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...change (e.g., Bunch Pollack, 1983; Howe, 1975, 1983; Rich, 1975; Schniedewind, 1985; Treichler, 1986). Women's studies' happy, if somewhat precarious, position would not exist without activism in the women's movement. Indeed, the very existence of women's studies is one of the movement's major triumphs, perhaps the premier accomplishment that differentiates between this and earlier waves of feminism.
In my feminist teaching over the years I have increasingly wished to foster the activist efforts of the women in my classes. I believe that the oft-mentioned gulf between academic and activist feminists is a false one, as do many other writers in this volume. There is danger, of course, of academic feminists becoming overly committed to the development of theory, or too focussed on a narrow slice of feminist scholarship and thereby neglecting the work of women seeking social change. As well, activists can become too focussed on immediate goals without developing a broader framework for understanding change. But women's studies would not exist without the women's movement; many feminists are both academics and activists; feminist academics must be activists in order to establish and maintain women's studies programs; many activist feminists come to academic feminist studies programs to ground their community work in the feminist literature and to gain credentials; and most Canadian feminist academics are activists in areas beyond their academic work (Eichler, 1990).
The present chapter describes my three years of experience in teaching a graduate course entitled "Feminist Organizing and Community Psychology." The course is part of a doctoral program in Community Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), but is open to masters level students and to students in other programs and departments in the institute. It is a course that I conceived as an explicit effort to bridge academia and activism, and in many respects it has been successful in doing so. Though it has been a highly rewarding course, it has also been the most difficult course I have taught in my 19-year teaching career in terms of tension and conflict between students and myself as instructor, far more so than any other feminist studies course that I have taught.
In the chapter I take up two themes: (1) the contradictions involved in teaching a course that emphasizes feminist collective process and focusses on fostering feminist community change in the context of the hierarchical, patriarchal authority structure that is academe; and (2) the impact of the course on feminism in the community, presented through a description of some of the projects carried out by students in the course. Prior to launching into the themes, it is necessary to provide some description of the course and its context.
The setting
OISE is an institution affiliated with the University of Toronto; through that affiliation agreement it is the Graduate Department of Education at the university, and offers MA, MEd, PhD, and EdD programs. Within the institute, which has its own administration and governing structure, there are eight sub-departments that essentially operate as university departments.
OISE is well known for its feminist scholarship, but it does not offer a unified feminist studies program. Rather, feminist studies is housed in differing ways in various departments; of eight departments, four offer some opportunity to do feminist studies. In the Department of Applied Psychology, feminist studies is offered under the rubric of the program in Community Psychology, which is a program staffed by left-wing men and feminist women. The students attracted to the program tend also to represent these differing perspectives. It is the sole program in the Department of Applied Psychology to eschew the individual as the unit of analysis and the individual change model and to focus on more macro analyses and on social change.
The differing analyses and resulting models for social change held by the left-wing faculty and students and the feminist faculty and students have been a source of some tension; but we have managed to maintain a vision of community psychology as the program with radical content and purpose in the department, and an appropriate site for dissension. In the debate between autonomous feminist studies and the integration of women's studies in mainstream academia I strongly favour the former. (1) But failing that, in my view, community psychology is a highly appropriate home for feminism in psychology because of its identification with oppressed groups, its focus on empowerment of the oppressed, the socio-politico-historical nature of its analyses, and an explicit attention to the dialectic between the individual and society.
The community psychology program has been in existence for six years, and since its inception it has included a strong feminist component; indeed, feminist studies is formally described as a core component of the program. I was the sole feminist faculty member for the first four years but I've recently been joined, to my delight, by two feminist colleagues. A number of the feminist students attracted to the program have been activists and women who have done front-line service work in a variety of feminist helping services, such as shelters for battered women and rape crisis centres, or have been radicalized through working with women in mainstream social service agencies. These students have exerted some pressure on the faculty to accommodate their...
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