Unveiling EFL students’ reflections while using critical feminist pedagogy (CFP) when debating.

Abstract

The present paper reports the findings of the implementation of a feminist pedagogy in an EFL classroom of adults in Bogotá, Colombia. After having found a lack of connections among the syllabus proposed by the institution, the linguistic and the sociolinguistic needs from students, the researcher decided to implement Critical Feminist Pedagogy (CFP), a poststructuralist methodology proposed by Connell (2009). The aim of this study was to unveil possible students’ reflective discourses that emerged when a group of EFL Colombian students debated about topics of inequality in a conversational level; however, a deeper focus was on students’ transformations (if any). Students were encouraged to see critically different situations of gender inequality. The results showed that students could be empowered to have a critical perspective on topics of inequality because they constructed reflections not only about gender but also about other characteristics of identity (Norton & Pavlenko, 2004). Besides critical reflections, there was evidence of some transformations, but the time scope to make such transformations real was insufficient. The use of CFP to empower students was effective (Khwaja, 2005). EFL trainers, professors, and SLA researchers may have the opportunity to see a new direction of teaching which focuses on a transformative methodology that comes from a post-method view of teaching and learning.