Teaching

Smith began her career as an academic with a position as a Research Sociologist in the Institute of Human Development in the University of California at Berkeley. She worked there from 1962-1964. Next, Smith worked as a lecturer for graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley from 1964-1966. She spent two years in the U.K. working as a lecturer (senior lecturer in 1968) in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex from 1966-1968. She moved to British Columbia in 1968 to work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Columbia. She was there from 1968-1976. Here she taught one of the very first Women’s Studies courses. At the same school, she worked as a Professor from 1976-1977. Dr. Smith then chose to work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in education. She taught there from 1977-2001. She was a professor in the Department of Sociology from 1977-2000 and worked as the Head of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education from 1992-2001. Also, in 1995 she was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria. Dorothy Smith remains a Professor emerita of the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and of the University of Toronto.
Her outlook on teaching and the power it holds can be summed in this paragraph that she writes: “Universities and colleges already are political; teaching in the social sciences and the humanities is a practical politics. Teaching the canon is patriarchal activism. I take this fact seriously. Of course I want a sociology for women to provide useful research services to organizations working for women’s issues, but I want more as well.” Furthermore, Dr. Smith believes that sociological research should be done using micro analysis using the method of inquiry from the standpoint of women.
When asked if she had any favorite classes to teach and why her response was as follows:

“I liked to teach classes that gave me an opportunity to learn. I’ve beendeveloping an alternative sociology based on principles from the women’smovement practices of ‘consciousness raising’ and it has been importantfor me to discover with students what works and what doesn’t. In havingto teach, you also have to learn how to think about something or throughsomething to clarify it to the point where you can actually speak it. Ilearned a great deal and always enjoyed teaching /the SocialOrganization of Knowledge / to graduate students in sociology at theOntario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). That was a course Iinvented; it has nothing to do with the sociology of knowledge astraditionally taught, but was developed out of early work I’d done on‘documentary reality.’ I’ve invented a couple of courses that I foundvery interesting to teach: one was an undergraduate course at theUniversity of Victoria – I’d misunderstood what I was supposed to teachand set it up as a course on /Research and Social Justice/ in which Itold students about, and invited in visitors with relevant experience totalk about, the relevance of different kinds of sociological researchmethods/approaches to different settings of social justice activism. Mysecond invention was an introductory graduate theory course also at OISEwhich I called informally ‘theory spotting;’ it worked from varioustexts and the business of the course was to find and identifytheoretical language and to examine how it worked. It was morestraightforward than it might seem in this brief account and thestudents apparently enjoyed it and, I think, learned a lot about /doing/theory. And now I’m teaching institutional ethnography at an advancedgraduate level as an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria,these past two years in the sociology department and next year in a newprogram called Studies in Policy and Practice.And then were was teaching women’s studies in the early days when thereweren’t even any books to work with and we had to invent the course andeven write some of the material to be used. Around 1972 myself and threeother women at the University of British Columbia initiated a women’sstudies course, the first at that university. In a forthcoming bookedited by Wendy Robbins called /Minds of our Own, / I’ve written as follows:[the four instructors who originated the course] ignorance, the absenceof material /to be taught/, as well as the women’s movement’sdistinctive commitment to working from women’s experience turned intoextraordinary advantages. In a course with sometimes eighty students, weengaged in dialogue. The differentiation between students and professorsin knowledge was not great. True we had skills that they might not yetappropriate, but when it came to knowledge of women’s lives, they couldcontribute from their own experiential knowledge as much as could any ofthe four of us, let alone the literature we drew on.I came to think of each hour of the three hours a week as the /real/university. It was in those three hours that, like the children whofollowed the Pied Piper into the world of light through the door in themountain, we entered the real university of dialogue, argument, variedviews, learning, learning, learning. Jurgen Habermas’s (1970) idealspeech situation was nothing to this. Nothing I’ve experienced before orsince was like this. Everyone had knowledge to draw on; everyone hadignorance to be remedied; everyone was passionately concerned to learnas well as to teach.”

I also asked her what a feminist pedagogy meant to her, she responded:

“Not much. I believe at the postsecondary and more particularly at thegraduate level that the teacher should teach from her skills with a viewto passing on to students what she knows how to do. So I expect to actas an authority in the classroom. But that doesn’t mean I’m a dictator.I just have to think hard about how to get across most effectively whatI know how to do. And I believe that students learn a great deal intalking with one another so I’ve developed ways of promoting that inclass and I believe also in working with students’ work and not just inwhat an instructor says, so I also do that.”

Dr. Smith does not have any particular thoughts about the future of the discipline, and doubts that there are any sociology graduate schools that are that exciting.

References

Smith, Dorothy. “Curriculum Vitae.”

Smith, Dorothy. “Dorothy Smith.” http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault/dorothy_smith.htm

Smith, Dorothy. “Email Interview by Sierra Powell,” April 2007.

Smith, Dorothy. “Sociology from Women’s Experience: A Reaffirmation,” Sociology Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Spring, 1992): 88-98.