Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching History Online

The Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online Guide came about in August 2020, when in response to COVID-19. Clare Daniel and Jacquelyne Thoni Howard curated the guide to provide their colleagues with a one-stop and open-source hub for implementing feminist teaching practices in their online courses. In a matter of days, and after being shared widely on Twitter, the guide reached 6,500 views, indicating a widespread interest among instructors, across a range of fields. In the spirit of feminist collaboration, Daniel and Howard invited three co-curators to help shape future directions of this project, Dr. Enilda Romero-Hall, Dr. Liv Newman, and Niya Bond.

When teaching online, historians may feel obligated to rely on top-down teaching approaches that use inactive learning strategies such as recording lectures and assigning multiple-choice assessments. They may also incorporate technology tools that entrench the takeover of big tech within higher education through data collection and paywalls, and therefore install patriarchal and capitalist hierarchies that promote inequalities in their online classroom. With knowledge of feminist tenets for teaching online, many active-learning assignments and historical thinking strategies used in traditional classrooms can be reimagined for the online learning environment and reapplied within traditional history courses.