Collaborative Teaching across Institutions

Abstract

Amid growing awareness of gender-based violence on university campuses, teaching about this issue is urgent. Courses on gender-based violence hold transformative potential: they can foster critical consciousness, challenge systemic inequalities, and contribute to broader social change. Yet, as bell hooks (1994) reminds us, transformative teaching demands more than intellectual rigor—it requires emotional presence, care, collaboration, and vulnerability. For instructors, especially women, racialized, and/or genderqueer faculty, this work often entails significant emotional labour. This paper reflects on our experience of feminist pedagogical collaboration and support across institutions as a means of resisting the neoliberal imperative and making emotionally-challenging and potentially transformational courses more sustainable. In the fall of 2024, we taught parallel courses on gender-based violence across three universities and disciplines. We developed a collaborative model of feminist support. We co-designed our syllabi, shared teaching materials, and, as three white cisgender women, worked together to actively centre the experiences of queer and/or racialized folks and to de-colonize our course materials. We met weekly to reflect, troubleshoot, and care for one another. This paper reflects on this process as a form of feminist praxis—one that foregrounds care, reciprocity, and collective reflection as pedagogical tools. Our approach was both effective and affective and our experience contributes to feminist pedagogical scholarship by demonstrating that cross-institutional collaboration can mitigate the isolation of academic labour. This experiment both improved our teaching and helped us maintain wellness and enthusiasm while teaching difficult materials.