Dissonant Voices: The teacher's 'personal' in women's studies

Abstract

This article grows directly from a collaborative project on the pedagogies of women's studies at the College of Ripon and York, and the University of York, and from the presentation given at the Gender and Education conference at the University of Warwick in April 1999. It is presented as a dialogue which polarises two voices considering a variety of positions adopted by tutors of women's studies in relation to their students, and, in particular, the ways in which the personhood of the tutor is implicit - or implicated - in the praxis of feminist teaching. Rather than moving to any synthesis or resolution of the apparently binary positions voiced, the article goes on to question the notion that the personal is always necessarily good and beneficial within feminist pedagogy, and to posit the liberatory potential of the impersonal for our teaching and our feminism.