Based on a study of five women's studies degree programmes, this article attempts to discuss pedagogical issues that are surfacing in higher education on account of the changing social composition of students since the implementation of reservations for Other Backward Classes in higher education. Critical pedagogy has not found much space in…

Integrative transformative learning in a feminist perspective asks students to engage in potentially troublesome and unsettling debates, to confront their own privilege and situated knowledges, and to experiment with conventional boundaries for knowledge production. We introduce the idea of the "tentacular classroom" grounded in the work…

This Ideas in Practice article investigates lifelong learning practices in a women's studies course at a program of Osher OLLI (Lifelong Learning Institute). The course adopted a holistic and positive approach by celebrating lifelong learners' strengths--their invaluable backgrounds and life experiences--fostering vitality and wholesomeness in…

Research is needed for us to be able to understand how Women of Color make meaning of their experiences in women's studies, especially Black women, whose experiences have not always been centered within women's studies (Elfman, 2009). Furthermore, it is important to distinguish Women of Color from Black women when investigating their lived…

Drawing on our experience co-teaching an undergraduate unit called "Gender and Environment," we argue for an expansive feminist approach to teaching climate change that embodies the content of the unit in its classroom practice. This requires: (a) understanding the classroom not as separate from the phenomenon of climate change but as…

In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary…

This dissertation retells the history of women's studies from a global perspective, challenging traditional U.S. and Eurocentric narratives about this emerging interdisciplinary field. Beginning with questions about why women's, gender, and sexuality studies has incited backlash across a range of cultural and geographic locations, this study draws…

This article explores the process of becoming a feminist educator as the author employed feminist theory in her pedagogy for the first time. This self-study answered the research question: 'What would a feminist pedagogy look like in a music history classroom?' Throughout a ten-week undergraduate music history course, the author employed a…

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought unexpected challenges to the curricular and co-curricular offerings of the Women and Gender Studies Program (WGST) at George Mason University. In March 2020, all courses were immediately transitioned to virtual, online experiences--none had previously been offered in a virtual format, programming ceased, and…

Florence Rosenfeld Howe died on Saturday, September 12, 2020. She had created an indelible life of magnitude and consequence. In 1982, when Howe was 53 years old, she published an influential article in "Change," "Feminist Scholarship: The Extent of the Revolution." If the article now seems conventional, that is a sign of how…

In this text, with an autobiographical methodology, we consider what it has meant for us to position ourselves as feminists in academia, inhabiting research lines and spaces in the field of Gender Studies. In our context, where universities are divided into teaching departments based on areas of knowledge, placing ourselves in a peripheral,…

This program description provides an overview of the peer-to-peer student staff model used by the Women and Gender Studies Program and Center at George Mason University. The program description lays out the unique structure of the unit, the need for this type of model, and how its structure is feminist in nature while also catering to student…

The discipline of women's and gender studies [WGS] often attracts criticism from the media, the public, and students. Few recent empirical studies focus on the experiences of faculty who teach WGS courses -- particularly professors teaching in conservative areas. To address this gap in the literature, I conducted 30 interviews with faculty who…

In 2019, Kentucky unanimously adopted new social studies standards featuring a version of the C3 Framework's inquiry arc, joining dozens of other states with inquiry practices embedded in their standards. The state legislature revised them in 2022 by passing the "Teaching American Principles Act." The Kentucky law requires teachers to…

This socio-cultural practitioner-based study investigated the ways in which using a feminist pedagogy in a Gender and Education course would influence students' interpretations of their own lived experiences. Using atheory of experience, we examined reflections on 14 students' initial personal gender stories and their perceptions of feminism. At…