Chiara RABBIOSI, Università di Padova, Italy
In this presentation I will react to the questions raised in the panel by moving from the consideration of the classroom as a political place in line with bell hooks (1994). I will reflect upon my own experience as a geography teacher in a Master course taught in English in an Italian University. The Master includes no Women’s or Feminist Studies class. My thirty-sh students come from multifarious parts of the world and the class is decidedly multi-ethnic and mixed from the sex and gender point of view. Teaching geography in such a context implies, even more than usual, locating gender as an historical and sociological situated practice It also implies opening up not only to an increasingly intersectional, queer and decolonial acceptance of feminism, but also recognising the impossibility to even discuss gender for some students, or the malaise they have in doing it, or the impact of the limited representations of western mainstream feminism that are by now strongly introjected.
The classroom – as a physical and as, increasingly, a digital and virtual space – constantly challenges us. In line with Doreen Massey, a classroom can be considered a place where “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories poses the question of our throwntogetherness” (Massey, 2005, p. 151). Indeed, a classroom is also a porous space, where ‘the local and the global’are continuously interacting through a problematic ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1993). And a classroom is definitely a normative space. But me, my students, my colleagues, we can (at least try to) play(ing) with it as well as making it a place to go to play with (in line with hooks invitation to develop a pedagogy that is ‘pleasure’).
Reflecting on a feminist approach from and around the classroom may also serve advancing geographic thinking. Moving along these lines, I claim that if theory is practice, pedagogy may be research despite the fact that higher education teachers scarcely reflect upon.
Mots clés : Classroom|Teaching|Throwntogetherness
A104158CR