CULTURE SHOCKS - FEMINISM AND DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

Across the past two decades feminist movements world-wide have been re sponding to the question of cultural difference. Comfortable notions o f universal sisterhood have increasingly given way to contingent allia nces shaped by new understandings of difference, power, and pluralism. In extending some of the contemporary debates in cross-cultural femin ism into the domain of teaching, this essay will explore how some of t hese debates are influencing the methods and ideals underpinning femin ist pedagogy and will consider how responsive the ''feminist classroom '' has been to a range of cross-cultural dilemmas. As feminist pedagog ic practice is inevitably informed by shifting cultural and power poli tics at play in individual contexts, the essay will seek to address so me of the specific issues arising in different cultural contexts, incl uding the politics of ''political correctness'' and multiculturalism i n Australia and North America and the politics of colonialism and post colonialism in Hong Kong. How do these issues affect the meaning(s) of feminism in the classroom? How do they redefine our understanding of ''radical pedagogy''?.