Against from Within: Finding Feminist Pedagogical Spaces between Academic Institutional Margins

As a teaching assistant in higher education, I acknowledge that I am subject to the particular ideological stance and pedagogical practice of the course professor. As I search to construct my own practice, I endeavor to locate a space within the traditional institutional tenets of pedagogy that characterizes the academy. Historically, these tenets are embedded in a curriculum that honors the knowledge of the hegemonic group, demanding mastery of content and reinforcement by the authority of the professoriate. Overtly, I submit to the authority of the professor and the legally binding course syllabus. I do not have any input into the curriculum, the learning outcomes, or the assessment components of the course. On occasion, the pedagogical stance of the professor is incompatible with my own pedagogical stance. Covertly, I have to find a way to work against from within. I have to create a space that helps me remain true to my own values and beliefs about myself as a teacher while at the same time working within the margins constructed by the professor. I have worked as a teaching assistant in the introductory course in women's studies for four years, a place where I have been mentored in a feminist perspective that is supported by the literature on feminist pedagogy. In their 1994 work, "The F minist Classroom," Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault reveal four critical themes in feminist pedagogical spaces: voice, authority, mastery, and positionality. Other researchers reinforce the perception that the feminist classroom is a place where all voices are heard, power differentials are minimized, knowledge is collectively constructed and differences are honored (Gore; Welch; Mogadime; Lee and Johnson-Bailey). It is my experience, however, that in some contexts this classroom is an ideal that is not always attainable, a discovery that in part helps to explain the difficulty of operationalizing theory into practice, bell hooks, Dolana Mogadime, and Ming-yeh Lee and Juanita Johnson-Bailey reveal similar experiences in their research of feminist teachrs in confronting these ideal frameworks in the classroom. In this teaching note I share an experience during which I was not able to successfully construct a feminist space within my practice. I encountered a particular