DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

A Curriculum Map for Introduction to Gender Studies

(starting with the final project of the course---click image below)

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Because of the 85% male editor base on Wikipedia, NWSA (National Women's Studies Association) and Wiki Education have valiantly offered an intervention in this digital space with a project where undergraduate gender studies build and extend new entries on wikipedia. Nevertheless, this fill-the-gap praxis rests on troubling assumptions for me: 1) wikipedia entries compliment term paper writing with assignments that mobilize fact-based, neutral writing without “championing a particular point of view”; 2) wikipedia entries give students the opportunity to write for real audiences, and; 3) wikipedia technology is so easy to use that it is as simple as facebook. My main contentiom here is that each of these assumptions erases the presence of bodies of color and their now decades-old theoretical and polemical challenges to women’s and gender studies (WGS), bodies and content that are centered in my own classes related to WGS.  While the aim of creating a more inclusive wikipedia is noteworthy, requiring queer black women, feminists of color and/or transwomen of color to compose in public digital spaces to unnamed/unmarked audiences and then remove all traces of their subjectivity and specific experience keeps the whitewashing of wikipedia firmly in place. Further neutralizing technocratic structure with claims that wikipedia is now as easy as facebook masks corporatization and erases even basic digital computing skills for students. It should not be surprising that the photos of staff and university students related to Wiki Education platforms are mostly white. Combined together, these issues compel us to see how even our most democratic, digital projects sanctioned by WGS reproduce inequalities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. Instead of having students participate in this wikipedia project that many gender studies now do, my students and I have created a different kind of digital project:  Gender-Spheres: The Gender Studies Archive.

 

To read 2015 students' opening welcome and manifesto, click here (these students are also responsible for the name and design of the site).
To read 2016 students' statement/contract on "Students' Rights in Digital Collaboration for Gender Justice," click here.

In fall of 2015, students in my Introduction to Gender Studies course spent the last week of the semester building a digital archive where they created their own version of a wiki/Wikipedia (see https://bitly.com/gendersphere).  They did not create something of that scale, but they collaboratively designed a multimedia gender-studies dictionary.  For this digital project, students pick a term--- an idea, an issue, a concept, or a person--- that they found personally critical to gender studies and create a 600-word (minimally), multimedia essay explaining that term. Students in fall 2016 extended the work and now every group of students will add to the site (after 1-2 years, terms will be expanded with multiple authors).  

 

Here are the five values of the project:

  1. subject-driven narrative discourse that privileges the voices and experiences of students, especially marginalized youth
  2. cultural pluralism represented through cross-cultural digital/visual/sonic ecologies
  3. student choice and own explicit framing of the key terms and issues in gender studies that compels them most
  4. public (more like counter-public) writing in open access spaces
  5. collaborative design and collective articulation of digital goals and processes (based on facility with & previous use of the class's ePortfolio platform)

These classroom ideals are relatively simple to articulate, but it takes the course of a semester to enact these values in a classroom.  Here are the steps of that enactment. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
I. Multiple Opportunities to See/Experience Themselves as Digital Authors/Designers

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
II. Multiple Opportunities for Visual/Multimodal Design throughout the Semester

Classroom strategies include: photo-essay assignments, prezi/google slides presentations in small groups, poster/gallery assigmments, scrapbook project on This Bridge Called My Back that is currently in progress, etc

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
III. Multiple Opportunities to Rhetorically Craft and Practice Public Writing/Public Appeals

Throughout the semester, students are asked to respond to readings in various genres of writing. There are detailed guidelines for each response on the syllabus and course website.  These are worth three points each (20 responses total). These responses are the bulk of the work of the course.  Click here for guidelines presented to students.  Classroom discussions/group discussions can also be organized in such a way that students' own polemics frame debates (see "pass the hat" activity for an example).

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
IV. Multiple Opportunities to Read and Write from Own Interests across Semester

Each unit of the course lasts for at least three class sessions.  Each unit features one jigsaw reading where students can select from multiple kinds of voices, types of scholarship, genres, and disciplines where multiple ethnic and racial groups are centered.  Here are examples based on the themes/topics of the course:

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
V. Scaffolded ePortfolio Design across the Semester
  • Designated lab sessions
  • Scaffolded and explicit design and navigational titles (with design statement assignment)
  • Explicit design of navigational titles (for external audiences vs. internal teacher/classmates)
  • Visual homepage using Canva or PosterMyWall
  • This ePortfolio is the same template as the student ePortfolios for the course--- the left tab is imagined as a table of contents of a digital/multimedia book; the background images of this ePortfolio are borrowed from popular images used on students sites.

 

Click here for a sampling of students' Gender Studies ePortfolios
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.