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…

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…

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…

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…

Previous research indicates that "The Studies" are helpful to students at both K-12 and higher education levels. Most of these studies focus on K-12 schools, fewer are at the higher education level, and few use quantitative methods to examine students' perceptions of "The Studies." The purpose of this study is to research…

This dissertation explores contemplative practices such as mindfulness, meditation, compassionate listening, and journaling as a means to self-awareness, self-compassion, and empathy for self and others. Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) and social justice classrooms and pedagogy include difficult conversations on social justice topics such as…

We live in a time when the question of who is (or is not) depicted in public monuments is a topic of heated discussions across the nation. For example, the removal of Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in a violent protest in 2017. Such debates concerning the display and preservation of Civil War monuments center around…

This article offers new insight into students' responses to Womens' and Gender Studies (WGS) classes by overcoming the self-selection bias hitherto inherent in the field. Exploring the experiences of 1406 students (770 women, 636 men) of a university with a WGS requirement across all study programmes, we examine the prevailing discourses on WGS,…

Current research on gender and educational leadership focuses exclusively on women, making men the invisible gender. Critical Black feminist scholars have pushed work on women and educational leadership further by bringing intersectional identity into the discourse, but the research still describes women as monolithic. New critical work in…

Feminist pedagogies have established the need to query power structures in terms of curriculum content and teaching praxis. However, the topic of student assessment poses difficulties: it is a means through which students' performance is evaluated and quantified according to set institutionalised criteria that values particular forms of hegemonic…

Scholars have noted that there is hesitation to utilise findings from gender studies in engineering education. Issues within gender studies may be part of the matching problem. Debates concerning two concepts for new engineering paradigms are investigated: "care" and "heterogeneity." Their appeals and the respective…

Courses: Introduction to advanced classes in Media Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Race, Communication, and Advertising. Objectives: In this unit activity, students critically assess advertisements that co-opt female empowerment and then identify ways they can resist such strategies.