Integrating Feminist Pedagogy with Online Teaching: Facilitating Critiques of Patriarchal Visual Culture

Abstract

In exploring ways to facilitate student feminist critiques of images of women in patriarchal culture through the asynchronous online discussion, we draw from literature concerning women and online education, feminist visual culture pedagogy, and online pedagogy. In this article, we discuss our implementation of the Interaction Analysis Model (IAM) as example of an online feminist learning space. IAM, as elucidated from a feminist standpoint, recognizes five cognitive activities involved in construction of knowledge through online discussions: (a) sharing and comparing of ideas, (b) cognitive dissonance, (c) co-constructing knowledge, (d) assessing proposed constructions, and (e) applying newly constructed knowledge. We also present a sampling of student feminist critiques as facilitated by IAM, which includes the lack of women’s voices, dearth of resources to understand women’s creativity, gender stereo-types in classical mythology, gender inequality in the art world, and learning about women’s lives through their creative works rather than the written records promoting male dominance.