Defying Borders: Bringing Feminist Pedagogy and Women's History into a new Core Curriculum. (original) (raw)
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2012
The authors provide a case study of how a group of faculty members was able to initiate transformation in student learning and institutional structures at a small university in the Midwestern U.S. through the introduction of collaborative feminist organizing and pedagogy. It details faculty-led initiatives that set the stage for innovative teaching and learning, and it describes the authors’ experience in the face of resistance when introducing a global women’s human rights course into the university’s new core curriculum. Because of its diverse, interdisciplinary and transnational content, this course challenged deeply ingrained disciplinary and pedagogical borders of both traditional area studies and the field of history. The authors argue that progress toward diverse curricula can be made when colleagues work collaboratively and apply innovative pedagogical models to the classroom. Although specific to one university, these challenges to and strategies for transformation have bro...
Putting Feminist Pedagogy to the Test
Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2000
Critics of women's studies (WS) have charged that WS teaching overemphasizes students' personal experience and is overly politicized. They claim further that WS classes discourage critical, independent thinking and stifle open, participatory learning, causing student dlssatisfaction. This study provides empirical ebidence of the process of WS teaching from the perspective of 111 teachers and 789 of their students from 32 campuses in the United States. Contrary to WS critics, WS faculty and students reported strong emphases on critical thinkindopen-mindedness and participatory learning and relatively weaker emphases on personal experience and political understanding/ activism. In addition, student ratings of positive class impact were higher for WS than non-WS classes. The results support the pedagogic distinctiveness of women's studies.
The Women's Movement: Impact on the Campus and Curriculum. Current Issues in Higher Education, 1978
1978
Two papers discuss changes in college campuses and curricula due to the emergence of women's issues and the movement to resolve them. An essay by Paul tauter, "The Campus," outlines some of the forces on campus making for change in college curriculum and feminist scholarship. These forces are categorized as "pushes" (women as con-umers of education, existing programs providing special services for women, statistical studies of women's progress through education and into careers) and "pulls" (exciting developments and strong interest in feminist scholarship), Florence Hove's "The Curriculum" outlines the history of women's higher education in the United States aLl its effect on the development of curriculum in women's studies. It is noted that women's studies are necessarily interdisciplinary and share the critical elements of general education: in short, they prepare students to make informed, ethical, judgments that allow them to participate in social, political, and cultural life. It is proposed that the strength of women's curriculum grows from the relationship it projects between past and future, thus supporting the true function and responsibility of the university.
2016
Drawing on over four decades of diverse teaching experiences as well as our recent work facilitating the NWSA Curriculum Institute, this article discusses some of the politics and praxis of teaching the introductory Gender and Women’s Studies course in the U.S. academic classroom. While mapping different pedagogical strategies, it offers some suggestions, recommendations, and provocations that inform our commitment to design syllabi, plan courses, and teach materials that introduce students to formative works and concepts in Gender and Women’s Studies, chart current trends, and signal new developments in the field. ResumeEn s’appuyant sur plus de quatre decennies d’experiences d’enseignement diverses ainsi que sur nos travaux recents pour organiser l’institut des programmes d’etudes de la NWSA, cet article discute certains aspects de la politique et de la pratique de l’enseignement du cours d’introduction Etudes sur le genre et les femmes dans les classes d’universite aux E.-U. Tou...
Feminism and Higher Education: Teaching Women, Women Teaching
Duke Journal OF Gender Law & Policy, 1997
Academic disciplines have always aimed to produce competent research scholars by impressing on graduate students the basic scholarship and modern trends of their particular field. Yet these institutions do little to prepare their apprentices for the teaching role that most hope one day to assume. The apparent assumption of academe is that a competent scholar and receptive students are all that is necessary for teaching and learning to occur. However, feminist studies challenges this assumption on two counts. First, it insists that the knowledge constructed in traditional university classrooms is incomplete. Women, minorities, and other marginalized groups protest that the educational system has for so long privileged the contributions and concerns of middle-to upperclass white males that course materials do not reflect the experiences of diverse communities. Scholarship by and concerning women and minorities must be incorporated into the traditional disciplines and existing theories must be revised in light of more complete data. Second, aside from challenging the content of university curricula, feminist scholars are also rethinking the processes of teaching and learning and the implications of these processes for pedagogy.
xxamazons.org, 2019
Here is my story of trying to teach a course in Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) from a radical feminist perspective at a southern university in Spring of 2019. I was invited to teach "Women, Gender, and Work" and an introductory WGS course after the outgoing chair of the Department of English, who had read my books in graduate school, discovered that I was living on the land, developing a feminist educational retreat center and campground for women in rural southwest VA. I took the invitation to return to the university as a theorist, excited about having the opportunity to inspire students to learn about radical feminist thinking, and especially women's spirituality and the intersections between different ways of knowing and thinking, having just returned from the 25 th anniversary celebration of the Women's Spirituality Program at CIIS in San Francisco. However, a conflict of interest soon developed between myself and the director of the program, who saw the need to tell me not only what to teach, but how to do so. When I challenged my students to learn how to think creatively for themselves, rather than to just download standard academic WGS orthodoxy, the WGS director claimed that this made them too uncomfortable. My course focused on women as reproducers of children, a reality which has structured women's labor for the past 35,000 years. The latter violated the trans ideology the students were exposed to through the current LGBTPlus movement on campus. bul·ly: