Gender Justice in Teaching

Overview

What is gender-just teaching? 

Gender-just teaching, or teaching that seeks to advance gender justice, draws on feminist and transgender educational frameworks that center the experiences of students marginalized on the basis of gender. This includes women, transgender people, nonbinary/agender/genderqueer people, and people otherwise perceived as gender-nonconforming. Above all, a gender justice approach to teaching celebrates the complex experiences and unique knowledges that students oppressed under genderism bring to educational spaces and foregrounds their success and thriving therein

Gender Oppression and Gender Justice in Higher Education

Societally, gender operates at multiple levels, from the personal to the cultural to the institutional. The personal level, for instance, has to do with one’s own gender identity and expression. At the cultural level are norms and ideologies, such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and gender conformity. These constructs are also embedded within institutions, such as schooling, and often contribute to our socialization around gender. 

Within higher education, gender-based oppression often manifests in policy and in the built environment of university campuses. Think, for instance, of sex-separated restrooms, which fail to account for the safety and belonging of trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming people. However, this oppression can also extend into classroom spaces, where gender identities and experiences (especially intersectional ones) outside the bounds of white, cisgender, patriarchal norms are often illegible to cisgender people. 

In order to counteract the psychosocial and material harms caused by gender-based oppression in the university, it is crucial to reflect on how, as instructors, we can create safer classroom environments that not only consider but uplift and celebrate the knowledge and experiences that students oppressed under genderism bring with them.

Teaching Strategies and Recommendations

Starting Point for Growth: Self-Reflection & Awareness

One great way to start thinking about gender justice is to reflect on how our own biases may manifest in our teaching. This can be done at ANY stage of teaching! To better understand your own implicit gender-based biases in a safe, private, and nonjudgmental environment, consider taking advantage of Harvard University’s Implicit Bias Tests, particularly:

  • Transgender Bias Test

  • Gender & Career Bias Test

  • Gender & Science Bias Test 

Readwatch, and learn from students, staff, and alumni as they share their stories, joy, and reflections as members of our campus community.

“What’s been the most meaningful to me are the conversations about shared experience that I’ve been able to have with queer BIPOC students. For students, I’ve found it’s reassuring to hear someone genuinely saying, ‘Yup, I got you. I know exactly how that feels.’

Those moments resonate so deeply because we are able to express ourselves without censorship.” - I’m A Berkeleyan: Em Huang on why it’s important to acknowledge multiple identities