Voice, Difference and Feminist Pedagogy

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.