Doing Feminist Educational Theory: A post-modernist perspective

This paper arises from my work as a teacher of courses in feminist educational theory in a New Zealand university. Students usually encounter educational theories as disembodied abstractions scattered in fragments in various, often seemingly unrelated, courses. In a crowded curriculum there is little space for them to create their own educational theories or to reflect on the processes of educational theorising. In this paper I speak with two voices as a means of modelling - for students and teachers of feminist courses - a process of doing educational theory. It is written in two columns. In the left-hand column I speak with an academic voice. I begin by reviewing some theoretical writings of post-modernist theorists who have drawn attention to the ways our educational and social theories are generated by our circumstances - biographical, historical, cultural, generational, and geographical. I then argue that post-modernists have seldom practised what they preach - their abstract, and often inaccessible, writings remain severed from the lived realities at their base. In the right-hand column I speak with a more personal voice. I introduce some everyday experiences which are usually rendered invisible in academic writing in order to demonstrate how a few moments of 'lived reality' can be generative of feminist educational theory. The paper also contains ideas about how its unorthodox form can be used to trigger multiple and idiosyncratic readings and as a trigger for students' writing.