Whether teaching undergraduate or graduate classes, the author integrates lesser-known women poets as part of the inquiry, not as curiosities, but as opportunities to discover something in the "raw" as contemporaries might have done. That the author's courses focus on or include in a substantial way the work of women is important, but does not by…

In this article, the author describes an upper-level, special topics English course she designed as a "workshop" in "wreading" contemporary women's innovative poetries. She was inspired to "wreading" by Charles Bernstein's essay "Creative Wreading: A Primer," in which he offers interactive and reactive responses to assigned texts as the grounds…

Many psychology instructors approach the topic of gender with considerable resistance and apprehension. Some professors may be reluctant to incorporate gender issues into their psychology courses due to their fear of altering their teaching practices. Others may be unable to present their views on gender in an unbiased way, so they avoid…

A common (although not universal) goal of feminist teachers is to create a "safe environment" in the classroom. The meaning of that term, however, varies considerably--some hope students will feel they can share personal feelings and experiences without fear of judgment, some that students will feel they can state their opinions without fear of…

Travel is a powerful pedagogical tool for critical and feminist teachers, as it leads to learning that is uniquely interactive, collective, and transformative. It places students in immersive contact with real-world realities, which the teachers strive to help them see, come to terms with, and connect to the positionality of their own lived…

In this article, the author intends to focus on the ruptures that sometimes emerge when his outsider and insider identities clash, shift places, or simply exist together in the classrooms he inhabits as teacher. He provides what Jerrie Cobb Scott calls an extended "think about" where he unpacks his own uncritical dys-consciousness and how it has…

Teaching is always challenging, and for some teachers who are feminists, teaching journalism is difficult. The tenets of good journalism--objectivity and neutrality--are often antithetical to their feminist values. Educators face the dilemma of how to incorporate feminist sensibilities into teaching journalism--a profession that strives for…

For decades, feminist teachers have been working in a chilly political climate. Rightwing critics claim that women's studies programs suffer from "insularity and narrowness, ideological bias, and a tendency toward misinformation." In the mainstream media, feminism is both vilified and trivialized. It's no wonder that many students doubt that…

The possibility of online student collaboration over cyberspace for two groups of students in Australia and Singapore was conceived by JaneMaree Maher at Monash University in Australia in 2005 after hearing a paper given by a colleague that detailed the experience of a three-way cross-country dialogue using flexible learning technologies. A recent…

Teacher authority is wielded in such a way that it is no longer "the" authority. Authority is used to open a space for students to find their own authority through speaking and writing--through voice. This process, so central to the feminist classroom, leads to the goals of feminist pedagogy as articulated by Robbin Crabtree and David Alan Sapp:…

The stakes are high for feminist teachers. Susan A. Basow, Nancy T. Silberg, Kathryn Duncan, Michael Stasio, and others have reported disturbing findings regarding the discrepancy between student evaluations of male professors and female professors. Professors who have identified themselves as feminists or committed to practicing feminist…

From interacting with their students, many teachers are aware that the concepts of feminism and environmentalism can conjure up impoverished, deficient, and equally painful stereotypes. For some college students, feminism can mean merely equal pay for equal work. Environmentalism may trigger similarly limited associations, but inevitably…

While working in a one-year position at Grinnell College, I was assigned to teach two sections of Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies (GWS). Although I had never taught in the discipline before, I decided that my course would need a social-justice component in order to ensure that students would understand GWS as both an academic discipline…

Values are principles or standards that people have decided are desirable to live by. The question of whether values can or should be taught to college students has been debated for decades, with the pros incorporating moral concepts into curricula and the antes scorning such efforts as not only inappropriate but also intellectually dull. In this…

This article focuses on women students' perceptions of and responses to the presence of men in a Women's Studies (WS) classroom. Like other feminist scholars (Bignell; Sethna), the authors feel strongly that it is necessary to incorporate students' perspectives into the theory and practice of feminist pedagogy. But although the issue of men's…