¹ Lorde, Audre, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 40–44, esp. 40.Google Scholar

² Weiler, Kathleen, “Freire and a Feminist Pedagogy of Difference,” Harvard Educational Review 61/4 (1991): 449–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1973);Google ScholarFreire, Paulo, Education for Critical Consciousness, trans. Ramos, M. (New York: Continuum, 1973);Google ScholarFreire, Paulo, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984);Google Scholar and Freire, Paulo and Faundez, Antonio, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York: Continuum, 1989).Google Scholar

⁴ Giroux, Henry A., Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, with a Foreword by Freire, Paulo (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1983);Google ScholarGiroux, Henry A., Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988);Google ScholarGiroux, Henry A., Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, with an Introduction by Freire, Paulo and a Foreword by McLaren, Peter (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988);Google ScholarGiroux, Henry A., Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference (New York: Peter Lang, 1993);Google ScholarAronowitz, Stanley and Giroux, Henry A., Education under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate Over Schooling (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Giroux, Henry A., ed., Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Rethinking Educational Boundaries (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).Google Scholar

⁵ Groome, Thomas, Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980);Google Scholar and Groome, Thomas, Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991).Google Scholar

⁶ Shrewsbury, Carolyn, “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women's Studies Quarterly 15/3–4 (1987):6.Google Scholar

⁷ Much of the conversation on community in education emphasizes commonalities, for it is the things that we have in common which foster community. An insight from postmodernist thought is the notion of identity politics wherein we are formed within and speak from particular identities. It is the particularities of these identities that creates an awareness of the critical differences between persons and groups.

⁸ Gerkin, Charles V., The Living Human Document (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984)Google Scholar, and Gerkin, Charles V., Widening the Horizons (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986).Google Scholar

⁹ Beck, Evelyn Torton, “Self-disclosure and the Commitment to Social Change,” Women's Studies International Forum 6 (1983): 159–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Self-disclosure refers to the process of the manner and degree to which one reveals one's personal life, values, and commitments to one's students. One of the major issues involved with teacher self-disclosure in the classroom is how powerfully it changes the teacher-student relationship. On one level an argument can be made for self-disclosure because such action humanizes the professor for the students and also shows how the professor wrestles with the issues involved. On another level the argument made against self-disclosure is that it puts the professor too much at the center of attention in the classroom, so that the students begin to focus primarily upon the personal elements of the professor's life, and the subject matter which the students were to be addressing falls from view. For example, in some of the courses which I teach we spend a fair amount of time exploring the concepts of jouissance and the erotic. The students frequently struggle with these materials on a conceptual plane and with the idea that these are proper data for intellectual inquiry. In my own mind I have examples that I know I could use il-luminatively to illustrate these concepts. But to do so, in my view, would entail being far too self-revelatory with the students for their good and for mine.

¹¹ Schniedewind, Nancy, “Feminist Values: Guidelines for Teaching Methodology in Women's Studies” in Shor, Ira, ed., Freire for the Classroom (Portsmouth, NH: Baynton/Cook, 1987), 170–79.Google Scholar

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¹³ Many of us have experienced the students' hermeneutics of suspicion. Even when we give relatively simple, straightforward questions to students on an exam, or instructions for a paper, we hear the students ask, “What does Homan really want?” Such a question implies a distrust of the instructions and reveals a belief on behalf of the student that, if they are able to cipher what the professor really wants, they will get a better grade on their work. Consequently when work is graded lower than what the student expected, the student appears confused and says, “But I thought that that is what you wanted!”

¹⁴ Written by Martin P. Britt, who was a student at Quincy University at the time. Marty gave me this poem when he heard that I was working on this article.

¹⁵ Shrewsbury, , “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 8.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Lorde, Audre, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider, 53–59.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Schniedewind, , “Feminist Values,” 170–79.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Shrewsbury, , “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 9.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Lorde, , “Uses of the Erotic,” 53–59.Google Scholar

²⁰ Cited in Groome, , Sharing Faith, 63, n. 84;Google Scholar Groome cites Augustine, , The Teacher, Ancient Christian Writers, 9, trans. Colleran, J. M. (New York: Newman, 1949), 185.Google Scholar

²¹ Noddings, Nel, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

²² Culley, Margo, “The Politics of Nurturance” in Culley, M. and Portuges, C., eds., Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 11–20, esp. 17.Google Scholar

²³ Weiler, , “Freire and a Feminist Pedagogy,” 463.Google Scholar

²⁴ See Appendix for instructions given to students.

²⁵ Minnich, Elizabeth, Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

²⁶ Belenky, Maryet al., Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986).Google Scholar

²⁷ Groome, Christian Religious Education and Sharing Faith.

²⁸ Culley, , “The Politics of Nurturance,” 17.Google Scholar

²⁹ Deborah Tannen refers to this phenomenon as “troubles talk” (Tannen, Deborah, Gender and Discourse [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 207).Google Scholar “Troubles talk” is a term that Tannen borrows from Jefferson, Gail, “On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversations,” Social Problems 35/4 (1988): 418–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Troubles talk” is “a ritual exchange of woes in the service of solidarity” (207). Tannen develops this insight in her important essay, “The Sex-Class Linked Framing of Talk at Work” in Gender and Discourse, 195-221. See also her discussion in chapter 1 on the relationship between power and solidarity.

³⁰ What I mean by “boundaries of difference” is that the declarative “In my experience…” effectively serves as a walling off of any potential critique. When another challenges such a declarative by reference to his or her own experience, the response is frequently of the character, “That might be true for you, but it was different for me.” Rather than building solidarity by seeing one's experience in communion with another, the person establishes herself or himself as distinct. This becomes a self-referencing, self-norming process that validates the self by holding others at a distance.

³¹ Shrewsbury, , “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 6.Google Scholar

³² See Groome, Christian Religious Education, for his initial development of this understanding. Especially see his Sharing Faith for an extended treatment and for applications beyond the strict limits of religious education.