KATHRYN PAULY MORGAN

Feminist classrooms aspire to be gender-sensitive educational settings com-
mitted to principles of participatory democracy. In the words of Nancy
Schniedewind ( 1983), "Feminist pedagogy demands the integration of egali-
tarian context and process" (p. 262). In their most idealistic moments, teach-
ers of feminist classes describe their rhapsodic participation in a collaborative
community of learners engaged in critical and collective gender equitable
world-world building. Their task involves providing nonoppressive leader-
ship in a way that facilitates the building of this democratic educational com-
munity ( Gutmann 1987). But how?

Often, as teachers, we are faced with classrooms of recalcitrant democrats
who, collectively, decide that they want to listen to us qua authority figures
and not to their fellow classmates (regardless of the emphasis you place on
the validity of diverse, personal/political experience). We need to ask our-
selves, as we teach in such classrooms, whether we, in concert with our stu-
dents, paradoxically, replicate the very power asymmetries that parallel those
in patriarchal classrooms. By virtue of acknowledging and using the authority
that we personally and institutionally bring to our classrooms, are we once
again consigning our students to silence? ( Lather 1991; Walkerdine 1983)
How should we think about that authority?

If I look at metaphors that give some promise of equality such as sister,
peer, friend, or translator, it seems to me that the teacher, as teacher, vanishes
altogether. What place is there for the knowledge, the methodologies, the in-
sight, the syntheses, and the critical evaluative standards that the teacher
brings to any classroom? Are these forms of power not the very basis for her
entitlement as a teacher?

What if she abandons them? I foresee the following dire consequences:

-124-