Cross-Cultural Pedagogy and the Passion for Ignorance

On its psychological surface, this article considers anxieties generated among some Pakeha (white) students in a feminist university classroom in Aotearoa/New Zealand when Maori and Pacific Islands teachers take positions of authority. At another level, the article queries the pedagogical ideal of `increasing cross-cultural knowledge', and discusses this ideal's inevitable production of ignorance, and its mobilization of complex Pakeha desires. More fundamentally, the article is a Pakeha teacher's (my) attempt to use the work of some psychoanalytic feminist theorists to make sense of student confessions and resistances that Pakeha feminist teachers cannot bear to hear, and that we cannot ignore.