English Studies :: Teaching Education Essays

Feminist and Critical Pedagogies in English Studies This is going to be one of those classes that I look back upon and say, à ¬Wow, that course really changed the way I think about things.à ®I have been thinking a lot about what I want to say in this statement and now that I am finally writing it, it seems I am at a loss.I know, though, that the affects of this class, for me anyway, will be far reaching.It has helped me to think in new ways about a multiplicity of things: empowerment, nurturance, the rhetoriticity of race and gender, power, what it means to be an intellectual or a professional.If I were to try and sum up the immediate (and what I would think are rather superficial in that I think the influence of this class upon who I am as a citizen/teacher/woman/student/intellectual is only just beginning) impact that this course has had upon me, I would say that it has helped me to begin to think of writing/teaching/living as both public and private acts at the same time.Reconciling the personal and the public aspects of my life, à ¬moving away from oppositions and towards multiplicities in [my] thinking (reading essay7)à ®, and thinking of myself not in terms of à ¬this-or-thatà ® but à ¬both/andà ® have been continuous threads throughout my reading essays. I think that taking this class at a time in my life where I was experiencing teaching my first college course helped me to be very open to many of the ideas within the texts we read.I was constantly looking to the readings that we did in relationship to how they might help me become a better teacher/professional/student/person.I was always looking at them and trying to make meaningful connections between what I was reading and what I am living.And it worked.I began to look at myself and see how I occupy multiple subject positions in society and how those subject positions influence not only how I am seen by others but how I see others and myself.For example, I began to see how I am seen by other people, not just as a graduate student, but as a woman graduate student.This might sound like I am whining or trying to make an argument that we are living in a sexist society, but thatà ­s not my point.My point is that I am seen as both a woman and a graduate student at the same time.