Facing the Limitations of Teaching and Learning Committed to Solidarity and Social Justice: A Feminist Approach

Abstract

This study examines how 52 graduate students enrolled in a social justice program in a large urban university in Canada relate to others in and outside the college classroom. Using a method involving creative student audio productions and self-reflections, the study finds that despite extensive learning about others and engaging with postcolonial, race, feminist, Indigenous and other critical theories and knowledges in the program, both racially privileged students and those who are members of disadvantaged and marginalized social groups enact relations extending power structures imagined as “solidarity.” These relations have important gender aspects and are shaped by broader historical forces, such as racism and colonization, as well as contemporary aspects of Canadian academia that have not been studied fully in relation to social justice education. These findings call for social justice curriculum and pedagogies that move learners from thinking critically and feeling empathy for others to behaving ethically and standing in political togetherness with those others as equals. The study suggests that transnational women and feminist political practices of solidarity mobilizing cross-racial and cross-national women’s movements in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s present valuable pedagogies that could position college students for such relating.