As an advocate of feminism and as a teacher, I hold myself responsible to teach not in a conventional way but rather in a way that demonstrates feminist values.
Here’s a light list of a few ways that I practice feminist pedagogy in the workshops that I hold. This list should give you a sense of what you can expect when you join us.
Topics: I choose topics based on the needs and interests I hear from my community of feminist entrepreneurs and business people, as well as from the questions that are haunting me about how to practice feminism in business and at work.
Design: I make sure that I have more than enough material to offer participants, at the same time that I promise to start and end on time even if we “don’t cover everything”.
Disclosure: I try to be clear, explicit, and direct about the expectations I have for what we’ll cover and how we’ll learn, so that you have a good sense of what I’m promising and so that you are ready to step into the learning experience. I make clear in advance if I’m intending to record and share the session, and with whom. I get participants explicit consent and also offer you a process for redacting anything that ends up being uncomfortable to share.
Prework: I usually offer some kind of pre-reading or pre-work to help you step gently into the topic, and also to help you start thinking about what you want to learn and what questions you have.
Flexibility: As we move through the material and experiences I’ve designed, I’m ready, willing, and able to adjust the focus, pace, and depth based on real-time feedback from participants about what you need and where your interests are moving.
Co-creating the Space: I always start the workshops with activities through which we co-create our space. This includes making introductions, sharing pronouns, sharing land acknowledgements, and sharing a bit about ourselves. This also, importantly, includes crafting and agreeing to principles for how we will interact with each other.
Experience : I want participants to feel welcome, comfortable, curious, encouraged, and brave in the space we create together. I check with the group at regular intervals during the workshop to make sure the climate feels constructive for everyone.
Presence: Although I like to have every participant show their face when we introduce ourselves, from then on participants are able to manage the intensity of their presence (e.g., with or without video, taking personal breaks, signing off early) as long as you do it in a way that’s kind to other participants. I make zoom recordings and or transcripts available to folks who have to miss parts of a workshop.
Learning from ‘authority’ — me, plus you: As an experienced scholar, teacher, and person in the world I have some expertise that (conventionally) grants me some authority as a someone who knows what she’s talking about. I usually do. I also do my best to stay in a learning posture myself, to be open to new ideas and perspectives, and to recognize when my knowledge is limited or not so relevant. I also expect that each participant comes with their own authority, based on their lived experience, their professional expertise, and their worldview. Our workshops are places where we share insights and engage with each other, not where I drop knowledge down on you.
Voice: I aim to facilitate a space and a dynamic where each participant can exercise some choices, some agency, and especially to voice your own experiences, concerns, and questions.
Community: I am to create a feeling of community during our workshops together. I also invite participants to connect with each other and to join our ongoing feminist community, since we learn better through our relationships with others.
Reflection together/ Reflexivity: Reflecting on information and experience is a critical practice for developing wisdom. Throughout a workshop, we have invitations to reflect in real time on what we are learning. We recognize and examine our own and each others’ assumptions, biases, and positionally.
Group Accountability: Towards the end of each workshop, participants and I reflect in real time on how well we met our own expectations and followed our own norms, and what we might do better the next time.
Reflections after the workshop: To develop your own wisdom from a workshop and also to make time to connect the workshop to your ongoing practices, after each workshop I offer participants a set of reflection questions. These often ask not only for you to make personal connections, but also for you to consider how you experienced power dynamics and emotions, how you recognized oppression and feminist values, and how the workshop brought up issues that matter to you.
Taking your learning forward, and Feminist Citation Practices: I hope that “what you learn, leaves with you”, and that the ideas you pick up in our work together moves forward to influence how you think about and practice feminism and business. I hope that you share publicly what you learn with me / what we learn together, as you navigate through social media, your own writing and teaching, and your own practice.
It would mean a lot to me if you would share ideas from my workshops with a citation back to me — either a link to my website, to my twitter/IG/LinkedIn accounts, to my book page on Amazon, and so on. I love it when folks share things like “I learned about/ I was first exposed to / I found myself challenging … Kyriarchy, and its relationship to intersectionality, in a workshop by @cvharquail”.
One weird thing about teaching is that ‘the better you teach, the less likely folks feel like they learned anything from you’. Folks will think they learned it themselves. Another challenge is that when material is synthesized well and unfolded thoughtfully, it’s often hard to tell that someone (in this case, me) had to add a lot of expertise and work to make it smooth and straightforward. Ideas look patently obvious, there for the taking, when in fact they were excavated through hard (often invisible) scholarly labor. So, an important part of challenging the kyriarchy is making feminist learnings and legacies clear. We honor the work that goes into putting ideas together, and we mention where we learned things, so our pathways might offer other people examples to follow.
Citing each other also shows that feminists develop ideas, share ideas, and influence the world. Change doesn’t just happen, just as ideas don’t just happen. They come from us working, together.
Bringing wisdom back to the community: I invite and expect participants to share their feedback — not only about the workshop process but also about the workshop content — so that wisdom can get cycled back into the community. And also, so that I can improve the workshop for the next time and keep learning myself.
Filling out a survey form to offer some anonymous feedback is actually a feminist business practice and an important contribution to our ongoing work.
Honoring our Feminist Legacy: I aim to cite my sisters and siblings in my workshop materials and in my presentations. In most cases, I try to share specific resources from authors/ activists whose work informs mine and whose work might support participants’ next steps. When it’s hard to list all the references (especially after 40 years of reading and learning feminist & business stuff!), I’ll offer a few resources to indicate key folks I’ve learned from and where you can go for more learning.
When I can do better at any of these goals, please know that I’m open to your feedback and suggestions.
This is a list-in-progress, so if you think I should add something, let me know.