Teaching with wonder: Engaged pedagogy and attentive listening

Reflecting, in dialogue, this paper revisits and extends our thinking on wonder as feminist pedagogy, a pedagogy which opens space for critical self-reflection and critical intellectual and embodied engagement to emerge in the classroom. Wonder as feminist pedagogy brings together our teaching experiences with a philosophical engagement of feminist and decolonial theory aiming to articulate and challenge dominant western discourses of knowledge production undergirded by the logic of the Cartesian cogito and its illusory neutrality. In this current paper we theorise how our praxes have developed in response to new teaching contexts, cohorts and the global pandemic. We undertake what Sara Ahmed calls feminist homework, feminist theorising guided by the philosophical lessons and encounters of the everyday, and, using this lens, we extend our thinking to consider bell hooks’ work on engaged pedagogy and teachers’ self-actualisation alongside Luce Irigaray’s work on listening and ethical co-existence. Guided by this work, we argue that we need to learn to reconceptualise the issues we are facing, which ultimately requires a challenge to colonial Cartesian logics and a reimagining of the Human as always-in-relation.