Feminist Pedagogy and Curriculum Design
Locating Ourselves
Personal Experience
Re-Thinking Location
Beginning the Work: Campus and Self-Assessment
A Foray Into Historical Analysis
Re-Locating Ourselves
Feminist Pedagogy and Curriculum Design
The Nitty-Gritty: Syllabi
The Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
Activism |
Feminist pedagogy is the starting point for designing curriculum (from individual courses to programs)
- Syllabus and program construction represent the dynamic articulation of women's studies, and this program development constitutes an important aspect of the scholarship of integration (note: WSQ frequently asks for articles discussing course formation and/or syllabi -- keep pulbication in mind as you are developing courses that may call into questions theoretical, disciplinary, and conceptual paradigms from which we have been working).
- Relationship between curriculum development and the emergence of new research.
Scholarship/methodology: the course should present and employ recent feminist scholarship, methodologies, concepts, and analyses so that students can acquire an understanding of the multiplicity of feminist approaches and perspectives and can develop their own informed positions on the issues raised in the class.
Pedagogy: whatever the teaching methods employed, they should foster a climate of mutual inquiry and exchange of ideas among and between faculty and students.
- We need to design this into the syllabus. Maintain some flexibility in the syllabus so that it can evolve in response to what is actually happening in the classroom.
- Appoint discussion facilitators -- write them into the syllabus so that people are clear about who is responsible for what and when, and assign them clear responsibilities.
- Build into syllabus classroom activities opportunities for students' to reflect on how the issues of gender in the course are produced in everyday life and in larger contexts such as the social, political, psychological, cultural, economic, historical and technological.
Techniques of managing the class include:
- discussion
- journal responses
- meta-commentary on classroom dynamics
- free-writes at key moments
- beginning-of-class small group mini-discussions in which students, in groups of 2 or 3, define and bring to class their insights
- stopping points at which the class pauses in content-discussion to specifically consider individual/personal experiences in light of the reading/discussion
- Encourage students to develop critical thinking skills, offer them the opportunity to aritculate their own positions on the issues raised by the course, and allow for an incorporation of feminist perspectives in assignments.
Resources
syllabi & activism & intro class
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