The author's partner Jay died on May 23, 2006. It was sudden and unexpected--he was 31, the author was 30. Her grief was prolonged and agonizing, and she has since learned that doctors refer to her condition as "complicated grief." Truly, she is not sure how she survived the first year after Jay's death. She certainly was not convinced she wanted…

Focuses on the women's studies program at Kansas City (Kansas) Community College. Discusses the use of guest speakers and service learning in women's studies in order to connect theory with praxis. Addresses the logistics of service learning and the opportunity for the faculty to perform part-time work in the community. (CMK)

Addresses what service learning is, how it can advance activism, and why service learning should be incorporated in a course on women and violence. Describes the project, the Hate Crimes Service Learning Project (San Diego, California), undertaken in a Women and Violence course in spring 1998. (CMK)

Explores the reasons why higher education must incorporate gender and multicultural scholarship and perspectives into the curriculum. Argues for the type of multiculturalism that focuses on identifying and deconstructing privilege and hierarchy. Discusses teaching strategies for multiculturalism as critical thinking. (CMK)

In this article, the author describes how critical thinking had been related to some of the most important lessons she learned from philosophy and women's studies. Work in analytic philosophy taught her how to better locate and reconstruct arguments from what had often seemed like a morass of surrounding text. Philosophy also provided her with a…

Getting old is scary; getting old in the classroom is also scary. In this article, the authors, both beginning their seventh decade and have been connected to St. Michael's College for more than thirty years, inscribe themselves and others like them within a narrative of aging and pedagogy that mitigates the terror by contesting and refuting…

In "Teaching to Transgress," bell hooks is both welcoming and suspicious of those who would teach from a position that recognizes the limitations of personal experience. Teaching from experience can lead to a difficult and defensive essentialism that relegates students and teachers alike to categories and "types," and, as hooks argues, can obscure…

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…

For educators striving to create an egalitarian classroom based on open, reflexive, and honest dialogue, silence can be the ultimate obstacle. Not only does silence stifle individual expression; more importantly, silence also prevents the collective production of knowledge, understanding, compassion, and empathy. When learners and teachers feel…

The author came to know about trafficking by accident, when she was hired as a research assistant at The Protection Project (TPP) in 1999. As a feminist teacher, the author was very aware of the divisions among feminists on the subject of trafficking, and was interested in communicating these differences to students who were not well versed in the…

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…

A recent flurry of reporting in mainstream media argues that boys are drowning in a female-centered U.S. education system. According to proponents of the boy crisis argument, boys are just biologically and developmentally different from girls, and it is educators' responsibility to teach to this perceived difference. The U.S. education system,…

Issues of gender hierarchy are central in an introductory women's studies class. The author wishes to give students an overview of some of the classical feminist theories and also some of the newest thinking. Also, through showing them multiple feminist perspectives, she would like them to learn that there is no single hegemonic feminist view. Her…

For this essay, the author takes as an organizing premise Jodi O'Brien and Judith A. Howard's notion of responsible authority--that "teaching is a value-based activity" in which educators should be striving to engage students in academic pursuits in order to create a moral citizenry. That is, educators need to acknowledge that they wield the power…

The course studied in this article is a result of a multi-campus effort to provide instruction in science content to pre-elementary education majors in ways that are appropriate to their needs as persons and as future K-8 science educators. The authors focused on The Chemical World, a four-credit hour course. The authors observed student…