Male Teacher Teaching Feminism in the Classroom

I love addressing the issue of Feminism in my classroom.  It often sponsors some of the best dialogue throughout the entire term.  As such, I usually poke around for the Feminist issue of the day in preparation for class discussion.  Today, when I searched "Men's Issues" on Google News to cover the "other side," I discovered the following infographics.

These infographics are meant to help us decide if we are a feminist or not.  The first one is meant to be comical and to open the door to people who might be real reluctant on this issue.

Infographic courtesy of The Guardian's Emer O'Toole

The next is meant to address the complexity of feminism with a bit more realism.

Infographic courtesy of The Guardian's Emer O'Toole

I like the second one quite a bit, especially the responses to the middle box on the left.  It shows that there are multiple ways of "seeing" feminism, and this is much the same response I get in the classroom.  People possess all kinds of views toward gender equality, and it is often hard to get them to address them in public.

Early in any conversation I host around gender equality, I usually wind up asking, "Who here considers themselves a feminist?"  The number of hands in the air is usually in the single digits.  The first time this happened I was shocked, but I found that it wasn't that people were against feminism, but they often had misconceived ideas of what feminism was.

A good Feminism text for Beginners by Sally J. Scholz

After the first couple of times of lecturing my students after the meager response to "Who here is a feminist," I began asking students to define feminism for me.  This is a casual brainstorm where I right terms and phrases on the board for everyone to read.  Students simply call out their associations and I write until I get a pretty good response set.

Once the board has a number of different associations, we begin to address these ideas one by one.  I've found it to be the most useful exercise in teaching any form of equality.  I do the same thing with civil rights, race, marriage equality, etc.  Those hot button issues that are sometimes scary for teachers to address.

Instead of lecturing, of revealing your own politics, ask the students to reveal theirs.  Give them the safe place in which to analyze their assumptions, and you'll often find that some of the students leave with a somewhat clarified expression of their own beliefs.

Me Lecturing.  Oops!

For teachers, it isn't about making sure students adopt our politics, it's about making them take a moment to analyze their own and understand why they feel the way they feel on certain issues.  It's taken me a long time to come to this point...6 years, and I'm still improving on it, but it feels right when I hear students expressing themselves about complicated issues.  I simply have to remember to get out of the way and mediate the conversation so it doesn't get heated, to clarify points that may have been stated poorly, or to force a student to examine a presupposition of their own line of thinking.  Oftentimes, they even force me to analyze my own.

I consider myself a feminist.  Proudly so.  Some may argue that a man shouldn't be teaching Feminism in the classroom, but I would argue that students need to see BOTH men and women addressing the issue, even if they come at it from different angles.