Teaching to Transcend: Educating Women Against Violence

Examines teaching and learning in shelters for battered women.

Teaching to Transcend explores a particular kind of safe space for the education of women: domestic violence shelters. Women in shelters are literally taught concepts from self-worth to financial management, parenting, and feminist values of equality and rights. They also learn more subtly through counseling, interaction, and affirmation of their own stories and survival. The ways in which women in shelters are educated are based upon the concepts of feminist pedagogy, such as intent listening, empowering voice, and radical social action. Teaching to Transcend expands both the concept of feminist spaces and feminist pedagogy and our understanding of the connections between education and politics (particularly the political economy of social knowledge) and non-school-based education spaces.