Women's Studies - Methodologies and Curricula

Methodologies and Curricula

Women's studies faculty practice a diverse array of pedagogies, though there are some common themes to the way many Women's Studies courses are taught. Women’s studies curricula often encourage students to engage in hands-on activities, including discussion and reflection upon course materials. The development of critical reading, writing, and oral expression are often key to these courses. The decentralization of the professor as the source of knowledge and wisdom is also common. Courses are often more egalitarian, stressing critical analysis of texts, and the development of critical writing. Like gender studies, Women’s Studies employs feminist, queer, and critical theories. Since the 1970s, Women’s Studies has taken a post-modern approach to understanding gender and how it intersects with race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, and (dis)ability to produce and maintain power structures within society that ensure social inequality. With this, there has been a focus on language, subjectivity, and social hegemony, and how the lives of subjects, however they identify, are constituted. At the core of these theories is the notion that however one identifies, gender, sex, and sexuality are not intrinsic, but are socially constructed.

Women studies programs are involved in social justice and design curriculums that are embedded with theory and also activism outside of the classroom. Some Women Studies programs offer internships that are community-based allowing students the opportunity to gain a better understanding of how oppression directly affects women’s lives. This experience, informed by theory from feminist studies, queer theory, black feminist theory, African studies, and many other theoretical frameworks, allows students the opportunity to critically analyze experience as well as create creative solutions for issues on a local level. However, Daphne Patai, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has criticized this aspect of women's studies programs, arguing that they place politics over education, arguing that "the strategies of faculty members in these programs have included policing insensitive language, championing research methods deemed congenial to women (such as qualitative over quantitative methods), and conducting classes as if they were therapy sessions." It is important to note, however, that many Women’s Studies curricula engage with a variety of different epistemological and methodological practices. Feminist scholarship is diverse and utilizes positivism, critical realism, and standpoint theory in its interdisciplinary scholarship.