The Intro Course: A Pedagogical Toolkit

Authors

  • Jocelyn Thorpe University of Manitoba
  • Sonja Boon
  • Lisa Bednar
  • Rachel Hurst
  • Krista Johnston
  • Heather Latimer
  • Marie Lovrod
  • Carla Rice
  • Alissa Trotz

Keywords:

Teaching, Introductory Courses

Abstract

Abstract
This article offers ideas and strategies for teaching introductory-level courses in Gender and Women’s Studies by providing the responses of eleven experienced educators who were asked two questions: What main theme or idea do you hope students will learn in the introductory class you teach? And what practical strategies do you use in the classroom to achieve that learning objective?

Résumé
Cet article propose des idées et des stratégies pour enseigner les cours d’introduction aux Études sur le genre et les femmes en fournissant les réponses d’onze éducatrices chevronnées à qui l’on a posé deux questions : Quel thème ou quelle idée principale espérez-vous que les étudiants apprennent dans la classe d’introduction que vous enseignez? Et quelles stratégies pratiques utilisez-vous en classe pour atteindre cet objectif d’apprentissage?

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Author Biographies

Jocelyn Thorpe, University of Manitoba

Jocelyn Thorpe is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba. She has taught different versions of the introductory course, including Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies in the Humanities, since 2010. Her research examines the history and social and environmental legacies of colonialism in the Canadian context. She is the author ofTemagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature (UBC Press 2012), and co-editor with Stephanie Rutherford and L. Anders Sandberg of Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (Routledge 2017).

Sonja Boon

Sonja Boon is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University. She has research interests in feminist theory (particularly corporeal feminisms), life writing, and autoethnography. Her work appears or is forthcoming in such journals as Life Writing, SubStance, Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She teaches the introductory course regularly and enjoys engaging in pedagogical conversations and sharing ideas with colleagues at MUN and beyond.

Lisa Bednar

Lisa Bednar has been teaching Introduction to Women’s
and Gender Studies in the Social Sciences, both in
the classroom and online, at the University of Manitoba
since 2004.

Rachel Hurst

Rachel Hurst is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at St. Francis Xavier University. Her research focuses on embodiment, (visual) culture, and power from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and decolonial thought. She also teaches the introductory course in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Krista Johnston

Krista Johnston has taught online and in-person versions of Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba. She has designed and taught a number of courses in Women’s and Gender Studies for universities in Ontario and Manitoba and recently completed her dissertation on anticolonial political action and responsibilities for decolonization.

Heather Latimer

Heather Latimer is a Lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and the Coordinated Arts Program. Her research and teaching focus on the links among representational politics, social identities, and cultural practices. She has published articles in a number of international journals, including Feminist Theory, Social Text, and Modern Fiction Studies. In 2013, she published her first book, Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film (McGill-Queen’s). Since she began teaching full-time in 2009, she has always taught first-year and introductory classes in gender and social justice.

Marie Lovrod

Marie Lovrod is Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She has facilitated her own and student learning through the Introduction to Women’s Studies for two decades. Her research addresses intersecting constructions of childhood, youth, and aging in the context of traumas and resiliencies produced as localized effects of global capitalization. She values communities of practice that respect research, learning, and social environments as inclusive spaces.

Carla Rice

Carla Rice is Canada Research Chair in Care, Gender, and Relationships in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at University of Guelph, a position she assumed after serving as Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Trent University. Her research in the fields of critical psychology, equity education, gender and sexual development, and women’s health spans three major areas of focus: diverse women’s narratives of embodiment in the passage to womanhood; arts-based inquiry into the experiences of people with disabilities and bodily differences in social and professional encounters; and qualitative research into the body as an equity issue in school settings. For several years, she co-taught Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies with Marg Hobbs, and the two recently collaborated on the introductory reader Gender and Women’s Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain (Women’s Press 2013).

Alissa Trotz

Alissa Trotz is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies, and Caribbean Studies, at New College, University of Toronto. She took the lead in the transformation of the flagship introductory Women and Gender Studies course to reflect a transnational focus and has taught it for over a decade. (For the last three years, the course has been team taught by June Larkin and Alissa Trotz.) She is also Associate Faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the Cave Hill Campus (Barbados) of the University of the West Indies. For the past seven years, Alissa has edited a weekly newspaper column, “In the Diaspora,” in the Stabroek News, a Guyanese independent newspaper, and she is a member of Red Thread Women's Organization in Guyana.

References

Britzman, Deborah. 1998. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Georgis, Dina. 2013. The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Giroux, Henry. 2000. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Halley, Janet. 2008. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hobbs, Margaret, and Carla Rice, eds. 2013. Gender and Women’s Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain. Toronto, ON: Women’s Press.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. New York, NY: Routledge.

____. 2000. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

____. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York, NY: Routledge.

Iton, Richard. 2010. In Search of the Black Fantastic. Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kincaid, Jamaica. 1998. A Small Place. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

Kumashiro, Kevin. 2000. “Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education.” Review of Educational Research 70 (1): 25­–53.

Marx, Karl. 1963. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York, NY: International Publishers.

McLoughlin, Lisa A. 2005. “Spotlighting: Emergent Gender Bias in Undergraduate Engineering Education.” American Society for Engineering Education 94 (4): 373-381.

Muñoz, José Estaban. 1999. Disidentifications. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Namaste, Viviane. 2011. “‘Tragic Misreadings’:’ Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity.” In Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions and Imperialism, Second Edition, 205-238. Toronto, ON: Women’s Press.

Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Roy, Arundhati. 2003. War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.

Simpson, Joanna. 2009. Everyone Belongs: A Toolkit for Applying Intersectionality. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education.

____. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym. New York, NY: Routledge.

Steinem, Gloria. 1970. “Women’s Liberation ‘Aims to Free Men, Too.’” The Washington Post, June 7: 192.

van der Meulen, Emily, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love, et al. 2014. “All Sex Workers will be harmed by Bill C-36, #yesallsexworkers.” Rabble.ca: News for the Rest of Us, July 11. http://rabble.ca/news/2014/07/all-sex-workers-will-be-harmed-bill-c-36-yesallsexworkers.

Downloads

Published

2016-10-28

Issue

Vol. 37 No. 2 (2) (2016): Belaboured Introductions

Section

37.2 - Belaboured Introductions

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

2. Authors are aware that articles published in Atlantis are indexed and made available through various scholarly and professional search tools, including but not limited to Erudit.

3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to preprint their work, that is, post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process. This can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Read more on preprints here.