ABSTRACT
Feminist classrooms aspire to be gender-sensitive educational settings committed to principles of participatory democracy. In the words of Nancy Schniedewind "Feminist pedagogy demands the integration of egalitarian context and process". Feminist educators are often expected to have a large wardrobe of hats: that of mother, sister, peer, mentor, translator, friend. Women's engaging in public rational critique has been systematically emphasized by Wollstonecraft and later Enlightenment feminists as evidence of women's capacity to reason. Feminist classrooms are expected to be subversive pedagogical settings that overthrow deeply entrenched patriarchal beliefs. The central argument is that internalization of a feminist educative sensibility is necessary for feminist education to succeed. Such internalization is mediated through identification with another woman, the feminist teacher. For successful socialization to take place, identification with the teacher role model is needed and such an identification is seen as both legitimate and instrumentally necessary.
