ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a detailed discussion of the theoretical resources available to challenge hegemonic and instrumentalist discourses of teaching and learning in higher education and pedagogical identity formations. Moving away from hegemonic discourses of teaching and learning, we explore the potential of pedagogies of difference to explore lived, relational and embodied practices in higher education, and their interconnection with ontologies, epistemologies and politics of mis/recognition (Freire, 1970; Lather, 1991; Fraser, 1997; Burke, 2012). The dynamics, relations and experiences of teaching and learning are conceptualised as intimately tied to the privileging of some forms of knowledge over others, the recognition and legitimisation of hegemonic subjectivities and the exclusion of ‘Others’, often problematically constructed as ‘undeserving’ of HE participation. Reductive language that frames teaching and learning largely as ‘styles’, ‘provision’, ‘needs’ and ‘delivery’, operates to hide complex power relations within pedagogical spaces, which are constituted and productive of gendered interactions, performatives and subjectivities. Feminist post/structural concepts of gendered subjectivity (e.g. Butler, 1993; Flax, 1995) shed light on the multiple, contradictory and shifting sense of self that unsettles hegemonic versions of the individual as a coherent, rational, knowable and stable self. Such conceptual frameworks aim to reveal the multiple layers of injustices that operate around processes of identity formation and subjective construction, in relation to embodied intersections of age, class, ethnicity, gender and race.
