Feminist Pedagogy & Self-Authorship

1. Feminist Pedagogy & Self-Authorship Preliminary Implications for Graduate Instruction in College Student Affairs Master’s Programs Anthony Sclafani HI ED 546, Summer 2013

2. Key Components to My Inquiry • This inquiry specifically and intentionally focuses on graduate students. Assumptions and statements referring to students should be understood exclusively in this context. • This inquiry is exploratory and not meant to describe or address any phenomena in totality. • This inquiry is situated in my personal experiences as a higher education/student affairs scholar-practitioner. I am not a neutral party.

3. What Do I Want to Investigate? • To what extent, if any, do feminist pedagogical practices advance epistemological reflection towards self-authorship among student affairs graduate students?

4. Why Feminist Pedagogy? • Personal/Professional educational philosophy; • Education as the practice of liberation (hooks, 1994); • Conceptual understandings of “helping professions” graduate education as a transformative process. • The dynamic relationships between the “personal” and the “political” (Awkward, 1995).

5. What is Self-Authorship? • Corel component of Baxter Magolda’sModel ofEpistemological Reflection (1992) • Longitudinal study of initial cohort of college students, who are now in their late 30s/early 40s. • Nuanced and reflective understanding of the world vis-à-vis one’s positionality. Self-guided and internalized foci frame one’s interactions with the world.

6. Self-Authorship & Metacognition • Self-authorship is a mode of meaning-making; it is an epistemological “state” (King & Baxter Magolda, 2005; Baxter Magolda, 2009). • Metacognition addresses how one comes to know what one knows (i.e., knowledge about one’s personal body of knowledge) (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010).

7. Mixed Methods Approach Major Strength Notable Limitation Not generalizable. Rather, exploratory • Qualitative & quantitative data sources; more robust analyses

8. Assessing for Self-Authorship • How does one determine epistemological development? • Several quantitative instruments were developed over the past 20+ years. • Focus group and/or individual interviews to capture student experiences, perceptions, and meaning making. • In a more robust approach, I would pursue deeper mixed methodologies, particularly regarding qualitative data.

9. Immediate Inquiry Methodology • Semi-structured interviews with 5 instructors who have taught a master’s level college student development theory class. • Semi-structured interviews allow for the interviewer/interviewee dichotomy to function more as a conversation that has some clearly-defined purposes.

10. Questions • Previously, you stated that you employed feminist pedagogical practices as a course instructor for [course name]; what role, if any, do you feel this pedagogical paradigm plays in the educational endeavor? • One of the major theories covered in your course is Marcia B. Baxter Magolda’s Model of Epistemological Reflection; from this theory, we gain an understanding of striving towards self-authorship. Do you feel there are any connections between your teaching pedagogy, and your graduate students’ own epistemological development?

11. Questions Continued • Your course is the foundational theory course for student affairs educators. As a helping profession, we value self-work, introspection, and lifelong learning. To what extent, if any, do you feel your feminist pedagogical approach contributes to your students’ mastery of developmental theory? • Follow-up: To what extent, if any, do you feel your feminist pedagogical approach contributes to your students’ abilities to situation their own developmental journeys within the critical study of student development?

12. Faculty Participants* * Participants self-selected salient identities vis-à-vis their teaching role and its relation to the inquiry.

13. Preliminary Findings • Communities of meaning/communities of learning (Moya, 2002) • “Positionalityand intersectionality” and its relation to student/professor dynamics. • Professor as learner. Student as teacher. • Anecdotal and qualitative support for hypothesis that feminist pedagogical practices have positive effects on epistemological development among students.

14. Focus on Pedagogy • Focus group/interview conversations are semi-structured around the pedagogy and its associated techniques.

15. Next Steps • From the 5 professors, I will gather quantitative data using a preexisting assessment instrument. • Basic pre-test/post-test format, with the intervention being the duration of the class. • Assessment instrument tailored to account for variables that affect learning OTHER than pedagogical paradigm.

16. Pedagogy of the Oppressed • For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other (Friere, 1970/1993, p. 72).