Grad Student & Faculty Colloq · Women'S And Gender Studies
How to teach and practically work towards being a professor! As someone pursuing a career in academia, I was suprised how little support or training there is to prepare to teach students (generally speaking). This course is a great answer to that - to help me start thinking like an educator and with learning at the forefront of my ideas.
Ways to center syllabi and course design on students' and pedagogues' needs; feminism as care; feminist pedagogy as critique in the corporate university
I learned how to unlearn and critically question everything that I have been taught through a feminist/queer lens.
I acquired many practical strategies on enacting feminist pedagogies in the classroom. I also had a hand in developing my own syllabus in the field of WGS from scratch. I gained more clarity of the philosophy of a feminist educator.
Technically, I learnt to design my own class and how to make my teaching more sensitive to all our differences, to prepare a lesson plan, and to moderate class discussions, but in reality I learnt so much more: how to support each other, how to support my students, and how a teacher can also be a human being in the classroom
I wish we had spent less time in the same (very small) groups and had a chance to interact with other students in the class more.
This course ultimately set forth lots of important questions that I will continue to consider moving forward. I learned a lot from our conversations about not only how to craft a feminist syllabus, but also how to more broadly implement feminisms in the classroom setting. I learned a lot from my peers in addition to Professor Bryan- Wilson.
One thing I loved about this course is that it became a way to build community with other scholars who want to do (away with) the Academy differently. I wonder if we could have switched groups around more so that we could get to know others in the class better.
In this course, we learn practical skills such as considerations for building a syllabus, planning an appropriate amount of content for individual lectures, and aligning assessments with course objectives and goals. We are exposed to readings from outside traditional mainstream (or whitestream) feminism. Particularly useful to me were writings on Indigenous feminism and pedagogy. While the course centers around pedagogy, many of the readings assigned are useful for other projects I am working on at Columbia, including my own dissertation research.
If you are thinking about going into academia, I highly recommend Prof. Marianne Hirsch's Feminist Pedagogy course - whether you identify as a feminist pedagogue or not! You will leave with more clarity of what good teaching looks like. This course cemented my desire of becoming a higher ed instructor by providing me a challenging yet safe space to reflect on my teaching philosophy. Yet, it was highly practical - providing several opportunities for students to hear from other accomplished feminist pedagogues on how they enact feminist pedagogies in their syllabus design and classroom practices. Prof. Hirsch role models several feminist pedagogies in class, and is evidently someone who walks the talk!