Abstract
Sociology faculty often feel frustrated when students don’t “get it,” i.e., when students are resistant or hostile to course material or faculty, and have little increase in sociological critical thinking. Those of us who teach about gender must find ways to manage student resistance to the course material. Dealing with student resistance might increase some students’ critical thinking, while simultaneously frustrating progressive students. As we engage with resistance, we must consider whether we are engaging in feminist teaching or teaching feminism (Weitz (2010). Feminist Teacher, 20(3), 226–236). This chapter describes a faculty member’s engagement with student resistance in the classroom, and the strengths and weaknesses of doing so. After she describes how she confronts resistance, two of her former students (both of whom identify as feminists) describe the promise and problems of using student resistance as a pedagogical strategy.
Each author contributed equally to this chapter. We would like to thank Gayle Bouzard, Kirsten Dellinger, Tim Paetzold, Ellen Slaten, and Gretchen Webber for comments on this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Patti asked two of her former graduate students to collaborate on this chapter because both took sociology of gender with her while they were undergraduate and then graduate students. She also trusted these particular students to be critical of her strategies. For this reason, the tone of the chapter is reflective and autoethnographic. We must also switch pronouns occasionally from “I” to “we.”
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Caviness, C., Giuffre, P., Wasley-Valdez, M. (2016). They Don’t Get It: The Promise and Problem of Using Student Resistance as a Pedagogical Tool. In: Haltinner, K., Pilgeram, R. (eds) Teaching Gender and Sex in Contemporary America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30364-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30364-2_18
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