Sveitadrengurinn og tælingarmáttur femínismans

Abstract greinarinnar "Farm Boy from the Edge of the Arctic and the Seduction of Feminist Pedagogy in American Academia"

The article assumes that pedagogical decisions are not merely the result of the educator's personal choice or her/his serious and rational curriculum planning; rather, they occur through the interrelation of coincidences, structural issues, political and institutional discourses, and events in people's lives. The article focuses upon the politics of progressive pedagogy as they concern my work on a US campus (as a graduate student and as a teaching assistant) and my nature preservation work in the small arctic nation of Iceland. I discuss how and why I became attracted to the political potential of feminist poststructuralist theories. This is discussed in light of my supervision of mostly white young women in a teacher education programme in a large Midwestern university. I consider the institutional strength of the discourse on classroom management, grounded in curriculum taxonomy and educational psychology, over environmental education and feminist and critical pedagogy. These issues are examined in relation to my struggle to make a liveable reality for myself as a teaching assistant; after all, pedagogical decisions are usually pragmatic solutions (strategies) to immediate problems. I tell the story of one man's pedagogical decision‐making process and trajectory of identity formation in which personal history, political beliefs, discursive and institutional power, and immediate problems interact. The article unfolds in several layers: narrative stories about the feminist party in Iceland (Kvennalistinn), my work as a ranger in Iceland, and my work as a teacher in Iceland and the USA; the trajectory of me working through issues of feminist theories and my practice as a teacher during my stay in the USA (that is, identity formation); and a postscript concerned with pedagogical and academic implications of the story that is presented.

Birt í Gender and Education, 6 (3), 1994, bls. 293-306