My Reflections on Catherine Borshuk’s article, “Managing Student Self-Disclosure in Class Settings: Lessons from Feminist Pedagogy”
Catherine Borshuk is a feminist professor who believes and teaches that the “personal is political.” She argues that while it may be challenging to deal with students’ self-disclosure, balancing the two is possible through the use of feminist pedagogy.
She stresses the importance of developing an approach to managing self-disclosure in the classroom. Her approach relies on “feminist pedagogy, and highlights classroom dynamics and ideas about welcoming the whole student into the classroom.”
She quotes Shrewsbury, who in a seminal piece of writing, stated that feminist pedagogy is a form of interactive teaching and learning. This approach involves continual self-reflection, active engagement with the subject matter, and a collective effort to overcome prejudices and discriminatory attitudes towards gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other forms of hatred. Moreover, feminist pedagogy also involves interaction with the community, established institutions, and social movements for progressive change (1987, p.6).
While Borshuk teaches psychology I wonder how this might relate to teaching Fine Art – as an educator using this methodology with limited knowledge of psychology and the skills to deal with addressing trauma.
The challenges she identifies of applying feminist pedagogy to her courses of biography and beliefs are helpful. While students share anecdotal experiences through their art based on traumatic personal experience, getting students to collectively identify their beliefs on the issue could be helpful to frame the personal experience in a broader political and pedagogical inquiry. However, my concern is whether bringing traumatic anecdotal experiences up for discussion bears the risk of re-traumatization when beliefs on the issue differ in the classroom. Or that the issue is discussed in a way that the student could feel quite disconnected as the conversation moves away from their direct experience.
In briefing students before they embark on projects, would it be better to advise them to think carefully about making work based on personal traumatic experiences? The point is not to get them to avoid the topic in question but to get them to think about how they might address the issue it brings up without directly implicating their own trauma in the work. This might help honouring the personal while maintaining boundaries for themselves and addressing confidentiality when it comes to sharing the work more publicly. Removing themselves directly from their personal experience would inspire them to engage in what Borshuk terms, “cognitive restructuring.”
It will be helpful to emphasize, as she says, “the ubiquity of such experiences, rather than as pathological, marginal or deviant. And having these experiences validated through readings and classroom learning can be affirming to those who have struggled with issues of mental illness, poverty, or violence (Phillips, 1998).” Using ‘we’ in taking about these experiences is inclusive and empathetic.
References:
Borshuk, C. (2017). Managing student self-disclosure in class settings: Lessons from feminist pedagogy. Teaching Sociology, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 17, No. 1, 78-86.
Phillips, B. D. (1988). Teaching about family violence to an at-risk population: Insights from sociological and feminist perspectives. Teaching Sociology, 16, 289-293.
Shrewsbury, C. M. (1987). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s Studies Quarterly, 15, 6-14.