Challenging the divide? Confronting a dialogue across political margins in a feminist classroom

Abstract

My article narrates and theorizes one educational moment of speaking 'across' the social and political margins in a peripheral college on the northern border of Israel. I recognize the academic space as what historian Louise Pratt titled a 'contact zone' where peoples geographically and historically separated meet within radically asymmetrical relations of power. In the Israeli academia, secular Westernized Jewish students and teachers from hegemonic groups interact with students from political and social minorities. Despite continued estrangement and mutual hostility, these encounters at times lead to unexpected moments of multicultural alliances. Feminist critical pedagogies serve to identify and create occasions for such interactions that are missing from most academic locations. However, as I demonstrate in this article, these moments which create potential unforeseen resistance to the existing power structure can easily be overlooked. The article focuses on a moment of pedagogical failure to identify an attempt by two female students to cross national affiliations and overcome mutual hostilities, expressing unforeseen solidarity with each other. Reflecting on the political and social reasons for my failure, I end the article by imagining an attempt at amending the pedagogical damage, giving the two students another chance to express their solidarity.

La dimensión pedagógica de la equidad en educación superior

“…No existe una única pedagogía de la equidad. La literatura especializada recoge una estimulante diversidad de expresiones y modalidades que declaran tener objetivos específicos sobre la justicia social, la equidad o la inclusión social: pedagogías críticas (Apple, 2011;Freire, 2005;Giroux, 1985;McLaren, 1995), pedagogía dialógica (Alexander, 2004), pedagogía de frontera (Giroux, 2003a), pedagogía humanizante (Salazar, 2013), pedagogía pública (Allsup y Shieh, 2012), pedagogía queer (Britzman, 1995), pedagogías feministas críticas (Hager, 2018) pedagogías del cuidado (Motta & Bennett, 2018); pedagogías emancipatorias (Morrow & Torres, 1995), entre otras. Aunque todas tienen objetivos particulares, comparten el interés por desarrollar y fomentar el pensamiento crítico y las relaciones educativas democráticas para permitir que las personas en condiciones de desventajas sociales ejerzan una agencia crítica para transformar los órdenes contemporáneos sobre la base de la justicia social (Marginson, 2011;Osman & Hornsby, 2018).…”