Ways of Doing: Feminist Educational Development

Abstract

In response to the recent special call in To Improve the Academy, we offer the following collaborative essay that describes how feminism is our characterizing perspective on educational development. The essay details various, interrelated facets of feminism that inform our work in the field: gender, intersectionality, power, privilege, standpoint theory, and collaboration. Not only do these facets characterize our own feminist approach to educational development—from consultations to organizational development to publications—but, we argue, they also align well with the values and approaches of the field as a whole.

Keywords: collaboration, diversity, POD, values, feminism

Introduction

Two academics graduate with PhDs at the same time from humanities programs. Both have similar, interdisciplinary academic interests, including a penchant for women’s studies. Both have taught courses, served as consultants for writing centers, and worked at CTLs while graduate students. Both intend to pursue educational development full time and find themselves interviewing for many of the same positions. Given the cutthroat dynamics of graduate school, the shrinking job market for humanities PhDs, and what Roxane Gay (2014) has labeled “the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive” (p. 47), it is easy to imagine this origin story—our origin story—unfolding much differently.

Yet our shared feminist perspective and, in particular, our shared impulse to choose collaboration over competition allowed us to subvert the more obvious ending. We met after completing graduate school and beginning our careers as full time educational professionals, and we chose to become allies, not adversaries. In the years since then, we have become frequent co authors, co mentors, and friends. We celebrate each other’s weddings and share baby photos. We send congratulations when one of us is recognized for an achievement and condolences when one of us faces disappointment. We each feel that the other makes us better scholars, writers, and people. We are keenly aware that we might have become rivals, uneasily eying or vying with each other; that this road was not taken is something we are continually grateful for and something for which we feel we owe our feminist values.

While there are many ways to define feminism, Angela Davis’s definition (2013) resonates most strongly with us:

Feminism is not bra burning or man hating. It is the interrogation of power, the honoring of perspective, the encouragement for reflection that makes us more aware of ourselves and our actions and more open and empathic to those around us. Feminism is challenging. It constantly demands a consideration of who we are and how we got to be this way. It forces us to ask who we have left out and to uncover the spoken and unspoken reasons why. Feminism humbles: it pushes us to do better, with the full knowledge that, in a world of differences and attending inequalities, perfection is not possible. It forces the embrace of process as much as product.

We have realized that our feminist training and perspectives not only laid the groundwork for our relationship, but also informed our inquiries and interests. These in turn have shaped, and are also well aligned with, our ways of being and doing as educational developers. While we recognize, like Gay (2014), that “feminism is complex and evolving and flawed” and that “feminism will not and cannot fix everything” (p. xii), in what follows, we outline the central feminist principles and approaches that guide our work in educational development. Furthermore, we posit that—although we claim it as the primary defining feature of our own work—a feminist perspective is quite compatible with the shared values and ethics of educational development as a whole, as espoused by organizations such as the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network.

Before we begin, we would like to make a few notes about our approach. First, as is probably already obvious, this is a collaborative effort, similar to many other pieces published in To Improve the Academy. Like all of the scholarship we have generated together, this piece is the result of our co mentoring relationship. While traditional mentoring relationships are hierarchical and thought to primarily benefit the younger, less experienced, and less knowledgeable protégé, a feminist alternative of co mentoring (e.g., McGuire & Reger, 2003) better reflects the more equitable, supportive dynamic that characterizes our relationship. Gail M. McGuire and Jo Reger (2003) explain, “Co mentoring emphasizes the importance of cooperative, egalitarian relationships for learning and development…. Each person in a co mentoring relationship has the opportunity to occupy the role of teacher and learner, with the assumption being that both individuals have something to offer and gain in the relationship” (pp. 54–55). While it is true that we have published both separately and together before, we felt it was especially important that this topic—on feminism and educational development—reflected a shared effort.

Second, we have intentionally taken a broad view of “educational development” in this special issue—not just the instructional and even organizational development work we do at our universities, but also the time we spend consulting with external individuals and institutions, volunteering with professional organizations like POD (e.g., chairing committees and serving on editorial boards), producing scholarship for educational development journals (e.g., International Journal of Academic Development and Studies in Graduate and Professional Student Development), collaborating with other educational developers on presentations and publications, advising newer members in the field, managing CTL staff, and so forth.

Third, like feminist pedagogy—an approach toward teaching methods, learning outcomes, and course content marked by several, complementary practices that include the “validation of personal experience, development of political/social understanding and activism, critical thinking/open mindedness, reflexivity…, social construction of knowledge, attention to affect (refusal to separate the rational from the emotional), empowerment, inclusion, collaboration, community, and leadership” (Hassel & Nelson, 2012, p. 146)—a feminist approach to educational development also encourages deep self reflection regarding “fundamental beliefs and values about teaching, learning, and knowledge making” (Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, 2015). This approach encourages continuous questioning of how we have come to know and do what we do, which voices have and have not been part of that process, and how structures of power produce patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The very theme of this special issue is a testament to how integral self reflection is to our field. As such, we have chosen to share our own stories in this article—failures, discomforts, transformations—and, in doing so, honor the power of our own narratives (and implicitly others’) as well as the particular contexts that have shaped them.

Fourth, and relatedly, we have decided to use first person pronouns. While it is not uncommon in educational development literature, this choice is in contradistinction to the academic conventions in some fields, which discourage the inclusion of the self in academic discourse or draw sharp divides between the personal and the intellectual. Such conventions insist on an (we believe misleadingly false) objectivity thought to accompany a dearth of “I” or “we,” the latter of which has been so foundational to feminist discourse, theorizing, writing, and relating (see Pearce, 2004, on pronouns).

Fifth and finally, careful readers will realize that this article is recursive, that many of our sections overlap with and circle back on one another. This is intentional, possibly even inevitable. Feminism, for us, is not composed of a linear list of disconnected theories or themes, but rather interconnected, interdependent facets that move in and out of focus, depending on the context. All of the topics explored below are the concerns of the kind of broad, overlapping, recursive feminism that has influenced and directed us for years.

With these considerations in mind, we now turn to the facets of feminism that most profoundly inform our interaction with, and participation in, the field of educational development.

Gender

While a feminist approach has many different aspects, the most foundational is that it focuses on and asks tough questions about the impact of gender in our lives. As we have previously written (Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017), women make up a higher percentage of practitioners and leaders in our field than in many other areas of academia. This observation, as well as our own experiences as younger women in the field, prompted us to analyze the feminized discourse of educational development and to consider how gender might impact the practices and perceptions of our field. Although higher numbers of women—as well as a positively affirmed feminized representation of our work—is, indeed, laudable, we also used that article to issue a series of concerns, noting that these gendered attributes may inadvertently contribute to our often reported dismissal, marginalization, or even termination.

We see identity—gendered and otherwise—as the result of a set of ongoing, repeated practices that are guided by and become intelligible through a shared set of social norms. Judith Butler calls this conception of identity performativity. She explains, “To say that gender is performative is a little different [from calling it a performance] because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman” (Butler, 2011, n.p.). All identities, therefore, become “term[s] in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, [gender identity] is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler, 1990, p. 33). To that end, we recognize the ways that our own practices as educational developers continue to (re)define what that professional identity means. For example, as Lindsay has transitioned from being an instructional consultant to the director of a new center, she has had to perform her role differently, as more assertive than she had been before. She has had to be more mindful of the symbolic power she is granted by virtue of being in a new position, as well as how her gender and age mitigate whatever authority she is granted, and how she must perform her role and her gender carefully (e.g., being sagely decisive but not appearing too “bossy”). We thus interrogate how identities come to be, how they are reinforced, and how we can create change within a set of shared social norms. And importantly, we bring this perspective to the work that we do with instructors and administrators as well, encouraging them to ask similar questions of themselves.

We also see gendered expectations and performances of other professional roles within academia. For example, women—even educational developers—in leadership roles must struggle against the predetermination that they are dependent, passive, emotional, and uncertain of themselves, whereas men are assumed to be sure of themselves, aggressive, and strong (Bornstein, 2009; Nidiffer & Bashaw, 2001; Sanchez & Thorton, 2010). Women also have to struggle against the perception that they are less capable of making appropriate and timely decisions without coming on too strong, which is to say too masculine (Eddy, 2009; Huston, 2016). Despite the stereotypes facing women leaders, collaborative approaches to leadership—more often demonstrated by women—have been increasingly judged as “more desirable” or “more effective,” especially in recent educational leadership (Kezar, 2001; Sanchez & Thorton, 2010). The POD Network, with its equitable share of women presidents over the years (Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017), certainly embodies this trend. Collaborative approaches are bolstered by feminine “ways of knowing” that are less linear and hierarchical than men’s, as well as the fact that women tend to be more democratic, participative, empathic, and collaborative as leaders and decision makers (Belenky, 1986; Cheung & Halpern, 2010; Huston, 2016). These gendered facets of professional life can have a substantial impact on practice, and they beg questions that we, as a field, have just begun to answer.

Feminist understandings of identity as performative can help us better articulate how power relationships and sociocultural norms shape our experiences and can point out how individuals reify as well as challenge those norms through their own performances. These ideas give us the philosophical underpinnings with which we can ask tough questions of educational development: How does who we understand ourselves to be shape our values and practices? What do those values and practices signify to those around us? How do power relationships shape this process of signification and self identification for us as a field of practitioners? What values are we reifying, intentionally or not, through our language and actions? These ideas also allow us to question those with whom we work: When someone identifies as a “teacher,” what ideals and values shape the performance of that identity? What values, norms, and expectations do students bring, and from what material conditions do those emerge? How do these multiple identities (teacher, student, etc.) held by multiple people interact with and reshape each other over time?

Intersectionality

In addition to querying questions of gender, feminist theory asks us to also consider the intersections of gender with other identities. The concept of “intersectionality” was first theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black woman, who observed that, at that time, “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). In her case, this meant focusing on either her disadvantage as a Black person or as a woman, but not the complex, and distinct, ways that it was both. Yet, Crenshaw claimed, this kind of single axis focus “marginalized those who are multiply burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination” (p. 140). She realized that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”—or, we might hasten to add, any other kind of prejudice or discrimination that people experience today, such as classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, and so on (p. 140).

Decades later, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) help us to understand the analytical power of intersectionality:

Intersectionality is now a commonly used tool, at least among feminists in academia (McCall, 2005), which helps us understand that identities are multiple, that axes may not be able to be isolated, that burdens may not be experienced neatly or singly, and that discrimination is not simply additive. Even in our disciplinary teaching, which we continue to do as a part of our educational development positions, we have applied an intersectional lens. Emily, for instance, works with undergraduate students to help them understand that people who are religious do not always prioritize (or feel discrimination based solely on) their religious identity. Religious people have many different identities and sometimes make decisions or hold beliefs that are not related to their religion. Conversations about intersectionality in the religious peoples whom Emily and her students study easily leads to turning this lens inward. As both teachers and educational developers, Emily and Lindsay have both found great utility in this framework.

So have other scholars in our field. For example, Peter Felten, along with Brooke Barnett, leveraged intersectionality as a lens in the context of the classroom in Intersectionality in Action (2016). When working intimately with other instructors, intersectionality helps us to presume multiple identities and the various ways these multiple identities might interact and might even prove to be burdensome. Intersectionality has further confirmed the essential importance, as recommended by Little and Palmer (2011) in their coaching framework for consultations, of deep listening and powerful question asking to help others identify and explore the salient aspects of their identity in any given educational situation and to avoid making presumptions about what the complicating factor or, more often, factors might be.

In a consultation with, for instance, an instructor who presents as a young White woman in a STEM field—a population with whom we have both worked extensively—we recognize that she may have questions about the efficacy of her teaching for any number of reasons. Challenges may be related to her gender or her age or her situatedness in a largely male dominated domain. Yet there are also, of course, many identities that are not visible: this instructor may hold a minority religious affiliation; she may be the first of her family to attend college; she may not be a native English speaker or she may come from a country that has different cultural norms; she may have a disability not immediately apparent; she may not even identify with binary gender identifications (we may be overstepping by even presuming “she” is a woman who prefers to be addressed using feminine pronouns). Intersectionality reminds us not only to appreciate identity as multifaceted, but also to avoid making presumptions so that we may create the conditions for authentic interactions between full, complex selves.

Intersectionality is also a lens that we turn back on ourselves; it is a means for recognizing the various ways we are constructed and continue to construct ourselves and the various ways our own social identities come in and out of relevance. We both have experienced situations where we have felt our voices were not heard or our ideas were dismissed, and we have struggled to determine whether that was because we were women or because we are young or because we were new or because we did not have the right job title or because, simply, our ideas themselves did not merit consideration. Intersectionality helps us realize there are no easy answers, that so often situations are the result of a confluence of interacting factors, that we may never be able to isolate one single explanation. We encourage others working in the field to continue to critically and reflexively contemplate their own variable identities and to create space for instructors to do the same.

Power

As feminist educational developers, we are not solely interested in gender and other specific identity markers (race, age, class, etc.), but also in the structures of power that produce and make those identities meaningful. Philosopher Michel Foucault’s work has been foundational to broader feminist understandings of how power operates through language and practices and thus to our considerations of how power and identity operate in our own educational development work. Foucault (1978) argues that traditional models for understanding power, which are top down and authoritative, fail to fully account for the microdynamics of power as it operates through discourse. More simplistic models of power also leave little room for resistance or change, short of a coup. For Foucault, power operates much more complexly—not as authority that holds the threat of punishment from on high, but as a multiplicity of force relations. Power is not acquired, seized, or shared; it cannot be wholly owned at all. Rather, it operates diffusely through discourse in order to reach “the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior” (p. 11) and to produce knowledge about that behavior through measures such as classification, valuation, etc.

Foucault’s hypothesis that power is diffuse forces us to reconsider what resistance and domination look like—to understand how institutions and practices are produced, bolstered, and conditioned by discursive systems, but also to recognize the potential for change. Feminist pedagogy (following, e.g., Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed) likewise embraces a notion of “power as energy, capacity, and potential rather than as domination” (Shrewsbury, 1987, p. 8). Power is inescapable but also productive; it generates as well as shapes meaning.

Within our field, Felten, Little, and Pingree (2004) have applied Foucault’s ideas about power to the consulting relationship. They note the educational developer’s ideal aim of creating a “safe space,” wherein the instructors with whom they work can feel comfortable freely expressing themselves, may ignore a web of power relations at play. Through a discussion of different types of consultations, the authors ultimately recommend that educational developers adopt a Foucauldian perspective and leverage their power carefully—to encourage reflection, to reinforce tenets of effective pedagogy, and to encourage others (instructors, students, etc.) to wield their power in careful ways as well.

When Lindsay was at her previous institution, she had decided to focus her educational development efforts on adjunct instructors. Considering her entry level status, combined with the systematic disenfranchisement of adjuncts, it may be tempting to see this as a situation in which very little change can be made due to our seeming lack of explicit power and authority over the practices and policies of our institution. However, Lindsay formed a small learning community of adjunct instructors, started offering professional development funds targeted toward adjuncts, and oversaw an award process that recognized excellent teaching in adjuncts. The combination of these efforts allowed Lindsay and her CTL to tell a different story about this population of instructors—one that was less “doom and gloom” and more focused on the value of adjuncts—something she advocated for in a research presentation at a POD conference (Bernhagen, 2014). This subtle and slow reframing of the discourse around the “adjunct experience” ultimately prompted several staff and administrators within the university to start accounting for and responding more consistently to the challenges faced by adjuncts, which in turn will continue to give adjuncts even more of a platform to contribute to the discourse.

Privilege

While “privilege” has, in recent years, become a contentious word, it is nevertheless an important consideration when adopting a feminist lens, in educational development or elsewhere. “Privilege,” as Gay (2014) so simply defines it, “is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor” (p. 16). Those tired of the term “privilege,” or squeamish about its implications in their own lives, may find the language of “tailwinds” and “headwinds” (Irving, 2014, p. 54) more comfortable—that is, the benefits, open doors, free passes, charitable explanations, and easy smiles that ease the passage of a person who is part of one group and those obstacles, frowns, skepticism, additional steps, intimidation, extra stops, closed doors, etc. that deter or impede others from their ability to succeed.

Homing in on privilege allows us, as Peggy McIntosh did so famously in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (McIntosh, 2017; originally 1989), to identify the (systematic) ways we might find ourselves moving about easily in the world, while others get stuck, fall short, suffer, or disappear, as the result of systems that advantage certain identities and disadvantage others. It asks us to query, to trouble, to dismantle the notion of meritocracy, ever popular in the American imagination. Privilege, McIntosh writes, is “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious…. Privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” (n.p.). Of course, becoming aware of one’s own privilege ideally has the effect of uncovering and exposing the privilege of others and, most importantly, the lack of privilege of others.

In what ways do different aspects of our identity—gender, race, class, and so on—stymie or ease things for us? Within the field of educational development, we have experienced both headwinds and tailwinds. Under less than ideal working conditions, it can be easy to feel a lack of privilege—low places on the ladder, lack of agency, stifled voice, dismissed ideas, controlled movements, comparatively low pay. It can be exhausting to hear, as we both repeatedly have, that older faculty might not take us seriously because of our young age, gender, and presumed lack of college teaching experience. It can be frustrating to work at an institution where the prestige and the power reside with the faculty, and to not be one of them. Or to report to an administrator who does not have a clear sense of what education development is or the value it (or we) can add to a campus. Having to constantly justify oneself on the basis of these intersecting identities is a very real headwind.

Yet it is easy to overblow setbacks and challenges and avoid seeing the very real ways that we both benefit from being gainfully employed as White women in a field predominated, as POD Network membership data indicate, by both. Emily came from a family of postgraduates; grew up in a wealthy, predominantly White, and safe city; attended a prestigious private college; and matriculated in a doctoral program at one of the top public schools in the nation—a school from which many of her relatives, including her father, had also graduated. It has only been recently, inspired by courageous authors and colleagues, that she has started to unravel the various ways that she has benefited not only as a result of her own hard work, but as a result of the financial security, support for and expectation of education, comfort with adults and authority figures, extensive networks, ease of movement, extra money for nonessentials, experience traveling, and so on (not to mention the casual fulfillment of basic necessities such as food, shelter, medical care, and love) that she did nothing to earn… and that so many others do without.

Likewise, Lindsay has recently spent time considering the various ways in which her privilege has smoothed her transition into a new position. She was recently hired as the CTL director at the university in her rural hometown. Although she is not an alumna and is a first generation college graduate from a working class family, her insider status in the community still offers a broad network of connections that ease her work. For example, she was advised upon her arrival that one of the colleges on campus can be “a difficult nut to crack,” owing to one administrator’s tendency to make the unit as self sufficient as possible. However, Lindsay knew one of this administrator’s family members and had, many years before, sung carols at holiday parties in this administrator’s living room. (It is worth noting here that Lindsay’s musicianship itself was a symptom of her privilege; she was fortunate to have parents who made sacrifices to support her interest in music, which resulted in her befriending other serious music students, of which the administrator’s family member was one.) Lindsay was able to connect with the administrator immediately and—after being invited to a college meeting to be introduced to the faculty and staff—has now had several opportunities to work with the college in question. Lindsay admittedly feels a little strange about this instance of privilege—and those like it—knowing that others at the university face uphill battles where she does not.

Yet privilege is, as the title of McIntosh’s piece highlights, so often invisible. Beverly Tatum (2000) writes, “In the areas where a person is a member of the dominant or advantaged social group, the category is usually not mentioned. That element of their identity is so taken for granted by them that it goes without comment. It is taken for granted by them because it is taken for granted by the dominant culture” (p. 10). Too often, privilege remains unrealized by the very people benefiting from it, those whose lives have simply allowed them to conclude that this is how the world is. Because of its invisible nature, privilege is challenging to identify, let alone grapple with. In a recent discussion at Emily’s educational development center, for example, she was horrified when a friend and colleague pointed out how a proposed change to the academic calendar would affect the less privileged staff who work tirelessly, but for significantly less pay, to support the institution (and the center). Emily had not considered these ramifications on her own. Later, in a center wide strategic planning discussion, Emily remembered her embarrassing myopia and advocated for a revised mission statement that would be sure to include these very staff, writing to her colleagues that “I cannot live with a mission that, by definition, excludes a significant part of our team (including two, full time, permanent positions) and I feel that it shouldn’t have to be up to those less privileged to advocate for their own inclusion.”

Part of what the notion of privilege reminds us of in our feminist work is that, as Allan G. Johnson (2001) writes, “To do something about the trouble around difference, we have to talk about it, but most of the time we don’t, because it feels too risky. This is true for just about everyone, but especially for members of privileged categories” (p. 83). It is too easy for those who are privileged to avoid talking about, or even thinking about, the ways that they are privileged. Those who are less privileged do not have the luxury of opting out, while those who are privileged do not (as McIntosh highlights with her focus on “invisible”) even realize they need to consider it.

Standpoint Theory

Because a common effect of privilege is the assumption that the dominant or privileged group’s perspective is universally shared, feminist standpoint theory offers an important, epistemological correction by emphasizing the particularity of perspectives that emerge from the complexity of identity within a web of power and difference. While initially inspired by Marxism (and later criticized for this very reason), we still find it helpful, in our educational development work, to remember standpoint theory’s central underpinnings: “that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced” (Hekman, 1997, p. 342). As we have written elsewhere, “different positions beget different standpoints, which emerge from different experiences of institutionalized social practices” (Gravett & Bernhagen, 2015, n.p.). Like Emily’s experience in the story above, the perspective of an educational developer may differ from a staff member, which may differ from a faculty member, which may differ from a teaching assistant, which differ from a student employed by a center, which may different from an upper level administrator tasked with supervising the center. This is the same along other axes of identity, such as race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, age, and so on.

Moreover, standpoint theory claims that “marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non marginalized” (Bowell, n.d.). This is, in part, because of what writings on privilege have taught us: that privilege is often invisible to those who have it. When people are part of the dominant culture (as we are, in some respects, being White women in the field of American educational development), everything that is like us seems normal, obvious, natural, a foregone conclusion. It is from marginalized positions (as we have also occupied, when we have not been directors, for instance, or when interacting with older male supervisors) that we can “study up,” seeing “behind” or “beneath” (Harding, 2004, p. 6; see also Green & Little, 2013). While feminist standpoint theory initially focused on women’s perspectives—and their systemic oppression—this theory allows us to be able to examine other institutional oppressions that exist within higher education and, potentially, within our field and to give voice to perspectives that offer critical points of awareness.

We have found leveraging such a theory useful in our own scholarship; indeed, it anchors the first piece we published together—a call to recognize the margins within margins, that not all educational developers are the same. We believe that educational developers are uniquely situated to appreciate the contextualization of knowledge and the importance of situatedness as we so often find ourselves shifting roles, wearing different hats, occupying the “betwixt and between” (Little & Green, 2012), adopting different orientations, moving along different continua, adapting to fit the variable circumstances we find ourselves in. We also recognize that, sometimes, we are marginal as educational developers (as we may be when instructors think of us as less than credible because we are not faculty or when our work is perceived as fluff) and, at other times, not marginal at all, aligned as we can be with the administration or appreciating, on the whole, salaries much higher than many of our disciplinary counterparts. We also find ourselves drawn to including different standpoints and explicitly advocating for them in our educational development work. For example, we have both advocated for the value of qualitative research and (as we are doing here) a feminist perspective in educational development scholarship.

Collaboration

Coming full circle, we wish to highlight a final defining feature of feminist practice (one that is clearly central to the work that we do together): equitable collaboration. As far back as 1970, when the second wave feminist movement was gaining traction, Robin Morgan wrote in the foundational anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, “The women’s movement is a non hierarchical one. It does things collectively” (1970, p. xviii). The act of joining together multiple, diverse perspectives when working for change—on whatever scale, toward whatever goal—is common in educational development as well. It is reflected in the leadership structure of POD, with its three president (president elect, current president, and past president) model, the importance of consensus in the decision making of its governing body, as well as the functioning of all POD committees, populated and chaired by volunteers working together toward a shared set of goals. Likewise, educational developers espouse collaboration as a value and often find themselves in situations where collaboration is necessary. We might work with several instructors from a single unit to redesign a curriculum, with individual instructors to help them consider student voices, or with administrators who themselves are responding to multiple stakeholders.

Because of the frequency of collaboration, educational developers are often called upon to help manage delicate situations or even conflict. After all, “with the increased attention given by many institutions in higher education to create a more diverse and global academic environment that reflects an educated citizenry—and as we work to develop and value individuals and groups who have different needs, ideas, values, beliefs, or goals—conflicts are inevitable” (Stanley, Watson, & Algert, 2005, p. 130). However, a feminist perspective on collaboration sees conflicts as important opportunities. We acknowledge that engaging in an honest exchange of ideas can be difficult. Yet we also believe that conflict can be a necessary step for making change (Johnson Reagon, 1981). The difficulty arising from conflict in collaboration “can be one means of achieving the kind of reflexivity necessary to recognize the limits of the knowledge that we produce so as to enable the localizing and situating of knowledge claims” (Pratt, 2010, p. 46). We see this not only when working with groups of faculty and/or administrators, but also when helping instructors navigate difficulties in the classroom. Often times, conflict with students—or, at least, having perspectives that conflict with students’—can prompt instructors (with the guidance of an educational developer) to reflect on their teaching in new and productive ways.

References

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