What does a feminist pedagogy of care look like in the classroom and what learning can this enable? This past week I presented a poster at the Teaching and Learning Innovations Conference 2024 at the University of Guelph, alongside Leah Govia (fellow research team member, PhD Candidate, Co-instructor and friend), exploring these questions. Our poster, titled "Feminist Pedagogy of Care in Practice: Reflections from a First Year Seminar Course: Who Cares? Do You?" was based on a course we taught in Winter 2023 as a part of our Teaching and Learning Fellowship. In this course we explored the concept of 'care' across various scales: from our classroom, to the campus, to the broader community, to our government, in digital spaces, and our world more broadly. We understood care as “our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself.”
Our poster specifically explored the idea of feminist pedagogy of care, which we see as a collaborative, learner centred approach where students and instructors are co-learners in the classroom. It involves active recognition and inclusion of student experiences, values, and perspectives and regular reflection on how we interact with each other and our shared efforts to create a caring classroom environment.
To highlight what this looked like in practice, we presented learnings from our 'social media storytelling assignment,' used as a part of students' mid-term assessment. This assignment provided a chance for students to practice their creative storytelling skills through a digital method: social media. Formatted as an Instagram post, students chose a topic related to care, took photos that could represent the topic, and then wrote a caption telling a story about care connecting the topic and visuals. Through this assignment would be able to: 1) Critically examine the impacts of care practices across different scales and contexts; 2) Practice digital methods in order to creatively and clearly communicate ideas; and 3) Analyze and reflect on how principles of care can be applied to our everyday lives and the world around us.
In response to this assignment, students shared all sorts of meaningful stories and visuals connected to their everyday experiences of care, which we shared via a public instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/who_cares_seminar/?hl=en
As instructors endeavouring to practice a feminist pedagogy of care in the classroom many questions emerged through this assignment, and the course more broadly. How can we facilitate meaningful conversations about care that account for co-learners’ different positionalities, abilities, and learning styles? What are the ethics involved in sharing lived-experience within, and beyond, the classroom? How can we respect student privacy, mental health, and emotional labour when inviting students to share from their lived experiences, while acknowledging the personal as political?
In addition to these reflections, this assignment enabled important learning. It focused on learning through relational, creative, and digital practices that challenge dominant (e.g. text-based or oral) ways of learning or demonstrating knowledge. This digital, public storytelling practice enabled students and us, as instructors, to analyze and reflect on care in our own and our co-learners’ everyday lives. Through the assignment, students connected theories and practices of care discussed in the course. It also highlighted two ways to apply a feminist pedagogy of care in the classroom, first by considering what skills, resources, and relationships students need to feel supported in sharing, and second by negotiating ethical dilemmas alongside student co-learners through open conversations and ongoing engagement.
Presenting at the Teaching and Learning Conference allowed us to revisit the course, including the social media storytelling assignment (and other activities/practices) and our own experiences of it, nearly a year after it concluded. This provided us the time and space to critically reflect on the opportunities, as well as some of the challenges, of practicing a feminist pedagogy of care in the classroom and to do so in conversation with others. As we put the poster together, we revisited theory about a feminist pedagogy of care, which we had drawn on to shape the course, and considered what this looked like from our perspective as instructors. We also had the opportunity to reflect on all this in conversation with those attending the conference, with questions and new perspectives leading to new learning and insights.
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