Embracing tensions in feminist organizational communication pedagogies

Feminist pedagogies hold potential to create more inclusive and transformative classrooms. Adopting a tension-centered approach, we draw on our individual and collective reflections on the design and instruction of a multisection undergraduate organizational communication course to build an autoethnographic account of the tensions associated with enacting feminist pedagogies. Specifically, we unpack the ways tensions emerged as we strove to align our practice with specific feminist pedagogical principles-building nonhierarchical relations, encouraging multivocality, and caring for students-and how we made sense of and discursively managed these tensions. In doing so, we dissect the ways that tensions are communicatively constituted, gauge how to transform our pedagogy by reframing dualisms into dialectics, emphasize the importance of reflexivity, and, finally, offer practical strategies for communication instructors who seek strategies for transforming classrooms.