ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the teaching tools that the author offer are informed by critical pedagogy, which disrupts gender hegemony by intervening in otherwise taken-for-granted social processes. Educators across multiple disciplines, who teach about inequality, oppression, and social justice, have long been concerned with empowering students to transform social structures. Teaching and learning can be an emotional experience for both educators and students. Discomfort is an emotion that is bound to emerge. As educators, they know this because they invite disruption of norms and taken-for-granted expectations via our curriculum and critical inquiry, often destabilizing all that is familiar to students’ inherited world views and identity structures. The permanency of names is rooted in colonial state-making practices, and names act as a governing logic of citizenship. Names are also an important mechanism of individual identity recognition.
