Making women the subjects of the abortion debate: A class exercise that moves beyond “pro-choice” and “pro-life”

Author(s): Crawley, S. L. Willman, R. K. Clark, L. & Walsh, C.
Date: 2009
Publication: Feminist Teacher
Citation: Crawley, S. L., Willman, R. K., Clark, L., & Walsh, C. (2009). Making women the subjects of the abortion debate: A class exercise that moves beyond “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Feminist Teacher, 19(3), 227–240. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546102
Section on webpage: Reproductive Rights and Justice Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Excerpt from article) In this article, we describe a classroom exercise designed to put women (and children and men) back at the center of the abortion debate, avoiding the standard rhetoric and engaging reflection on how we might find common political goals among the so-called pro-life and pro-choice sides. As feminists, we can avoid losing students who are accepting of feminists ideals on many issues but feel unable to participate in feminist movements because they ideologically disagree with legalized abortion. We also provide a brief history of the current public debate and a discussion abotu some problems that arise from a binary, polarizing debate. As we work toward creating a safe space, students and the instructor can take the vitriol out of the abortion debate and have a constructive conversation. The challenge is to direct the students to a certain degree, to facilitate intellectual debate without silencing any student altogether. With careful planning and active facilitation, we think this exercise allows just that.

 

Abortion as a feminist pedagogy of grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water

Author(s): Hurst, R. A. J.
Date: 2020
Publication: Feminist Studies
Citation: Hurst, R. A. J. (2020). Abortion as a feminist pedagogy of grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water. Feminist Studies, 46(1), 43–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2020.0011
Section on webpage: Reproductive Rights and Justice Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Excerpt) Deep Salt Water is a poetic textual and visual memoir about abortion and loss set against the backdrop of ecological catastrophe in the world’s oceans. It is the result of an artistic exchange between artist Catherine Mellinger and writer Marianne Apostolides. Apostolides’s memoir emerges during a complex and often fraught historical moment for abortion access in Canada, where she and Mellinger live, as well as the United States. Concerned about drawing attention to the reality that some “women feel guilt and grief at what is a rather violent surgical procedure (as most surgical procedures are),” Apostolides worried her work could be manipulated by anti-abortion activists and politicians to support the position that abortion rights should be revoked or severely curtailed.

 

Teaching about reproduction, politics, and social justice

Author(s): Price, K.
Date: 2008
Publication: Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy
Citation: Price, K. (2008). Teaching about reproduction, politics, and social justice. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 19(2), 42–54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43505850
Section on webpage: Reproductive Rights and Justice Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: In this essay, Price describes the development of a course that addresses the human rights and social justice aspects of reproduction in order for students to understand how social, political, and economic institutions and processes, and intersecting oppressions and privileges can affect the reproductive choices of individual women and entire communities, zooming out from the narrow concept of individual choice, which dominates discussions of reproductive rights in the United States. She discusses the theoretical foundations of reproductive justice and offers some strategies for its incorporation into courses on the politics of reproduction.

 

Reproductive justice as intersectional feminist activism

Author(s): Ross, L. J.
Date: 2017
Publication: Souls
Citation: Ross, L. J. (2017). Reproductive justice as intersectional feminist activism. Souls, 19(3), 286–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2017.1389634
Section on webpage: Reproductive Rights and Justice Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Abstract) Reproductive justice activists have dynamically used the concept of intersectionality as a source of empowerment to propel one of the most important shifts in reproductive politics in recent history. In the tradition of the Combahee River Collective, twelve Black women working within and outside the pro-choice movement in 1994 coined the term “reproductive justice” to “recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.” Its popularity necessitates an examination of whether reproductive justice is sturdy enough to be analyzed as a novel critical feminist theory and a surprising success story of praxis through intersectionality. Offered to the intellectual commons of inquiry, reproductive justice has impressively built bridges between activists and the academy to stimulate thousands of scholarly articles, generate new women of color organizations, and prompt the reorganization of philanthropic foundations. This article defines reproductive justice, examines its use as an organizing and theoretical framework, and discusses Black patriarchal and feminist theoretical discourses through a reproductive justice lens.

 

A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education

Author(s): Shor, I. Freire, P.
Date: 1987
Publication: Greenwood Publishing Group
Citation: Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Section on webpage: Liberatory Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Google Books) Two world renowned educators, Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, speak passionately about the role of education in various cultural and political arenas. They demonstrate the effectiveness of dialogue in action as a practical means by which teachers and students can become active participants in the learning process. In a lively exchange, the authors illuminate the problems of the educational system in relation to those of the larger society and argue for the pressing need to transform the classroom in both Third and First World contexts. Shor and Freire illustrate the possibilities of transformation by describing their own experiences in liberating the classroom from its traditional constraints. They demonstrate how vital the teacher’s role is in empowering students to think critically about themselves and their relation, not only to the classroom, but to society. For those readers seeking a liberatory approach to education, these dialogues will be a revelation and a unique summary. For all those convinced of the need for transformation, this book shows the way.

 

Imagining and enacting liberatory pedagogical praxis in a politically divisive era

Author(s): Wilson, C. M. Hanna, M. O. Li, M.
Date: 2019
Publication: Equity & Excellence in Education
Citation: Wilson, C. M., Hanna, M. O., & Li, M. (2019). Imagining and enacting liberatory pedagogical praxis in a politically divisive era. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(2–3), 346–363. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2019.1656563
Section on webpage: Liberatory Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Abstract) In this essay, the authors challenge the myth of political neutrality in teaching and emphasize the urgent need for teachers to imagine and enact liberatory pedagogical praxis that sensitively responds to the nation’s divisive political climate. They point to U.S. political shifts and changing federal policies in education as catalysts for the social and cultural exclusion of vulnerable children of color. They suggest how teacher educators and in-service teachers can use media sources that reveal how children experience and navigate increasingly xenophobic and polarizing political climates as critical texts. Critical pedagogy and civic education scholarship offer frames to further explain how such texts serve to enhance students’ learning, sense of belonging, and their ability to contribute to a democratic and just society. The authors conclude with strategies for supporting teachers’ development and advocacy.

 

Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect

Author(s): Bryson, M. de Castell, S.
Date: 1993
Publication: Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’éducation
Citation: Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’éducation, 18(3), 285–305. https://doi.org/10.2307/1495388
Section on webpage: Queer Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Abstract) This article examines tensions between post-structuralist theories of subjectivity and essentialist constructions of identity in the context of a lesbian studies course co-taught by the authors. We describe the goals, organizing principles, content, and outcomes of this engagement in the production of “queer pedagogy” — a radical form of educative praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of “normalcy” in schooled subjects. We argue for an explicit “ethics of consumption” in relation to currciular inclusions of marginalized subjects and subjugated knowledges. We conclude with a critical analysis of the way that, despite our explicit interventions, all of our discourses, all of our actions in this course were permeated with the continuous and inescapable backdrop of white heterosexual dominance, such that: (a) any subordinated identity always remained marginal and (b) “lesbian identity” in this institutional context was always fixed and stable, even in a course that explicitly critiqued, challenged, and deconstructed a monolithic “lesbian identity.”

 

Queer desires and critical pedagogies in higher education: Reflections on the transformative potential of non-normative learning desires in the classroom

Author(s): Fraser, J. Lamble, S.
Date: 2014
Publication: Journal of Feminist Scholarship
Citation: Fraser, J., & Lamble, S. (2014). Queer desires and critical pedagogies in higher education: Reflections on the transformative potential of non-normative learning desires in the classroom. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 7(7), 61–77. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol7/iss7/7
Section on webpage: Queer Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: (Abstract) This article considers what a queer approach might offer in addressing some of the challenges of higher education in the contemporary neoliberal landscape. Despite a rich literature on queer issues in the classroom, most of the existing scholarship has focused on engaging queer students, being a queer teacher, or teaching queer content in the curriculum. Very little work has focused on what it means to take a queer approach to pedagogic techniques or how such an approach might impact educational practices more broadly. We ask: What does it mean in theory and practice to “queer” our teaching methods? What role can queer pedagogic practices play in contesting the marketization of higher education and the shift towards more instrumentalist and consumer-based modes of learning? We argue that a queer approach to pedagogy, which explicitly seeks to open up spaces for non-normative educational desires to emerge, potentially offers fruitful strategies for fostering critical and transformative learning.

 

Resource guide for trans and nonbinary students

Author(s): Gonzalez-Pons, K.
Date: 2023
Publication: Best Colleges
Citation: Gonzalez-Pons, K. (2023). Resource guide for trans and nonbinary students. Best Colleges. https://www.bestcolleges.com/resources/transgender-nonbinary-student-guide/
Section on webpage: Queer Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: Intended for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) pre-college students, this web page describes TNB-specific barriers to success in the college setting, including gender-segregated on-campus housing, name and gender changes, inequitable healthcare options, exclusivity in college athletics, and microagressions and harassment. It also provides advice on finding gender-inclusive colleges and links to resources for TNB college students, including GLSEN and ACLU’s Know Your Rights Guide, the Gender Odyssey Conference, the TRANSforming Gender Conference, the Trans Legal Services Network, Trans Lifeline, college scholarships for LGBTQ+ students, and a college experience guide for LGBTQ+ students.

 

Queer pedagogies: Theory, praxis, politics

Author(s): Mayo, C. Rodriguez, N. M.
Date: 2019
Publication: Springer International Publishing
Citation: Mayo, C., & Rodriguez, N. M. (Eds.). (2019). Queer pedagogies: Theory, praxis, politics (Vol. 11). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27066-7
Section on webpage: Queer Pedagogy Literature
Tenets: Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches.
Annotation: This book explores queer pedagogies across a range of themes and topics and grapples with the meaning and practice of queer pedagogy within different educational contexts. The authors engage readers with ongoing questions related to theory, praxis, and politics.