REFLECTINGON AN ACADEMIC PRACTICE TOBOOST GENDER ...

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Our action research (AR) experience was not methodologically pure, however, accordingto Christianakis (2008), the complexity of classroom dynamics made unnecessary that educationalresearch conformed to the classic action research cycle; «teacher research reflects someof the same goals of action research, methodologically, [nonetheless] it is less formulaic thanthe action research cycle» (ibidem: 100). Following Smith (1996), that it is not really a misusingof AR; in fact, Lewin itself was more interested in offering skills to observe and problematizerealities then defining a strict method of research, and the technicization of AR maydegenerate and reduce its critical and liberating possibilities (Weaver-Hightower, 2010).We cannot forget, however, that in our experience we are going to start from a feministperspective that, by interacting with AR, brings a special focus on the consequences of powerrelations responsible for gender inequalities (Frisby, Maguire, & Reid, 2009). In that sense, «wemust be mindful that raising questions about gender inequalities can create hostilities fromthose resisting change, so we must carefully consider if and how such tensions can be negotiatedwithout endangering study participants» (ibidem: 16-17). Such question is extremely relevantin the classroom where is always present the power relation between teacher and students.In order to recognize that tension, we believe that we have to consider our experienceas not participative, despite of the active inclusion of students in it. In fact, students’ reflexivitywas centred on the topics we were analysing and not on the process and dynamic wewere acting while working on them. Indeed, even if we took in great consideration theiropinions and feedback in order to decide how to proceed, they did not take directly part inthe decision making; in other words, they were not co-researchers. That brought the teacher(B. Biglia), in the moment in which the practice was going to derive in an AR, to invite A.Velasco as external co-researcher, making it possible to redefine and articulate a more complexnetwork of power relations in the classroom. Moreover, A. Velasco’s participation wasextremely important in order to «respond to the ever-shifting, contextual and relational, andlanguage and culture-based nature of students’ identities and voices» (Cook-Sather, 2007: 397).According to the author, this can be achieved by the researcher engaging in a process oftranslation: «Translating ourselves into different versions of researchers such that we conceptualizeand collaborate with students as co-interpreters has the potential to help us resist someforms of imposition and subordination» (ibidem). We believe that researcher’s translation andshifts are inherently limited due to the fact that our standpoint (Haraway, 1991) cannot beomitted. Collaboration between researchers, especially if they have a different backgroundand standpoint, could improve our mobility and offer more space to students’ different opinionsand realities. In our case, the presence of the co-researcher was particularly relevant toreduce both an intergenerational lively gap and feminist language ones and help students tobe conscious of their gender stereotype.112
Nevertheless,Awareness does not automatically produce appropriate responses for the action. That is, «awareness» easilyleads to reflection without action. (…) «Critical consciousness» facilitates a contextualized analysis of problematicsituations, which allows people to transform that reality. (…) Transformation, therefore, results from a criticalperspective. (Colás & Jimenez, 2006: 423)This, in our opinion, has to be directed also on ourselves.In that sense, the commitment of feminist pedagogies with self-reflexive practices fightingagainst our own sexist, racist homophobic barriers (Shrewsbury, 1993) requires to stimulatestudents to relate curriculum with their own life (Klebesadel & Kempfert, 2004) according to apolitical practice that aims at producing social and educational changes (Mayberry, 2001). Inorder to do that and to prepare teachers on gender equalities, Freixa, Fuentes-Guerra, andLuque (2007) insisted in the need of offering students special tools to analyze their professionalpractices and to critically reflect in the way in which beliefs influence teaching dynamics.According to that, following Campbell (2002) suggestions, our own political commitmentsbring us to develop a «collective, experiential, egalitarian, interactive and empowering processthat connects rational and irrational dimensions with the affective once facilitating cooperativelearning» (Luxan & Biglia, 2011: 156).In conclusion, the question would be to support future schoolteachers to become aware oftheir gender stereotypes and offering tools to self-reflect on the influence that such stereotypeshave in their teaching practices (Giraldo & Colyar, 2012). However, as Bondi (2009) declares, isnot easy to teach reflexivity, though an ongoing personal and collective work can help in orderto learn how to put it in practice. According to Cook-Sather, we can try to engage with that bycreating opportunities for students to gain critical distance on their experiences and inviting them to analyzethose experiences with an eye toward changing them are key components of student voice work as well. Likecritical and feminist pedagogies, student voice work supports the interrogation by the oppressed of their ownexperiences and sees this interrogation as the means by which to come to an understanding of their power asknowers and creators of their world and, in turn, as potential transformers of their world. (2007: 395)For that reason, as we will detail later, we developed a process starting from students’ freewritten accounts, going through students’ personal systematic and critic analysis of them toend with a collective debates to redefine categories, understanding and stereotypes in orderto bring an ongoing process of both collective and self-reflexivity. Using Haraway (1997)metaphor, we can say that students’ analysis is diffracted, as the class is crossed by new lightswhich, by working on them, will diffract them again so that each student will be affected bysome of those new lights and diffract them again and so on…113
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