Women’s Studies as a discipline has passed its 40th anniversary; at TCU, Women’s Studies will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2014. An interdisciplinary field that puts gender at the center of analysis, Women’s Studies courses are offered at more than 700 colleges and universities, and it ranks among the fastest growing undergraduate majors (Berger 39). TCU’s program offers an undergraduate minor and emphasis as well as a graduate certificate and replicates the national growth demographic: in 2012-13, undergraduates declaring the program increased by 100% and graduate students by 140%. Around 450 students enroll in WOST-approved courses each semester, and more than 60 faculty members claim WOST-affiliated faculty status.
Despite the flourishing of this discipline at the national and local levels, some still may question the place or validity of Women’s Studies as part of a student’s education. Even putting aside the many personal, ethical, political, and intellectual reasons for why students might choose to enroll in Women’s Studies, there is an additional compelling—but under-recognized—reason to argue for its importance to college curricula. Women’s Studies stands as a pedagogical leader and model for liberal education.
I bolster this claim through reference to an ambitious project launched by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in 2005 called Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), designed to describe and prescribe practices that fulfill the promise of a twenty-first century liberal arts education. To this end, LEAP defined a series of Essential Learning Outcomes, Principles of Excellence, and High-Impact Practices, all of which are set out on its website. For those of us who witness the metaphorical handwringing of the media regarding the “humanities crisis” and perhaps even do some literal handwringing ourselves on occasion, LEAP’s conclusions are affirming, inspiring, and offer one possible blueprint for producing that old-fashioned goal of liberal education, “engaged and informed citizens” (LEAP website).
What struck me upon looking over the LEAP website was how the pedagogy associated with Women’s Studies programs, known as feminist pedagogy, has been promoting and practicing the High-Impact Practices described on the LEAP site for decades. Feminist pedagogy was described in a now-classic article as promoting a
vision of the classroom as a liberatory environment in which we, teacher-student, and student teacher, act as subjects, not objects. Feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching/learning engaged with self in a continuing reflective process; engaged actively with the material being studied; engaged with others in a struggle to get beyond our sexism and racism and classism and homophobia and other destructive hatreds and to work together to enhance our knowledge; engaged with the community, with traditional organizations, and with movements for social change. (Shrewsbury 6)
Feminist pedagogy and LEAP’s vision for liberal education converge in a number of concepts. Collaborative learning, long a hallmark of feminist pedagogy and emphasized in the language above with the phrases “engage with others” and “work together,” undergirds LEAP’s notions of Common Intellectual Experiences, Learning Communities, and Collaborative Assignments and Projects. Feminist pedagogy’s commitment to seeing students actively engage – with each other, the subject matter, and the community outside of the classroom–shows up in LEAP’s prioritizing of writing, research, service learning, and internships. Diversity/Global Learning, another of LEAP’s High-Impact Practices, is at the heart of feminist pedagogy, which seeks to understand the constructions and effects of difference in humans’ lives and in society, and Women’s Studies as a discipline, which has become increasingly interested in the effects of transnationalism on gender and the emergence of global feminisms.
Women’s Studies offers above all an intellectual space for students to examine their identities and place in the world, while learning to inhabit diverse perspectives and put theory into practice in the service of activism and social change. It also offers—perhaps surprisingly to those not familiar with the field—a longstanding tradition of critical inquiry, collaborative and engaged learning, and pedagogical innovation that can be a model to the larger institutions of higher learning within which Women’s Studies programs exist. In this way, Women’s Studies truly moves from margins to center.
Works Cited
Berger, Michele Tracy. “So You Want to Change the World?” Ms. Magazine (fall 2012): 38-42.
“Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP).” American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2013. Web. 1 July 2013. http://www.aacu.org/leap/index.cfm
Shrewsbury, Carolyn M. “What is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women’s Studies Quarterly 15.3/4 (1987): 6-14.
This article was written by Theresa Strouth Gaul, Department of English and Women’s Studies, for the Fall 2013 Issue of Insights Magazine.