ABSTRACT
Feminist pedagogies are strategies for the improvement of the educational experience and democracy more generally. More specifically, they pay attention to the ways in which knowledge and epistemic authority in the classroom environment are related to culturally determined gender expectations. Through the collective construction of a common consciousness about historical and present processes related to how gender defines one’s identity and one’s academic experience, the goal of feminist pedagogies is to promote equal learning opportunities in the classroom setting and throughout the academic culture. In this chapter, I will present the principles and the history behind feminist pedagogies. As a cluster of teaching practices, it will be shown how feminist pedagogies are guided by the attempt to enhance learning by bridging the student’s self-identity and the cultural identity of the academic community through an academic experience that is both epistemically reliable and liberatory.
