Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

ence on the teaching. This was because various kinds of emotions were presentduring the ten days of the course – from the early days of the course whenpeople were eager to get to know each other, over some days of closer friendship,to a certain level of tiredness in the social relations that occurred on day7 and 8 of the course.Partly because of the different levels of knowledge between the students,and partly because of our view of knowledge not as accumulated mass, but asunderstanding arising through experience and thinking, we wanted the studentsto reflect on various perspectives of knowledge already at their disposal, tohighlight complexities and introduce different theoretical frameworks in orderto increase the level of understanding. This meant that the teaching processduring the course could be regarded as experimental, and students who wereused to lectures on books or theories probably perceived these sessions as a bitconfusing at the start.As a group of co-teachers, we had scheduled the days of the coursearound different concepts, that in our view are key to gender studies, suchas ‘politics’, ‘knowledge’, ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘sex/gender’. Day 7 of thecourse was dedicated to ‘experience’, and during that day we wanted to discusswhy experience has been important for feminist theory. The ambition was toshow that experiences, are always already interpretations, and as such culturaland historical, but that – despite this – it is necessary to take experiences intoaccount and reflect on them. With the ambition to have the students thinkcritically about experience, ontology and epistemology, we decided that weshould start the day with a hands-on exercise in memory work before we gaveour lecture.After a brief introduction to the method, we asked everyone to write afew pages on a concrete memory they had from a particular situation. As oneimportant feature of the method is that everyone shall have a personal memoryof the situation, we first tried to find a situation about which every participantwould have a concrete memory. We had prepared different suggestions to thegroup, such as “Going with public transport”, “Getting dressed”, “Cooking forsomeone else” and “Entering the university for the first time”, but the wholegroup – all in all we were 26 persons – both teachers and students took partin the exercise – couldn’t agree on a common situation. Thus, we decided tosplit the group into three smaller groups, in order to find a suitable situationto write about. Later on, it turned out that two of the groups had decided to80