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Towards a New Era of Excellence in Education

Taisir Subhi Yamin and Ken McCluskey

Pathways to Transformative Learning: Disrupting Hierarchies of Gender, Class, and Race through Creative Expression and Artistic Imaginings

Karen Magro

Imagining the Feminist Imaginary Through Object-Based Research

Kathy Sanford and Darlene Clover
Using objects-based research, feminist adult educators and museum curators shared and described artifacts of personal and professional meaning. These objects enabled participants in this feminist study to articulate ways in which we enact power and change, and ways in which we can imagine and create a more feminist world. Through this study we challenge systems of patriarchal colonial oppression, addressing inequities across gender as it connects with class, race and culture and showing how objects reveal alternative ways of seeing and shaping the world. In this paper we take up feminist object-based research as a way to step outside ‘patriarchal logic’ to reimagine the world through four themes: corporeal, including the body and objects worn on the body; communicative, which speak and narrative; protect, representing feminist action and power, and disappearing, referring to that which has been lost or made absent. These show recurring patterns and connections that collectively enable us to imagine a more equitable and just feminist world.

Survivor Tales: Feminist Graphics Bridging Consciousness Raising into Reality

Kimberly Croswell
This article examines two feminist comic representations of violence against women founded in the lived experiences of artists Sabrina Jones, and Rebecca Migdal, editors with the annual graphic anthology World War 3 Illustrated. In these visual narratives, the reader is introduced to the impact violence, visible and invisible, has on these women’s lives as they recollect events, and move on from their painful experiences. Far from offering a commiseration of pain, a function which Susan Sonntag attributes to disaster and war photography in Regarding the pain of others, these graphics (or comics) project empathy, while also empowering readers by providing a sense of ‘what’s next?’ Also embedded in this analysis is an examination of the cultural roots of misogyny, through which violence against women and gendered ‘others’ is operationalised. Through their multimodal visual and narrative retelling of the harmful impact violence and the threat of violence had on their lives, Jones’ and Migdal’s graphics offer resolution and an opportunity for consciousness raising about the issues facing survivors of male violence. Their resistance gives voice to the experience of threats and abuse, and shares wisdom throughout it all.

Exploring Women’s Transformative Learning and Community Building through Practicing Martial Arts to Disrupt Gendered and Hetero-Patriarchal Norms

Emily Dobrich
This article explores the potential for martial arts to support transformation and community building for women. Findings indicate women can derive many individual benefits from learning martial arts. Yet, the benefits must extend beyond the individual level to create social change. Based on an evaluation of literature on women’s experiences learning martial arts, I use my perspective as an adult education researcher and a feminist lens to propose creative approaches to supporting women in learning martial arts. Supporting women in learning martial arts requires promoting creativity and invention in practice. Feminist new materialism, transformative learning theory, and communities of practice are the theories that guide the direction of this article. The major contribution of this article is to offer creative approaches for imagining a feminist praxis through martial arts that could foster learning environments that encourage self-determination and build social support and resistance to hetero-patriarchal power and gender inequity, which has relevance to broader educational settings and communities.

Sharing the Lived Experiences of Women in Academia by Remembering, Reclaiming and Retelling Stories of the Feminist Imaginaries

Bev Hayward
Feminist Imaginaries are psychological and social spaces where creative possibilities are overflowing. They facilitate new ways of being, new ways of knowing and new ways of knowledge creation. This paper embraces a decolonial and feminist approach to storytelling, remembering, reclaiming and retelling; telling the stories of a band of wandering women, journeying to the psychosocial spaces of the Imaginary. Drawing upon a feminist theoretical tapestry, creative writing methods and autoethnographic approaches, the story is an example of the possibilities for Feminist Imaginaries in academic research. Many female students I have encountered naively believe they have social justice and equality but the inequalities are hidden in low paid, part-time work and unpaid care. To explore patriarchy’s deceptive nature, reference is made to the canons of Western art and literature as spaces from which to depart. It is from this space and time of departure that our journeys to the Imaginaries begin. Our lived experiences as artists as educators makes our activism all the more urgent to care for racialised, working class and disabled students. Those experiences are illustrated in poetry and visually in an artwork created to accompany this paper entitled, Remember, shout her name, tell her-story. Furthermore, creative writing is a form of the Imaginary and is used to tell this tale. I suggest, by borrowing from Laurel Richardson, creative writing is a method of inquiry to learn about ourselves and our research. By writing into the topic, rather than reading around and then writing, the imagination can wander and wonder freely. I include a small demonstration of how this process might be performed. In this way the story is open-ended, to be continued, as so too the fight for social and gender justice must continue. Accordingly, I invite you, the reader, to remember your stories, reclaim, imagine them, document and share them.

The Feminine Outsider: Resistance through the Feminist Imaginary

Maxine Chester

The Weaving is Us: Decolonizing the Tools for the Feminist Imagination

Claudia Diaz-Diaz, Dorothea Harris and Thea Harris
This article documents weaving as a decolonizing epistemic tool for feminist futures that emerges from the work of our collective – the Feminist Imaginary Research Network. As a collective of feminist adult educators who work in both the academy and women’s museums, weaving challenges the centrality of rationality over other ways of knowing and being. Following the teachings of Indigenous women thinkers and artists, including the work of some of our members, we frame weaving as an epistemic tool and aesthetic language for future-making. Weaving acts upon us as a mirror of our history, as an antidote against the supremacy of rationality, and as a tool for collective projects of transformation. As a decolonizing tool, weaving gathers us around Indigenous women’s traditional knowledge, but also confronts us with the question of our obligations when the teachings of weaving have been offered to us – what is our responsibility to the work, to each other, and to this emergent knowledge?

Conducting Arts-Based Research with Rural Women in Columbia, South America: A Tool for Community Empowerment and Gender Justice

Lady Johanna Peñaloza-Farfán and Irma A. Flores-Hinojos
Women's social movements in Colombia are known for being visible in the streets, on social networks, in the courts, and neighborhoods (Zulver, 2022). In Colombia, women have mobilized to seek gender justice. Many of them have to face violence not only daily, but also in a structural way such as the legal impossibility of owning land. Sometimes, mobilizing means exposing themselves to the dynamics of power and violence to which they are subjected (Rojas, 2000). Many women, however, seek to form associations to protect themselves from these dynamics. Associating and organizing as a collective allows women to start transcending the patriarchal structures that keep them in a situation where they are held as immobilized victims, and in turn, become the new protagonists of a struggle that allows them to be the builders of a different destiny for themselves and future generations (Llevadot, 2022). This new scenario demands that women recognize the importance of building a collective identity that can lead them to establish common objectives that are broader compared to the individual goals that lead them to satisfy their immediate and daily needs. Building this identity implies establishing actions that commit them, through participation, to change how they interact with their closest people and the social and political environment in their territories (Zulver, 2022). Some of these actions are expressed in the production of handicrafts, food, embroidery, theatrical performances, and other community activities that strengthen the community's organization.

Examining Feminist Pedagogy from the Perspective of Transformative Learning: Do Race and Gender Matter in Feminist Classrooms?

Mitsunori Misawa and Juanita Johnson-Bailey
Although feminist pedagogy has been widely used as a teaching approach in classrooms in higher education to enhance diversity, issues of race and gender are often areas of contestations for non-White faculty. The purpose of this study was to explore how non-White professors, a Black woman tenured full professor and a gay Asian male pre-tenured professor, co-created a feminist classroom and how they negotiated power in that classroom environment. The research questions that guided this study were: 1) what does a feminist classroom look like in higher education; 2) how does the intersection of race and gender influence feminist pedagogy; and 3) what strategies do adult educators and practitioners use to deal with disoriented dilemmas? This research progressed into a longitudinal study, focusing on how the faculty members’ praxes grew from critical classroom incidents that the professors believed directly related the negative reactions from students to their positionalities as a Black woman and an Asian man. Three themes emerged from the data: a) Confrontation, b) Resistance, and c) Hostility. Each of these themes are defined and presented through direct quotes from our teaching logs and students’ reflections. Discussion and implications for practice are also provided regarding how race and gender matter in feminist classrooms. The concluding section describes how the two faculty members implemented reflective practices in higher education to create feminist classrooms.