ABSTRACT
Feminist pedagogy means teaching in the context of awareness of female oppression. My first exploration into what this might mean began in 1970, when a colleague and I combined our respective seminars into a single experiment that was to consider issues of characterformation in women as represented in fiction and psychology. We were convinced that such considerations were painfully absent from the curricula of our respective departments, but had to break a number of rules in setting up such a collaborative course: all new seminars were to be reviewed by a college committee which required long and closely argued justifications before approving such innovations; seminars were understood to represent the culmination of long and arduous training in a discipline – not new ventures into unknown ‘interdisciplinary’ terrain; and co-teaching, while not expressly forbidden, was thought to pose such insoluble issues of credit, grades and teachingloads that it was in practice virtually unknown. All these circumstances lent an air of adventure to our undertaking that served to carry us through our own terror of not knowing what we were getting into. Only one thing was certain: we would not lack students.
