Teaching with wonder: Engaged pedagogy and attentive listening

Why homework?

In her articulations of feminism as homework Sara Ahmed conjures up images of feminist theorising taking place around the kitchen table, challenging the stereotypes of this traditionally domesticated and consequently femininised space, and through these images enabling us to appreciate a theorising that is imbued with the ‘encounters of the everyday’ (Ahmed, 2017: 7). Ahmed argues that this feminist homework is crucial because ‘we have much to work out from not being at home in a world’ (Ahmed, 2017: 7). This means that, for Ahmed, ‘homework is work on as well as at our homes. We do housework. Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master’s residence’ (Ahmed, 2017: 7).

Ahmed’s suggestions that feminism is homework understands the project of feminism as a transformational one, a project that arises from the feelings of unease when one realises the power relations in any context are pitted against you. This is why feminism emerges out of this working out, this becoming conscious of oppressive structures that bring about feelings of discomfort, of ‘not being at home in a world’ (Ahmed, 2017: 7). Initially, we might not have the language to articulate the reasons for our unease but many of us can often feel something is amiss. Feminism as homework is thus not interested in cleaning and maintenance, rather it seeks to challenge unequal power relations and reimagine the status quo (Ahmed, 2017: 7). Using the frame of feminism as homework also makes sure that the philosophical is not a disembodied abstract activity, rather it is always embodied and tied to the everyday, including the happenings and lessons learned, at home, around the kitchen table. Ahmed’s articulation of feminism as homework resonates because it is quite easy to feel not at home in the world of academia, as a worker or student. When we first met, as PhD students and casual workers in the university, we were very much ‘not at home’. Since then, we have spent much time together at various kitchen tables, undertaking feminist anti-colonial homework, seeking to critique and challenge the status quo. The joy and comfort we find in our collaborative feminist homework creates a space and sense of belonging to a community that matters – a community larger than the two of us with important critical work to do. The feminist homework we undertake together thus provides us with a safe space, a home, within academia that so often makes us feel ‘not at home’. It strengthens our friendship and belief in the necessity of our work. We began to articulate these lessons in our article ‘Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy’ (2021). And, while we recognise the privilege of our new employment contexts, like Ahmed, we view these feelings of discomfort, unease and sometimes anger at the unequal power relations at work in the university as ‘opportunities for transformation, inspiring us to challenge and rebuild the master’s residence’ (Ahmed, 2017: 7). As we return to our now (mostly) virtual kitchen table due to our geographical distance, we are keen to continue this feminist homework wondering if wonder as feminist pedagogy travels to new contexts.

Politics of location: Our new contexts

When, in 2019, we began writing ‘Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy’ it was with the intention of documenting and theorising our experiences as casual academic teachers during the 2 years prior, from 2017 to 2019. Returning to reflect on these words in 2023, we do so in a world changed forever by the devastation of the COVID pandemic, as well as from new employment contexts at different institutions. In 2020 Laura took up a continuing position as Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at Flinders University and in 2022 Fabiane took up a continuing position at University of Southern Queensland as a Pathways Lecturer. We have both also become mothers.

Laura’s new context and attentive listening

I spent the first months of 2020 in my new job working on my own research and developing new courses as well as refining and building upon some of the curriculum from my previous teaching. Little did I know that within a few months the COVID pandemic would cause unimaginable loss of life around the world, nationwide lockdowns, close down international and domestic state borders and, in the context of Australian academia, see many swiftly move to online teaching and working from home, as well as huge job losses as the university sector grappled with the loss of income generated by international student fees.

We taught the first 3 weeks of semester before the nationwide lockdown commenced on the 23 March 2020. The move to online teaching was swift and chaotic. Luckily most of the students were able to connect online, although not without some setbacks. It was very clear to me from the get-go that we could not replicate the ambiance of the face-to-face classroom and it was thus important to rapidly learn new techniques for online teaching. I found the very simple task of checking in with each student at the start of each online class to be enormously helpful. This was not a straightforward academic exercise, rather, it was an opportunity to share where we were at physically, emotionally, and academically. It also allowed me to demonstrate my own vulnerability and to be honest with the students about my context of starting a new job, in a new city, as COVID hit. Often, I was as lost as they were! Checking in each week enabled us to appreciate one another’s context: some students locked down at home with their parents, some with younger siblings and cute pets, some students who were parents locked down with young children, and international students far from home worried about loved ones. This seemingly small gesture each week enabled us to get to know one another in our homes in ways we never would have in a classroom. It was almost serendipitous that this class was my feminist theory class Thinking Through the Body, a course that begins with feminist critiques of body/mind dualism and centres on theory that is embodied and embedded in social and political contexts of the everyday. In this class, many students find, for the very first time, ideas articulated in the readings that speak to their own experiences. Reflecting on my experience with this class now, 4 years later, I can see how the experience of coming together each week during lockdown and engaging with this material created a very close-knit group. Each week, locked down in our homes, we came together at a virtual kitchen table – we were quite literally undertaking feminism as homework. It was in this class that I had also assigned the weekly journal activity that Fabi and I assigned in our previous courses and explained in ‘Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy’ (2021) which asks students to engage with the weekly reading in a personal weekly journal. Perhaps it was because of the lockdown and the solitude of this moment that we had time to read and to wonder or the opening up and being vulnerable and performing wonder during the intimate space of the online classes – I can’t say exactly what it was – but this cohort of students produced, across the board, consistently wonderful deeply engaged journals. They engaged with the theory, they wondered, they found connections with their own context and understood the power of feminist theory that engaged philosophical lessons of the everyday. This consistency, however, was short lived.

At the end of July 2020, I returned to face-to-face classroom teaching another upper-level class called Global Feminist Activism. There were less prerequisites for this class and the course attracted a larger number of students, approximately 50 compared to the 20 students enrolled in Thinking Through the Body. I had also assigned weekly journals in this course but it soon became clear that many in the class were struggling to ‘wonder’. This is not to say that all the students struggled as there were students who were engaged and who excelled but, more generally, there seemed to be a lack of critical engagement with the assigned readings and in critical thinking more generally. As we noted in our previous paper, bell hooks connects critical thinking with the experience of wonder. Mindful and embodied critical thinking can bring about wonder and the ‘ability to be awed, excited, and inspired by ideas is a practice that radically opens the mind. . . Hence, there is the capacity of ideas to illuminate and heighten our sense of wonder, our recognition of the power of mystery’. (Hooks, 2010: 188). Moving from the context of a large research-intensive university with a mostly privileged student cohort to a smaller university where the student cohort is a much more socially and economically diverse group, I started to appreciate that there might be some sort of privilege that comes with the space and time to wonder. I began to ask myself, as Fabi was, if our concept of wonder as feminist pedagogy travels to different contexts. After discussions with Fabi about her experiences in her new position and with colleagues at my new institution I began to realise that perhaps some of the students in my class were not ‘wondering’ because to wonder might be a reflection of the privilege of having the space and time to do so. One might struggle to wonder, to comprehend and be awed or excited by ideas if one does not have the time to read slowly, to breathe, to sit and reflect.

As I reflected on what I might do differently in this new situation I turned to meditate on our notions of wonder as feminist pedagogy. In doing so, I returned to Luce Irigaray’s work for guidance. In our 2021 paper we highlighted how Irigaray’s articulation of wonder as an action that is both active and passive suggests a way of knowing-being-doing that challenges dichotomous logics of knower and known (Ramos and Roberts, 2021: 35). And, following Irigaray, we attempted to articulate a pedagogy based upon a non-appropriative relationality, a relationality that does not appropriate or silence an-other (Ramos and Roberts, 2021: 35). We suggested this model of relationality might be an exciting way to theorise what happens in the classroom. Irigaray’s articulations of relationality and ethical co-existence with an-other remain a guiding light and in rereading this work I realised I needed to be very careful to set up this non-appropriative relationality in the classroom which involves an attentive and ethical listening. I needed to be careful to not participate in silencing an-other through expectations I may have brought with me from previous cohorts. Through this I could then try to understand my new context better, to understand the students’ needs and hopefully guide them to wonder. I needed to actively try to create space, so lacking in our contemporary neoliberal university, to pause, to read slowly, to breathe and to wonder. To try to let students forget for a moment about grades and future employment. Which, of course, is a privilege!

This practice of attentive listening, as Irigaray articulates it, sets up the space of silence required for a non-appropriative relationality to emerge between two subjects. Attentive listening is a mindful embodied listening that does not simply try to grasp information and to ‘know’ the other – reducing the other to an object. Instead, attentive listening attempts to perceive the unknowable other in their otherness. This is not to say we can never be in relation with an-other. Rather it is this process of attentive and ethical listening that founds a non-appropriative relation with an-other and out of which something new emerges. As Irigaray explains, “while you can never ‘know’ me you can ‘perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality’. Importantly, you can help me become while remaining myself” (Irigaray, 1996: 112). In ‘Ethical Gestures Toward the Other’ Irigaray writes that listening ‘to the other is not only to hear some information from him or her. Rather it is to listen to the words of the other as to something unique, especially irreducible to my own world, as to something new and still unknown’ (Irigaray, 2010: 50). Listening is embodied and active. It is something we can all work on and do differently. Given this, we might ask what attentive listening looks like in the classroom? How does attentive listening contribute to wonder as a feminist pedagogy? Thinking through these questions we must appreciate that Irigaray articulates these gestures of attentive listening as embodied practices that aim to disrupt patriarchal and colonial power relations that undergird societal codes and language (Irigaray, 2010: 50). How might a teacher learn to listen attentively to new contexts and cohorts? And how does attentive listening disrupt power relations?

Not only do we have to pay attention to the already coded language in which we live but also to the call of the other, that the other addresses to us. It brings us into non-appropriate relation with an-other. Stephen Pluhacek writes that Irigaray’s work attends to this ‘call of the other’ (Pluhacek, 2002: 45). He writes, that for Irigaray: ‘To hear is to not yet listen, and to listen is not yet to understand. Only a finite being can hear. For to hear you, I must not be the whole. Furthermore, I must be open to you. . .’ (Pluhacek, 2002: 50). He continues:

To cultivate listening requires that we do more than hear a message in terms already established by society or coded by language. It involves a recognition and respect of the other – listening to the words of the other as something unique, irreducible to my preconceived ideas of the other, as something unknown, and perhaps even unknowable. Thus, in listening we neither expect nor hear some information from the other. Rather, we cultivate a relation of indirection and of respect toward the other (Pluhacek, 2002: 50).

This type of active, ethical and attentive listening that Irigaray and Pluhacek are articulating here is core to understanding Irigaray’s thinking of non-appropriative relational subjectivity, we are always in relation with the an-other, and we must always work toward building a place ‘in which we can approach the other’ (Irigaray, 2010: 11). Understanding the student-teacher relationship in these terms complements our thinking of wonder as feminist pedagogy. In fact, we might say that it is key to understanding the notion of wonder, and wonder as feminist pedagogy. As a teacher, I needed to reorient myself, to step back from the coded academic language and listen while remaining open in order to build a place, a space, to approach this different cohort of students attempting to engage with the ideas and to articulate their thoughts. As a result of listening attentively to the students, I made changes to the course resources to include podcasts and videos alongside the primary and secondary literature to give the content more texture and try to bring the more abstract ideas to life for the students in new ways. I also made sure that during lectures I tied the theory to the concrete political more explicitly. As the students often worked in small groups listening to the layout of the physical classroom also became important. I made sure to try to keep the groups fluid, which involved, unbeknownst to the students, mixing the more advanced students with students who were struggling. I realised the assessment needed revising and I took out the journal writing and added an oral presentation task that required students to summarise the argument of one required reading (aiming to teach critical thinking) and included a group assignment that asked students to create an activist poster linked to themes covered in the class. As students began preparing the activist poster assignment during classes, I began to see wondering and critical thinking happening. Most of the class produced posters that creatively connected the theory to contemporary issues and ultimately excelled at this task. The posters were creative and wonderful. Through this assignment students illustrated a passion for learning that disrupted my own ‘taken-for-granted truisms’ and produced work that highlighted our thinking on wonder as feminist pedagogy offering ‘opportunities for opening and curiosity to learn-teach-learn from embodied positions’ (Ramos and Roberts, 2021: 36). Returning to our thinking on wonder in these new contexts, and more specifically practicing this mode of attentive listening, offered a new framing to the problem and consequently a positive outcome. This is not to say the journey was an easy one as we note in the following section, this practice of attentive listening and non-appropriative relationality is intimately connected with bell hooks’ work on engaged pedagogy and teacher self-actualisation.

Fabi’s new context and engaged pedagogy

After Laura left UQ in 2019, a series of happenings pushed me to not only engage more deeply with what wonder as pedagogy can offer but also to reconceptualise my pedagogical praxis: bordering burn out, COVID-19, changing jobs to a totally different academic environment, and becoming pregnant 1 month after starting my continuous appointment. My long-term precarious employment conditions were taking their toll. For a long while, I was continuously teaching across three disciplines, taking on as much teaching as I could in a bid to make ends meet. On top of this already delicate situation, COVID-19 happened, hitting us like a storm. Suddenly, the lively classroom communities we had created needed to be reconceptualised. And this had to happen fast, no time for planning, quick adaptation was called for. We had to swiftly deal with the challenge of rethinking class dynamics to engage and connect with students online. We had to rethink our pedagogy to bridge this newfound distance while dealing with the immense stress of intensely uncertain times.

A year after this critical period, I took a continuous job offer at the University of Southern Queensland’s (UniSQ) in their Pathways programs. Pathways education also known as enabling, bridging, foundation and tertiary preparation offers programs that aim to prepare (mostly non-traditional) students with knowledge and skills to successfully enter and transition through tertiary education. UniSQ offers a variety of programs in this space, including a Tertiary Preparation Pathways (TPP) for students who have not completed their secondary education or have not studied for a while, diplomas and a degree with a strong focus on articulating incarcerated students into further studies, programs for students still in secondary schools and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs for speakers of English as an Additional Language. During my first year at UniSQ, I taught into the EAP program in a course specifically designed to support students going into Bachelor or Master of Education degrees and in the UniPrep Program where I worked with a group of approximately 15 secondary students looking for alternative pathways into university. This program, targeted at low SES schools, are offered while students are still completing their senior years and focus on developing students’ academic skills for a successful transition into university. The cohorts I was now teaching were not only diverse in terms of age, cultural, linguistic, socio-economic and educational backgrounds but also in terms of the levels I was pitching for. Working with secondary students at risk of not quite making it into university and with more mature students who needed to achieve a considerable high level of academic English required flexibility and quick adaptation from my part.

I moved from a prestigious research-intensive university to a smaller regional university, with predominantly online teaching, a stronger focus on students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) and low SES backgrounds, and I was now designing and teaching mostly pre-undergraduate courses. I was also dealing with the intensity of pregnancy as I attempted to navigate my new work environment. Wonder was vital during this tumultuous period because it allowed me to remain open when I often felt like shutting down. It provided me with a sense of curiosity and a foundation based on Irigaray’s notion of relationality to approach change and new students. Yet, working in courses with vastly different formats/objectives and cohorts to the ones we were teaching in Gender Studies at UQ pushed me to also consider the implicit privilege that some of what we were doing in our work with wonder represented. At the core of wonder as pedagogy was the task of guiding students to read differently to encourage the construction of a relationship with what we were learning rather than to see knowledge as a possession. However, there was an implied expectation that students would have advanced levels of literacy to be able to go further than reading words on a page. We were aiming for a deeper kind of reading. In my new context, I started to often work with students who had disrupted or disengaged schooling and needed assistance with their basic literacy, in terms of being able to read and write to gain entry to university. This seemed far removed from the mostly middle class and privately educated students from our previous institution. Questions then surfaced: how does wonder travel as a pedagogical concept? Does its meaning change when applied to other contexts? How might we adapt so wonder is relevant in different contexts?

These questions together with the challenges I had been facing, bring me to bell Hooks’ ‘engaged pedagogy’:

Progressive, holistic education, ‘engaged pedagogy’ is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being. That means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that ‘the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people’. (1994: 15)

At its core, engaged pedagogy asks teachers to focus on self-actualisation and wellbeing as fundamental aspects of holistic classrooms that are empowering for both students and teachers. During this period, responding to the particularities of my new teaching conditions and contexts while continuing to teach in a manner that aligned with the inclusive pedagogical ethos I strived for, made it evident the urgent need for the praxis bell hooks called for. This is a praxis based on self-reflexivity, where we as teachers gaze toward not only our practices but towards ourselves, as fully fleshed human beings. As hooks puts it, ‘my passion for [teaching] led me to interrogate constantly the mind/body split that was so often taken to be a given’ (Hooks, 1994: 18). Engaged pedagogy thus entails deep self-work, with the recognition that teaching is an embodied practice, mind and body working together while we look for ways to grow and heal so we can work with students from our best possible location. Reading engaged pedagogy alongside wonder has been helpful in these unprecedented times because it adds a focus on well-being and self-actualisation that was not fully evident in our initial conceptualisation of wonder as pedagogy.

Even though focusing on well-being and self-actualisation made complete sense when it felt like the world was falling apart, what this meant in practice seemed like an abstract concept, especially considering the complex environment and demands of the neoliberal Australian higher education context in which we are located. In my attempt to make sense of what hooks proposes, I turned to the teachers that inspire her pedagogical work, Freire (2000) and Nhất Hạnh (1998). From looking into their work, it becomes clearer that when she refers to well-being and self-actualisation, there is a connection to living consciously in the world and critical awareness. This critical awareness comes from a combination of contemplation and action in the world, or what Freire would call praxis. From praxis, we can get clues to what hooks means when she talks about well-being through empowerment. I read empowerment here as connected to independent thinking that has a sense of community. In Hooks’ theorising, empowerment comes from taking part in our realities (in the classroom and beyond) as subjects and not as passive objects. Empowerment relates to reciprocity - meaning relationships between conscious subjects, similarly to Irigaray’s non-appropriative relationality.

Apart from care and reciprocity, with practices that go beyond rationality to include a sincere attention to affect, beginning with us so that we can extend it to students, a starting point in engaged pedagogy is a continuous process of self-reflexivity. Hooks (2003) argues that self-reflexivity is fundamental for responsible educators who are committed to self-growth and engaging consciously with their practices. Another starting point is a focus on presence and openness of heart. Hooks (1994: 21–22) explains that ‘professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit. . . Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply’. We had already started exploring some of these themes in our first paper on wonder, but my newfound acute changes meant that they became more important than ever. As I sought to work with the challenges rather than against them, for me self-actualisation has meant a continuous process of self-reflexivity through self-inquiry.

Through self-inquiry, I have consistently explored how to adapt the many aspects of teaching such as curriculum choices, modes of delivery, assessment, class activities, ways of communicating with students, and classroom dynamics to meet students where they are at in my new cohorts. For example, with the Academic English class for Education degrees, I quickly realised that students were at vastly different starting points regarding their academic language and awareness of Education as a discipline. From getting to know the students and reflecting on what I was doing, I became aware that I had overall pitched the content and activities at a level that most in the class would not be able to follow. I then adapted the content and way of delivering the course by breaking down the syllabus and focusing more on scaffolding the content with tailored activities to students’ various levels. I also started to pay closer attention to the emotional responses some students were having based on previous negative educational experiences with deficit mindsets of ‘you are not smart enough’. I offered consultations and time in break-out rooms (the class was online) to check in with students and support them as much as I could. Self-reflexivity has also entailed inquiring into what I bring into my new classrooms, my biases, and ways of approaching teaching. Regular check-ins with the affective aspect of teaching have also been an important part of this self-inquiry practice. I often check my body for sensations like tension, frustration and joy while asking questions such as ‘what does it feel when students answer in a particular way? What are my reactions like? What do these reactions mean? How can I remain open even when class dynamics are challenging?’

The longer I sit with engaged pedagogy, the more I see its potential to work alongside wonder to guide the creation of classrooms that are communities – inclusive, caring, and holistic. However, it is important to note that even though a focus on well-being and self-actualisation can enrich our teaching and as a consequence students’ experiences, the current Australian neoliberal higher education system is not conductive of engaged pedagogy. Institutional support and care, a work environment that supports the well-being of teachers (so that we can support students), is a far cry from the general state of higher education in Australia. As Baker et al. (2002: 13) put it, in Australian higher education deep ‘sociocultural, sociopolitical, temporal and spatial disparities constantly challenge engaged pedagogy’s enactment’. In addition, the intensive work needed in engaged pedagogy may be hindered by the ‘emotional labour outside of the classroom space, labour which is often both invisibilised and feminised as secondary to what is re-presented as the important and essential labour of teaching’ (Motta and Bennett, 2018: 642). Our quest for well-being and self-actualisation might also be affected by our lives outside of the academy: ‘by family commitments, by financial debts, by community work- all of which may squeeze time and emotional strength and limit the ability to care’ (Madge et al., 2009: 43).

Bringing it home

Much like implementing engaged pedagogy might be hindered by contextual socio-cultural-political-institutional constraints, wonder as pedagogy needs to be considered in contextual terms. The answers to the questions posed previously: ‘how does wonder travel as a pedagogical concept? Does its meaning change when applied to other contexts? How might we adapt so wonder is relevant in different contexts?’ are not straightforward. However, one important conclusion we have come to is that wonder can only travel as a pedagogical concept if it remains open. There is a vital need to adapt our pedagogy to new situations and cohorts if we hope to make wonder relevant beyond its initial intended group of students.

We learned that while often there is perhaps a privilege in the capacity to wonder in the way we had initially theorised, we still find that wonder as a pedagogical concept opens us up to imagining and beginning to perform different ways of being and relating in the world. At the very least for us as teachers so that we can remain open to the possibilities that each new group of students might represent to our pedagogical praxis. In this way, wonder as pedagogy may thrive as a fluid concept that can take new meanings depending on who and what we are teaching. When read with Irigaray’s work on attentive listening and hooks’ engaged pedagogy, its relevance and transformational potential take on new layers of possibility with a commitment to self-actualisation and deep self-work, always in relation and always in community. The self in this context is one that is always in relation with an-other. A self that is always open to the call of the other. We thus recognise the potential for a non-appropriative intersubjective relation between the teacher and student, a relation that might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards new ethical ways of being in the world.

In a similar vein we may also claim this type of relationality to our own teaching. As we embark on a continuous process of self-inquiry, we remain committed to the impossibility to ‘fully know’ and this allows for a continual opening and the possibility to listen attentively, while remembering that we are forever a work in progress without fossilised blueprints. Thinking through wonder as an embodied philosophical framing and as a pathway toward knowledge that challenges dichotomous logics makes it possible for this musing to occur.

As we end our reflection on the deep self-work involved in the process of revisiting wonder as pedagogy read alongside attentive listening and engaged pedagogy in response to our new teaching contexts, we return to the image of the home, the hearth, the kitchen table. Echoing Luce Irigaray, Stephen Pluhacek writes: ‘There is to be love between us – that is, a home. This is not a site of immanence. It is not a domesticated safe haven. The hearth is the curved space-time of joint solitude, of the outside drawing near. I am at home means that I am not at risk – (even) in the warmth of proximity. To be at home is to welcome the other, to be welcomed by the other. It is something I can never do alone’ (Pluhacek, 2002: 51). We return to this image to remind ourselves that attentive listening that grounds an ethical intersubjective relationality which challenges colonial neoliberal logics is work that is always done together. It is feminist homework undergirded by new relations of loving and listening. Feminist homework elucidates the ways in which community provides an important base for teaching and learning. As university teaching around most of the world moved online as a result of the COVID pandemic, and many of us were quite literally sitting at kitchen tables, a lens was shone on the human need for connection and community in how we learn-teach-learn. Revisiting wonder as pedagogy through a discussion of attentive listening, non-appropriative relationality and engaged pedagogy framed by Ahmed’s notion of homework we end this paper emphasising the philosophical lessons learned from the encounters of the everyday, lessons learned at home, in love and in community.