Doctoral Students’ Lessons Learned: Applying Feminist Theory to Our Roles and Classrooms

Overview: Two social work faculty will address how feminist and relational cultural theories informed their identities and decision to pursue doctoral degrees after many years of teaching. Faculty will share lessons learned and how feminist pedagogy has informed their classrooms and teaching approach and strengthened their advocacy as social work educators.Proposal text: This presentation will explore how Relational Cultural Theory and Feminist theory facilitated both personal and professional growth. This presentation will examine how these theories informed two social work faculty’s personal and professional identities and how feminist pedagogy informs their roles and classrooms. The use of Relational Cultural Theory, a theory that people grow in relationship with one another, helped two social work faculty mentor each other and provide support to pursue doctoral programs after nine years each in academia (Alvarez & Lazzari, 2016).The use of Feminist theory reminds us that what’s personal is political and applying feminist theory to our identities and practice made us realize that we are modeling what we value (education) for both our students and for our daughters. The use and application of Feminist theory is how we are pursuing power and freedom within the academy (Chiarelli-Helminiak et al., 2021).

The use of both Relational Cultural Theory and Feminist theory requires us to reflect on our positionality, a reflexive feminist practice (Guy, 2020). We are both women, both mothers of two young girls each, who, like so many during the pandemic, have had to find support and balance. We will share how we have utilized these theories to inform how we have sought balance and self-care, as all “too often personal voices are devalued, putting the onus of resolving burnout back on the individual” (Chiarelli-Helminiak et. al., 2021, p. 7). We will share how we have used empowerment and groupwork to support our journeys as both social work educators and as doctoral students (Turner & Masch, 2015).
As a result of both our doctoral educational experiences and work in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, we will share how we have further developed our feminist identities which we then bring into the classroom (Charter, 2021). Feminist collaboration between us has made us better educators, empowered us to pursue doctoral degrees, and allowed us to develop a feminist pedagogy (Long et al., 2020). Feminist collaboration has also pushed us to develop and refine our feminist pedagogy.

We will provide examples of how our feminist pedagogy is manifested in our roles as Assistant Directors of Field Education and as classroom instructors, through increased empathy for students, increased knowledge and understanding of adult learners, defining and discussing intersectionality, explicitly naming and acknowledging the power differential that exists between students and faculty, and making ourselves available as a source of support (McCusker, 2017).