feminist teacher volume 19 number 3 195 © 2009 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Virtual”: Feminist Pedagogy in the Online Classroom NANCY CHICK AND HOLLY HASSEL “Feminist education—the feminist classroom—is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and prac- tice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.” —bell hooks The decade-long debate about the value of distance education (DE)—specifically online teaching—may become a moot one. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on a 2004 study, revealing that, “By the end of 2005, Eduventures expects more than 1.2 million students to be tak- ing such courses, making up about 7 per- cent of the 17 million students enrolled at degree-granting institutions” (Carnevale, “Online”). An even more recent study by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation reports that 89 percent of the over one thousand responding institutions offer face-to-face (F2F ) instruction; 55 percent of them offer online courses (Allen and Seaman 5). Overall online enrollment increased from 1.98 million students in 2003 to 2.35 mil- lion in 2004 (Allan and Seaman 4). With numbers of such magnitude, it’s hard to ignore the fact that online teaching is becoming a reality for more and more instructors at institutions traditionally offering face-to-face instruction. In times of budget crises and calls for efficiency and expansion into new student popu- lations, discussions of online teaching are no longer just for the pioneers in the medium, new faculty pressured into teach- ing DE, or the cyber-savvy. The chances are high that more and more of us across rank, discipline, campus type, and level of technical ability will venture into the vir- tual classroom. As these chances increase, so do the objections about online classes: they exploit already overwhelmed faculty and adjunct instructors; they encourage a consumer model of education, with their accompanying marketing as “flexible” and “convenient”; the increased amount of reading and writing leads to instructor burnout; they are merely correspondence courses masquerading as intellectually rigorous, college-level education; online students are disengaged and even more “estranged and alienated” than hooks’s on-campus students; the courses lack the sense of community made possible by face-to-face classrooms; etc. Many of these critiques, however, are not borne out by research. For example, the Sloan Foundation study reveals that at 74 per- cent of public colleges, online courses are taught by core faculty, as opposed to only 61 percent for their face-to-face courses—indicating that it is permanent, not temporary, instructors who are taking