Teaching Women’s Lives: Feminist Pedagogy and the Sociological Imagination

Abstract

It is 8 a.m. on a cold January morning. I sit in my freezing car waiting for it to warm up. Excited and nervous, I anticipate the dynamics of my first class of the semester, a weekly three-hour junior/senior-level seminar course titled “Women’s Lives: Global Perspectives.” Having previously visited the assigned classroom, I know that it will take some time before the students arrive to transform it from a traditional lecture style setting (instructor desk in front of the blackboard and rows of tables and chairs facing the desk) into a formation that allows all participants in the seminar to see and engage in discussion with any other classmate or with me.¹

Twenty-one years ago we struggled with the recognition of difference within the context of commonality. Today we grapple with the recognition of commonality within the context of difference… Activism is the courage to act consciously on our ideas, to exert power in resistance to ideological pressure—to risk leaving home. Empowerment comes from ideas—our revolution is fought with concepts not guns, and it is fueled by vision. By focusing on what we want to happen, we change the present.

(Anzaldúa 2002, 5)