This is the first year that I've been a TA in a women's studies course. Although TAing in political theory for the three years before that definitely equipped me with a variety of pedagogical skills, I was not entirely prepared for some of the challenges of teaching young women about feminism. One of the big challenges is, of course, students' resistance to feminist ideas. However, the biggest challenge has not been to recruit these young women to feminism, or to convince them of the strength of feminist ideas. No, the biggest challenge has been the fact that many times, I agree with my students about their critiques of feminism. When students ask why there are not more positive representations of women or why we don't teach more about women's resistance to oppression, I don't know what to say because these are things that I want from my feminist movement, too.

However, it seems impossible to reveal my sympathy to their position without (1) undermining the professor, (2) having to explain why the women's movement is in the shape it is in, (3) feeling like a traitor to a feminist movement that has benefited me in innumerable ways, and (4) worrying that if I admit my own misgivings and criticisms of the feminist movement, students will throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject feminism altogether. My strategy so far has been to show them that I am listening to their frustrations, regardless of the nature of the complaint. What I have realized is that listening to students must be the starting point of teaching. My teaching motto, borrowed from Linda Briskin, a York professor, is the best piece of teaching advice I have ever received: "start from where the students are." The only way to do this, of course, is to listen to them. Even when the inevitable complaint of male-bashing surfaced in my tutorial, I fought the compulsion to simply tell the students that they were wrong. Instead, I let them know that I was unaware that this had occurred in the course, but I invited them to identify, in tutorial, specific moments of male-bashing so that we could talk about it.

I realized that listening honestly and openly is the moment when teaching becomes truly activist—and feminist. Taking the views of a young woman seriously lets her know that her voice counts. Next term, I hope to learn more about the students' views and in turn to have them learn more about how they can define their own variety of feminism. To facilitate this, I will ask each of them to bring to tutorial songs, books, magazines, or visual images from their lives that they think are feminist. In doing so, I hope to foster a necessary discussion about modes of resistance that are out there, and how we can bring that resistance into our own lives.