Teaching feminist geographies in the Netherlands. Learning from student-led fieldtrips

Abstract

In this paper, the authors reflect on the use of student-led fieldtrips as an example of feminist pedagogy in a feminist geography course, a joint course by the universities of Amsterdam and Groningen in The Netherlands. The paper is a co-production of three lecturers and one student of this course and therefore includes teachers’ as well as students’ views. The authors conclude that student-led fieldtrips are a successful means of bringing in an explicit feminist pedagogy in teaching gender geography. Students were able to help shape the course using their own everyday experiences and interests and were able to contextualize their experiences in relation to theory explored in the classroom. This result is particularly important within the context of geography teaching in Dutch universities in which an empirical and policy oriented focus and a masculine model of teaching and learning dominates.

Keywords

• student-led field trips
• feminist pedagogy
• gender geography
• universities in The Netherlands