, Australia LYN YATES & KAREN HALASA La Trobe University, Australia

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the writers' experiences of a postgraduate women's studies course in order to raise issues about voice, silencing, and the treatment of 'difference' in the literature concerned with feminist pedagogy. In that literature, difference Is identified as an important Issue for feminist pedagogy. However, it Is argued here, while the literature has a wide-ranging conception of where and how difference operates In the classroom, it has an unclear vision of what it means to address this. The authors' reflections on a course which was offered in 1985 suggest, moreover, that there have been some shifts in how difference is conceived In feminist pedagogy: from attempting to transcend difference to attempting to work with It; from giving salience to Intellectual/political categories of difference to categories concerned with Identity and power; and from assuming an essentialist feminine quality in female groups, to emphasising what Is not held in common. The writing about feminist pedagogy has continued to explore the personal, emotional and political dimensions of voice In the classroom. What it now needs to explore further Is how to bring together adequate concepts of difference and student voices with better concepts of curriculum, learning and the teacher.

In both literal and metaphoric senses, the finding of voice has been a central theme In much feminist work. In discussions about feminist pedagogy, it has often been taken for granted that one of the primary aims of such a pedagogy is to provide a learning environment where women feel safe and are encouraged to express their different voice. Here, 'different' has usually ref erred more to women's collective difference from men's ways of learning than to differences between women. These moments of gaining voice have been represented as crucial stages in the

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process of self-actualisation and conscientisation of women (for example, Martin, 1981; Spender, 1981, 1982; Rowland, 1982; Stanley & Wise, 1982; Bowles & Klein, 1983; Bunch & Pollock, 1983; Magarey, 1983; Belenky et al, 1986). Set against and integral to these positive accounts of women finding their own voices are accounts of women's previous and continuing silencing and marginalisation, especially in mixed-sex classes. In these stories, the feminist classroom, and especially the women-only classroom, becomes a place where this ought to not happen: it is imagined as a place of safety, of shared experiences and of women speaking together.

The following discussion takes as its starting point reflections on our attempt, in 1985, to create a feminist classroom and pedagogy in a women-only postgraduate course on feminism and education. The experience and memories of those of us involved In that course are at odds with the effects and outcomes usually associated with women-only classrooms and feminist pedagogy. In our recollections, disappointment, frustration and division are paramount themes.

The reflections and discussion in this paper are also framed by the agendas prominent in more recent work on critical and feminist pedagogy. Here it is argued that educators need positively and productively to acknowledge division and difference - in class, ethnicity, gender, sex uality, age - among classroom participants (for example, Giroux, 1991; Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Luke & Gore, 1992). These exhortations to work with difference are infused with a pedagogical and political urgency.

In this article, then, we are interested in feminist pedagogy, women-only classrooms, and the issue of difference, and are attempting to interpret, extend, and raise questions about the issue of difference and the way it has been raised as an issue for pedagogy. We hope to do this in two ways. The first is by comparative reflection on the ways in which 'difference' is understood and deployed now compared to how it was when we were undertaking our postgraduate course in the mid-1980s. And the second is to draw on those earlier experiences - of disappointments and divisions - in order to pose questions about the ambitions and the limits of the present pedagogical interest in 'difference'. What does it mean now, beyond a rhetorical commitment, to heed different voices, and to work with difference and diversity as political and pedagogical goals? Our argument is that despite the obvious political appeal of this approach, insufficient attention is being given to the problem of how to 'enact' such a pedagogy. And, linked to this absence in the critical pedagogy literature, there is a marked evasion of those difficult questions to do with curriculum and knowledge building.

Voice and Pedagogy: some recent themes

Studies of feminist and critical pedagogy have begun to give greater attention to the diversity of women's voices and to the subtle ways in which, despite the best intentions, women's voices remain unheard. In 1986, an article in the Harvard Education Review by Magda Lewis & Roger

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Simon explored some of these issues through a discussion of what happened in a graduate class whose subject matter, 'Discourse, Text and Subjectivity', had been influenced by feminism and women's studies and whose teacher was explicitly interested in feminist pedagogy (Lewis & Simon, 1986). Simon & Lewis discussed how in their mixed-sex class the women had felt silenced, notwithstanding that this was a class about matters which were ostensibly concerned with women's experience (of marginalisation, of otherness...), and in which the women might be regarded as experts. Finally, towards the end of the semester, the women had a moment of epiphany where they collectively recognised and discussed what was happening, and seized the floor to insist that their experience be heard. Lewis (the graduate student) and Simon (the teacher) argue that what they learnt was that "no single voice can speak for our multiple experiences". They concJude:

We are arguing here f or a pedagogical project that allows a polyphony of voices, a form which legitimates the expression of difference differently. (Lewis & Simon, 1986, p. 471)

Lewis & Simon are recapturing here an insight that had been a central thread in contemporary discussions of feminism and pedagogy. It is not just the substantive content (the curriculum) of formal education institutions that have made women invisible. It is also an inattention to ·more pervasive differences - of 'ways of knowing', of styles of association, of differently conceived rationality, of modes of learning. Lewis & Simon were re-finding this insight in the context of a formal curriculum which was explicitly concerned with the silencing of women. They are arguing that the remaking of the formal content of the classroom without attending to differences of language and mode of interaction within the class, was to not attend sufficiently to the pervasive difference of women's experience which was the ostensible focus of the exercise.

In a recently published collection of articles, Feminism and Critical Pedagogy (Luke & Gore, 1992), a number of authors interrogate some of the key terms of critical pedagogy - student voice, liberation, empower ment - in order to point to the ways in which these categories and claims remain ungendered in mainstream critical pedagogy and blind to specific differences between students and to types of power relations. Drawing on her own experience of developing a course on 'Media and Anti-Racist Pedagogies', Elizabeth Ellsworth argues that "key assumptions, goals, and pedagogical practices fundamental to the literature on critical pedagogy - namely, 'empowerment', 'student voice', 'dialogue', and even the term 'critical' - are repressive myths" (Ellsworth, 1992, p. 91). In their abstraction and generality, Ellsworth argues, these themes work to repress, rather than to liberate, the diversity of voices and political claims of class members. For example, Ellsworth quotes Barbara Christian, an African-American woman, as declaring

what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own lif e. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing

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that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is... (Ellsworth, 1992, p. 94)

Ellsworth then argues that to respond to such assertions and powerful commitments, "by subjecting them to rationalist debate about their validity" is "inappropriate"(ibid.).

Ellsworth's case is that general formulations of critical pedagogy assume that there is one final message to be reached (a right to freedom from oppression under a democratic social contract), and one privileged mode of reaching it (analytical critical rationality). This formulation, according to Ellsworth, preserves the authority of the teacher, silences voices attuned to other imperatives, and is of dubious political merit (given that it is the authority given to the universal rational person that has preserved the dominance of men and European voices over women and those from colonised cultures). Instead, Ellsworth argues, the classroom should be founded on the insight that all knowings, Including the teacher's, are partial; and on an awareness of the difficulties, the risks, the fears and desires associated with giving voice in the classroom.

Other authors in the collection on Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (Luke & Gore, 1992) point, however, to some of the problems which might arise from this emphasised attention to listening to difference. Patti Lather, for example, warns against romanticising and reifying the student voices as 'Other'. What is needed, she argues, ls a framework which no longer "sees the 'other' as the problem for which they [teachers] are the solution" (Lather, 1992, p. 132). Employing Foucauldian analysis, Jennifer Gore too argues that we need to recognise "the potential dangers and normalising tendencies of all discourses, including those which aim to liberate"(Gore, 1986, p. 63). A pedagogical commitment to an equality and plurality of multiple voices within the classroom, and to a process focused on the interactive resolutions of these differences has its own dangers, an argument that has been made in the different context of radical critiques of progressive education. Assuming the equal legitimacy of all present positions can be a form of sugar-coating for an inequitable status quo.

The themes of silence and speech, and of enabling difference to be heard, are, despite these cautions about proposed resolutions, central to many recent discussions of feminism and pedagogy. In both the Lewis & Simon discussion and in the Ellsworth article 'difference' is seen as extending to language style and emotional resonance, and as posing deep problems for the pedagogical Issue of judging the adequacy of a student's contribution, or of directing the progress of a thematic interest (that is, organising the curriculum). Lewis & Simon were talking about these themes in now familiar ways: how women fare and how the subject matter of feminism fares in a mixed-sex setting. It ls a story in which 'difference' takes a relatively simple form, in which 'women' (weak, concerned with experience, alienated by academic discourse) confront 'men' (powerful, controllers of academic discourse, managers of themes within that discourse) and struggle, this time successfully, to have their voices heard. Ellsworth's plea for the recognition of difference is both more

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comprehensive and troublesome, for her concern is not with the opposition men/women, but with the multiple and contradictory perspectives of those who are not, for example, "European, White, male, middle-class, Christian, able-bodied, thin, and heterosexual" (Ellsworth, 1992, p. 114). But, in form, the pedagogic outcome of Ellsworth's reflection is remarkably similar to that raised in the discussion by Lewis & Simon. What is needed is more space for subordinated voices to be heard, and for a context which makes those speakers feel the safety to speak in their own terms, for a context which makes them feel that they will not be judged by a teacher who has a prior and authoritative schema regarding what is to count. In such a formulation, the classroom becomes a kind of therapeutic and tolerant space where participants are encouraged to voice their difference. Political and pedagogical goals become virtually one and the same thing: the articulation and appreciation of difference is represented as a sufficient educational rationale.

On the other side of the world, around the same time that Lewis & Simon and their classmates were embarking on their graduate course, the writers of this paper were taking part in a new postgraduate course. But in our case the teachers and the students were aJI women. And in this course, silencing, differences, frustration remained endemic:there was no moment of epiphany, no instant reclaiming of a solidarity in which the powerless would triumph over their oppressors. Our experience frames a different story of difference, a different set of issues about what feminist pedagogy might look like. In whatever ways the students and teachers from that course now selectively emphasise certain memories of that experience, and however we explain our disappointments and frustrations, one thing is dear: everyone felt silenced!

The Course

In 1985, four lecturers in La Trobe University's School of Education initiated a joint teaching project in the Master of Education programme, a two-semester coursework subject entitled 'The Theory and Practice of Non-Sexist Education'. Within the structure of Australian teacher education, the subject-matter of the course was a new departure, at least at this level. Because numbers in the Master's degree were small (around 30 to 60 for an entire programme, with 6 to 10 In a class), only a limited number of subjects could be offered, and these were generally recognised to signify a faculty's declaration of strengths and areas of key educational significance and as areas having a particular scope for serious postgraduate study.

The students who chose to enrol in or audit the course were predictably all female, and represented a cross-section of research interests and political outlooks. There were few courses available in Women's Studies at tertiary level at this time, and this was the first Master's course in the area approved at this university. Although much feminist publishing had occurred, and although a number of very large

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feminist conferences had taken place in Australia, at this time there was very little academic publishing on these issues in the specific literature of education. So the offering of this particular course by four women in the school was a significant symbolic statement regarding women's studies as an Intellectual field and a field of relevance to education; and it was recognised as such in challenges raised in the accreditation process.

Differences between the staff were known well before the course was offered. These Included differences of disciplinary training (one had trained in English; a second in sociology; a third in anthropology and comparative education; and a fourth in history of ideas and curriculum studies); differences in feminist commitments (in the typologies popular at the time, they covered the range from radical separatist through Marxist-socialist to liberal); and differences of pedagogical style (one teacher was known for an elaborated consciousness-raising format which extended for many weeks at the beginning of her courses; others were known as conscientious followers of traditional ways of structuring courses). But, both in the initiating discussions which developed the course proposal, and in the opening sessions of the course, these differences were construed positively, and, indeed, as a defining feature of this course. The students too, as is common in education, came from a wide range of previous educational backgrounds. One transferred from another university specifically to do this course. The different teachers in the course each had at least one of their former students taking it.

A remarkable feature which emerges from the discussion and written comments offered by those who participated in the 1985 Master's course Is the strength of their memories. It is eight years since the course ran, yet all those who responded to our questionnaire did so in some detail, presenting a powerful, albeit negative, picture of that experience. What had begun as a hopef ul and ground-breaking new field saw many expectations thwarted. There was widespread disillusion with what might have been positive aspects of the course, such as the collaborative teaching, the incorporation of different perspectives, the new and of ten radical content, and, for some, a break from traditional treatment of both the reading of texts and the discussion of issues. Set against and retrospectively interrogating these hopeful expectations are the recol lections of participants - tension, divisions, contradiction, disappointment and frustrations. These are not romantic memories of a collaborative female space.

At the time at which the course was mounted, many discussions of feminist pedagogy assumed an essentialised understanding of 'the feminine', and extrapolated inappropriately what would be expected to flow from a gathering of 'women' or from allowing a 'female-defined' space. 'Feminine' was elided with 'feminist'. In practice in our particular all-female space, a space entered with goodwill by teachers and students with some common purpose, division and the tensions associated with difference were intensely felt.

One student remembered that

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the divisions within the class related to the actual frameworks, the structures within which debate could occur and the feelings of frustration which resulted from this. ... Deep alienation related to a particular type of radical feminism which confirmed my initial reticence to 'do' Women Studies courses. Ethnocentrism [was] embedded in {the] 'radical feminist' perspective.

The persistence of division was also remarked upon by one of the teachers, who noted that, even before the course had begun, she experienced "great anxiety about actually 'teaching' Women's Studies! [and] concern about seeming not well read enough in front of students and colleagues". This teacher remembered in particular "several times when the whole group seemed blocked because there were at least three different 'sectors'" :

the separatists who really seemed to want to criticise and reject the whole academic enterprise, the socialist who seemed on the point of sarcastic/angry outbursts a lot of the time, and the 'rest' who seemed a bit confused/bemused. I'd say tension was the over-riding memory.

Even something as apparently straightforward as the week-by-week organisation of a reading programme remained a problem throughout the year. Another student wrote that

There was a tension between some members of the group who wanted/expected a traditionally oiganised course with regular prescribed reading, {which was] systematically organised and others who I think wanted a freer approach where talking about subjective experience would uncover more generalisable truths.

And finally, there was a strong sense of frustration with the persistence of the differences, and the way discussion about them came to occupy much of the classroom time. For one student,

the first word that springs to mind is contradiction. I suppose we had plenty of practice of trying to develop a feminist classroom - week after week - but not really much theory ...I was very disappointed.

The experience of this course suggests to us that a feminist pedagogy was more complicated and elusive than a simply achieved natural unfolding of 'women's ways of learning' in a woman-only space. But, importantly, our memories and experience also suggest that simply being sensitive to and working with either the abstractions or the particularities of 'difference' Is no less problematic. That is, while initially understanding our experience as providing a critique of the earlier romantic hopes for a feminist classroom, this experience also suggests some questions about the celebration of difference found in much recent critical pedagogy.

Despite their previous differences in teaching style, the teachers of the course expected that a 'feminist' course would at least be

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characterised by two elements. First, it was assumed that the teacher/student relationship would not simply replicate a transmission model of a teacher imparting wisdom to receptive students. Rather it would be, in Freirian terms, 'dialogical': the students' experiences, concepts, questions would actively structure the course. Second, the feminist movement had discovered that 'the personal is political', and it would be expected that feminist teachers would be sensitive to the various participants in the class: aware of silences and potential exclusions, and able to do something to remedy these.

Clearly, this course was not successful on either of these matters ('everyone felt silenced'). But this was not because of lack of attention to the then popular guiding principles of feminist pedagogy. Everyone quite quickly became aware both that the course was not working, and what the dissatisfactions and preferences of each of the participants were. But because all the staff also assumed an imperative to be 'cooperative', to not assert any individual authority relative to each other, the problem of different preferred ways of proceeding simply led to recursive attempts to interrupt proceedings and discuss the problem and how it might be resolved. (The students felt less polite about the impasse, but they too had no unified resolution to offer, and nor did they have a means of overriding the teachers' determination to not impose on each other.) Since people had different beliefs about the way to go and what mattered in terms of content; and since they were not moved by hearing re-statements of alternative positions, no resolution occurred. The course limped along, trying one approach or another according to whose turn it was to organise a session, but with frequent interruptions to discuss why it was not working.

What then can this apparently failed and fraught experience offer to contemporary debates about critical and feminist pedagogy?

Difference

The Categories of Difference In 1985, the categories of difference which structured feminist debate and which explicitly framed our class discussion were primarily political ones (of Marxist, radical, liberal and variants of these). The differences between participants were understood as differences along these lines (and indeed, in the dynamics of the class, very soon each member had a reified identity in terms of such categories). These categories not only constituted a grid through which we interpreted feminist theory, they also became the means by which differences between class members were articulated and cemented. It became virtually impossible to think outside these apparently irreconcilable categories. (A point which Is possibly of some interest given the deep divisions and debates evident in Australian

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women's studies today in relation to post-structuralism and antl-poststructuralism.)

These differences which preoccupied class members, in some contrast to those which are discussed at length in recent writings, were neither essentialist, nor arrayed along axes of power: they were intellectual/political. But their formative and reifying power in discussions was important. Today the debate concerning types of feminism has shifted to questions about the merits of post-structuralism, post-modernism and post-colonialism for feminism. And these debates have opened up new categories of difference. Currently, 'difference' is deployed in the critical and feminist pedagogy literature in a positive, even celebratory, tone to denote differences of identity, and of speaking positions.

In our class, categories of difference which are prominent in contemporary discussions were also represented: differences of power, of silenced Otherness. Within the course, especially for some students, the experience of their own position was felt as one of powerlessness and Inappropriate voice. Lewis & Simon discussed how in their class the women students felt silenced by texts, fellow students and a curriculum which all seemed to appropriate what was the legitimate way to talk about women and language. In our course too, at least some students experienced their difference as one of lesser power and of illegitimate 'voice'.

For example, one student, from a non-English speaking background, and with particular concerns about ·c1ass and ethnicity, felt that her own attempt to voice a case about the issues of race and class for feminism was framed as inappropriate or illegitimate. From the point of view of the teachers (collectively), this was not the case: the points were not inappropriate and were not heard as such. But, from the student's perspective, the teachers' willingness to incorporate and/or 'place theoretically' her points of difference can be interpreted as simply replicating those patterns of power and authority which typically characterise classroom interactions, and which, despite contrary intentions, were found also to be endemic to the course analysed by Simon & Lewis. In that course, and in ours too, the denials and supposed refusals of differential relations of power had powerful emotional resonances. For while we were all meant to be among equals, collectively and collaboratively being sensitive to different perspectives, the operation of more covert - even if unintended - forms of power was an uncomfortable presence.

In her written recollections, another student commented, I did not sense that the atmosphere was one which encouraged the exploration of alternative ideas and notions of a sisterhood seemed chimen·cal while there was a kind of disciplining and implicit closure on the part of one staff member at least.

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Thus, although the intellectual/political differences in this particular class were between teacher/student groupings rather than of students relative to teachers (remembering that each of the teachers had at least one protege student participating in the course), the differential power of students and teachers was also experienced in the classroom, and was not overcome by an intention on the teachers' part to take all voices of participants as important. In her analysis of the critical pedagogy literature, Gore (1992, pp. 56-62) astutely observes that the very concept of 'empowerment' embodies such a structural differential (that only some are in the position 'to give', to empower). Similar concerns were voiced by the teacher Roger Simon about his course. But our experience (that is, the criticisms voiced by the students as well as the teachers both during the course and subsequently) is critical of a solution which abrogates, as he did, the teacher's determining and authoritative role. In this respect, Ellsworth's proposed solution to undermine the teacher as authority, as well as the 'universalist' solutions she criticises, is brought into question. In our course, the criticisms were not just about students' own felt powerlessness, but about the failure of the course to offer a way of working beyond the initial differences. Recall that the course was described as giving "plenty of practice of trying to develop a feminist classroom ...[but] not really much theory". (And it is an interesting comment on women's studies today that this student now refers to the course's apparent lack of theory as a 'contradiction' in a course explicitly concerned with feminist pedagogy.)

The Pedagogic Project

In our 1985 course, felt differences between those taking part were strong and explicit, but they were also perceived as somehow illegitimate. That is, the differences between individuals, between the political positions they held, between teachers and students, were, by the time the course had been under way for a few weeks, construed as 'barriers' which we had to try to overcome. In comparison, the contemporary recognition of difference is understood, as we have been arguing, quite positively, as something to be worked with, as an intrinsic feature of the classroom, as something which progressive educators should not deny, least of all regard as barriers. While this understanding of difference is not framed as a quest for a further singular transcendent position, questions nevertheless remain about what it means both as enacted pedagogy and in relation to developing curriculum.

Today, formally, the content and theory of women's studies attends to different voices among women as never before. Identity politics is supported, the search for truth and for one authoritative story is of ten seen as a chimera. Yet it appears that the acknowledgement of difference is far easier to achieve at a theoretical and abstract level than at the level of mundane, day-to-day relationships and teaching and learning interactions (cf. Childers & hooks, 1990; Yates, 1992; Tsolidis, 1993;


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McLeod, 1993). For all their grandiloquent descriptions of pedagogy as "a form which legitimates the expression of difference differently", what Lewis & Simon were able to illustrate was a rather more traditional example of the oppressed finding a voice of solidarity in the presence of their oppressors. Difference and silencing within the all-female Women's Studies class cannot be reduced to this simple and singular opposition. And, in terms of the organisation and structure of the curriculum, what does it mean to talk of a 'polyphony of voices'? In Australia today, paradoxically if not surprisingly, there are plenty of courses whose content addresses difference and identity (often buttressed by weighty reading lists), but whose pedagogy remains relatively unchanged by these challenges; and theories abound about 'difference' pedagogy which ignore the question of what we teach in the new politically sensitive classrooms. So questions of the enacted form of difference in pedagogy remain. Does 'a polyphony of voices' amount to no more than week-by-week references to 'different points of view'; to noting, theoretically, the intervention made by 'women of colour' Into the debate, and so on? Is 'difference' In pedagogy more than a form of tolerant pluralism and accommodation?

In an exchange entitled 'A Conversation about Race and Class', Mary Childers & bell hooks (1990) have commented insightfully on both these tendencies in contemporary feminism. On the first, the recognition that difference as power is a matter of voice and language and not just theoretical acknowledgement, bell hooks reflects:

I critic.ally examine why it is that I.do not rejoice when I see people who taught me in graduate school who were deeply hurting to me when I tried to talk about race, now writing about race. (Childers & hooks, 1990, p. 62)

and again a lot of privileged white women have appropriated the discourse on race [...] now the new terms of this discussion suggest that words like race and racism are inappropriate, not sophisticated, too simplistic. Currently the discussion of race takes place within the framework of 'colonial discourse'. How many women and men know what that means? (Childers & hooks, 1990, pp. 74,78)

And, on that other question of how the 'polyphony of voices' is to be heard, the conversation between hooks & Childers raises many questions about what we actually mean to do with the current acceptance of difference and multiple voices. They argue the need to work with contradiction and conflict and emotional resonance, not just bland theorising (similarly Smith, 1990). ·

Ellsworth's anti-racist classroom attempts to take account of the kind of dilemmas which Childers & hooks raise. But she is unable to resolve the persistent problem of what to teach, of what to do about content. While Ellsworth attempts to distance her conclusion from a liberal education master narrative, she nevertheless recognises that her argument requires some similar principles to govern how and why the Others are to listen to

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each other. Moreover, her conclusion has much to say about recognising the 'knowledge' that the students might bring to a particular class, but very little about what the students might expect to get from the teacher, and from choosing to take a course as distinct from choosing to form a political association. For us, the direction discussed by Ellsworth recalls the stalemates and dissatisfactions of our course. Even though she insists upon the importance of engaging "with actual, historically specific struggles" (Ellsworth, 1992, p. 92) against the universalising abstractions of much critical pedagogy, there remains a lack of specificity on key questions. Would a semester-length class proceed beyond the identification of different voices and interests? How would this approach work through the sorts of stalemates and frustrations which we have described? What would be the basis of knowledge produced in such a class? How would competing understandings and interests be sorted out?

Potentially, the acknowledgement of different voices today is both stronger and weaker than at the time of the 1985 course. It is stronger in that, In our course, although we recognised (some) differences, we could not really accept them, nor could we find a way to work with them. But it may be weaker too, in that the acceptance - even celebration - of difference may be a theoretical move In which the authority of the teacher and the theoriser is less open to question than in earlier visions of a feminist classroom. For example, many tertiary women's studies courses which in content celebrate those at the margins do so by theory of such sophistication and abstraction that the mode of learning the message is in contradiction with the conclusions which must be mastered.

The reflections on our earlier women's studies course help to highlight two different directions which are found in contemporary discussions of feminist pedagogy, and which remain difficult to bring together. One is the continued concern with the emotional, embodied experiences of the classroom as an important source of silencing, and of domination. A second is an Interest in denaturallsing the categories with which we all work, a direction that requires considerable feats of abstracted intellect and attention to a wide body of reading material. Both these concerns (and both are well represented in the Luke and Gore collection) take difference and the non-unitary form of the category Woman as a key agenda. But they move towards this in different ways: in the first case by seeking to provide conditions for the safe voicing of knowledge by those involved in the class; in the second case by seeking to engage students with the explorations already mounted by a wide range of groups and theorists. What needs to be further considered now is that very traditional question of educationists, of how you bring process (pedagogy and student voice) together with a content that involves some reading outside the group, that assumes there is some point to learning as distinct from (or as a distinct form oO political association.

In this paper, we have suggested that pedagogy should continue to be taken as a serious issue for women's studies, especially now that this field is part of the academy and replicates many of the forms associated


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with other disciplinary fields of study. We have suggested that some of the earlier writings about feminist pedagogy questionably elided essentialist assumptions about femininity and 'women' with the discussion of a feminist teaching project. The course in which the writers of this paper took part made very clear to us that tensions, difference and silencing are issues within women's 'learning spaces' as well as in mixed ones. It has made us suspicious of an approach to pedagogy - feminist or not - which risks producing a happy pluralism without much bite or a series of grandstanding prescriptions which pay little heed to the possibilities and effects of enacting such abstract goals. Nevertheless, we would suggest, the move to avoid essentialism and to take difference seriously - as both content and process - might be one starting point for a new productive attention to pedagogy. But there is a need too to consider pedagogy In conjunction with curriculum and learning. And, in relation to the contemporary feminist theorising of difference, we would argue that the practices of our mundane, day-to-day dilemmas are still one means by which we 'talk back' to our theory.

Correspondence

Julie McLeod, Women's Studies, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria 3217, Australia. Fax: +(61) 52 27 2018; Lyn Yates & Karen Halasa, Graduate School of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia. Fax: +(61) 34 78 7807.

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