Laura Ciolkowski

Do not take this class if you value your tuition money! Poor lecture held only once a week. Professor Ciolkowski was clearly very passionate about her work, however, this passion frequently obstructed her ability to teach the material of the course. She constantly brought up outside work (often from popular culture or her work as a Victiorianist) to the point where we would spend only a fraction of the lecture talking about the reading at hand. Now, this would not be so horrible, as the examples she brought up were often interesting and somewhat relevant, if it were not for the most egregious flaw of the course: lecture was only once a week. When the midterm and final exam are assessing knowledge of the reading, the lectures ought to encourage knowledge of the reading. When there is only one lecture, all of the information of copious reading must be condensed into one hour and fifteen minutes. There is not time for an excess of outside material yet, without fail, every time Professor Ciolkowski would try to fit an excess of material and often sacrifice examination of the readings for that material. The design of this course is inherently flawed or, at the very least, does not allow for Professor Ciolkowski's lecturing style. To speak to the quality of the course in general, I felt that the reading excessive and incohesive as that lectures were similarly ill-planned. In particu…

I personally didn't like Professor Ciolkowski at all when I had her for Introduction to Women and Gender Studies. Professor Ciolkowski spends very little time addressing student questions in lecture and disregards students when they question her logic. Keep in mind that I'm a WGSS major, so I typically enjoy discussion and the subject matter of WGSS courses. She has a very erratic teaching style as well. Instead of taking the intro class I highly recommend taking Sociology of Gender.

Laura was one of the worst professors I have had at Barnard. She constantly forced discussion into women and gender even though that was not the class we were taking. She seemed nice at first, but by the end of the semester, I had grown to hate her. Writing papers for her class was extremely difficult. Her suggestions for papers were always vague, and when I fixed the things she had told me were wrong with my paper, she gave me a lower grade. I found this class extremely frustrating; it made me want to be a science major.

I really liked Professor Ciolkowski—she was so helpful, nice and bubbly, and I loved hearing her thoughts about the texts we read. A lot of people, for whatever reason, don't love her lectures, but I do. This class is the hardest class I have taken, by far. The reading for this class is unreasonably heavy—at least 200 pages per week, and you must read closely or else you won't be able to do the weekly writing assignment, which is also super lengthy. The midterm is fairly hard, but as long as you read the texts carefully and can summarize the arguments, you'll be fine. Also, the class is a pain because you have to do event reports twice a week. Overall, the workload shouldn't deter you from taking this class, but be prepared for an insane workload, and maybe take one less class that semester (i.e. 4 instead of 5). I learned so much from this class, and I feel infinitely more informed about women and gender issues, as well as race. This class really opened my eyes to the issues in the world.

I had Professor Ciolkowski for both Intro to Women and Gender Studies (Fall 2009) and for Women and Culture II FYS (Spring 2010). In the lecture format for the intro course, she taught with Professor Valenze as well. I'm not a bra-burning feminist in any sense of the word, but that's not what this class was about. It was a great intro course that covered not only women's rights, but also other ethnic, social, and cultural norms that are extremely problematic. Professor Ciolkowski is very intelligent and her train of thought is sometimes difficult to follow, but if you can extrapolate her main point you'll learn to really enjoy her lectures. I definitely learned a lot, and I learned to question everything around me. The class is extremely informative to say the least, and Professor Ciolkowski is very kind and understanding to her students, always willing to coordinate your schedule with hers if her office hours do not coincide with your availability. For FYS, it was obviously a smaller format, and the discussion was to be mainly held by the students. However, Professor Ciolkowski definitely had an idea of where she wanted the class to go with our discussion and tried to keep us on track. She does tend to talk a lot, but that's because she's obviously very passionate about the subject matter. Needless to say, I would recommend her to anyone!

This class made me want to kill myself. I don't know who designed the syllabus for First Year English, but it's awful. They ask you to read a million things, and you barely get to discuss them before you have to move onto the next. I barely read most of the books, except for the things I had to write papers on. At first, Professor Ciolkowski seemed like a nice person, but then she kind of wasn't. When meeting with her about papers, most of her suggestions were very vague, and it was like pulling teeth to get something further out of her. The paper writing was hell. Sometimes I found her condescending too.

I think the course was pretty good. This was the first time I ever interacted or even read academic feminist texts. I was familiar with a lot of the ideas presented -- intersectionality (probably the biggest one emphasized) -- but being able to read what the authors said in their own words was refreshing. However, I'm not sure how to actually *feel* about the course itself. Women's and gender studies is a very broad topic, of course, and there is a lot you can say about it, and I feel that Professor Ciolkowski and Professor Nelson really did try to cover the breadth of what they thought their primary audience would find interesting. I'll get back to this later. A lot of the people in the lecture and discussion were very financially well-off white women, also presumably cisgender and heterosexual (though I may totally be wrong). While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, I agree with the May 23 reviewer, that it was rather sad to sit in a room with white women and discuss the issues in Push, a book that deals very intimately with the experiences of a Black woman. Though my group seemed to have more diversity, there was *still* whiteness that came through. I remember very clearly hearing a white woman use the term "colored people" in the 11th or 12th week -- seriously!? Thankfully someone called her out right away (though that person was not white) but I was very surprised my TA…

Prof. Ciolkowski is perhaps the best professor I ve had at Columbia Barnard thus far. She s energetic intelligent fair and supportive of all students. She makes the material interesting and her enthusiasm engages the entire class. Her ability to relate modern experiences to the material encourages students to arrive prepared and ready to participate.

I'm a bit conflicted on how to review this course. On the one hand, this class more or less accomplished what its title suggests in introducing students to the major concepts and ideas within women's and gender studies. However, it all felt a bit shallow and artificial. We were forcefed buzzwords but never really dissected what they meant, and told half a billion times that intersectionality is the most important thing to ever happen to us but spent too little time thinking about why most of the people in our lecture hall were white, financially-privileged cisgender women (while I'm channelling my frustration, there was also very little talk of trans issues... in a gender studies class? what?). Readings were certainly informative, but they felt a bit long and excessive for an introductory level class. Further, it felt a bit like all the things I've been reading on social media (twitter and tumblr in particular) related to feminism were put in an academic package via 100 page articles and lectures. We sped through the material and just didn't really dig that deep into things I've learned from snippets I've read on the internet. The focus on intersectionality felt a little forced, ingenuine, and defensive. By this I mean that it seemed like this emphasis was more out of a fear of being branded as racist than a legitimate, honest care for antiracist politics. It was extremely iro…

Many discussion classes descend into either chaos or rote repetition this one in contrast always felt like an intensely interesting conversation among friends. Prof. Ciolkowski encouraged everyone--especially devil s advocates--to speak but did a good job of keeping us on track and intellectually rigorous. She was responsive to our questions graded papers carefully and helped foster a sense of camaraderie among those enrolled. Easily my favorite class this semester.