WMST 101:
Requirements
Ø
Dialogue
Journal (25% of Final Grade)
Ø
Group Project on
International Women's Issue (25%)
Ø
Final
Reflection Essay (25%)
Oriental poppies by
Georgia O'Keefe
Each week when there is not
another major assignment due, you will write a 1-2 page typed response in which you will grapple with the issues
raised by the readings. Consult syllabus
for due dates and specific readings. At
the beginning of each class, you will exchange journals so that you can share
your reactions with another member of the class and then get some written
responses from him or her. The dialogue
journal affords you the opportunity to explore in greater depth your own
questions and convictions about the readings and to share your thinking with
each other and with me in greater detail than is possible during class
discussion. To examine sample students'
dialogue journals, click on the following link:
SAMPLE
STUDENT DIALOGUE JOURNALS.
Each week, focus your
journal on the central issue that is the "theme" for that week. In exploring that theme in your reflection,
bring in as many of the readings as you can.
You may focus primarily on the ones that had the most impact for
you--either because you agreed or disagreed with them--but you should also
demonstrate that you can integrate the other readings into your thinking even
if you only mention them by way of example.
I would like you to try to deal explicitly with at least 60 % of the
assigned readings if you wish to receive the assessment of
"excellent." When we read
several titles for one week, try to discuss that percentage of them if you wish
to achieve an "excellent."
When we read just one or two texts, be sure that you demonstrate you
have read the whole text--beginning, middle, and end; discuss the whole text,
not just the beginning. Shoot for the
maximum of two pages of reflection if you wish to receive the highest
assessment level. The journal is your
opportunity to create your own comprehensive understanding of the issue
addressed each week in view of the assigned readings.
In writing your journal response,
you should do the following (not necessarily in any particular order):
Ø Reflect briefly on the central issue or issues for that week.
Ø Bring into your reflection several of the readings. When you look at each reading, state what you
think the main point of the reading is.
Indicate any assumptions the writer makes about the issue for that week,
about women's roles, or about what it means to be a woman.
Ø Explain how each reading confirms or contradicts some of the other
readings. What does it add to the
conversation that the other readings might overlook? How does it support or challenge other pieces
we've read, our class discussions over the semester, or thinking you've
developed from other sources including your own experiences?
Ø Explain your own view. How has
this reading AND the whole set taken together affected your understanding of
the issues they raise? How have they
challenged, confirmed, extended, or qualified your own prior knowledge?
Each
dialogue journal should be 1-2 typed pages.
Do a spelling and grammar check before submitting your work. Write clearly and coherently so that your
journal partner and I can read your thinking with ease.
If
you want to know how much time to spend on the journals, think in terms of
about three or four hours to complete the reading and about two hours of
thinking, writing, proof-reading, and final editing each week. You should plan to devote about six hours
each week outside of class to your work for this course.
Assessment Criteria
Ø I will not put letter grades on your weekly dialogue journal
reflections, but I will read and respond to them, using assessment measures of
Excellent, Very Good, Good, or Okay. I
will use the following assessment system when responding to each journal:
Ø Excellent means that the journal demonstrates outstanding engagement with all
the readings. The entry is exceptionally
thoughtful and comprehensive in bringing in many of the readings and the
student's own reflections and experiences.
When more than one essay is assigned, the analysis includes explicit
reference to at least 60% of the assigned titles. When only one text is
assigned, the journal deals with the entire assigned text, beginning, middle
and end. The writing is clear, coherent,
and technically correct.
Ø Very Good means that the journal demonstrates strong engagement with most of the
readings. The entry is careful in its
thought and attempts to bring most of the readings as well as the student's own
reflections and experiences. The
analysis includes explicit reference to at least 50% of the assigned
titles. When only one text is assigned,
the journal deals with the entire text.
The writing is usually clear, coherent, and technically correct.
Ø Good means that the journal demonstrates average or competent engagement
with a few of the readings, though not enough to show a comprehensive grasp of
the materials. The thinking needs fuller
development, and the student needs to offer more of his or her own reflections
and experiences. The analysis includes explicit reference to at least 40% of
the assigned titles. When only one text
is assigned, the journal deals with the most of the text, although not as
comprehensively as could be. The writing
may impede a reader's comprehension at times.
Ø Okay means that the journal is too short to develop ideas, strays from the
point, or does not adequately demonstrate that the student has read all the
readings. The analysis includes explicit
reference to less than 40% of the assigned titles. When only one text is
assigned, the journal does not adequately deal with the whole text, beginning,
middle, and end. The writing presents so
many technical or grammatical problems that it is difficult to grasp the point.
Oral History Project: Interview with
an Older Woman and Formal Essay
The purpose of this project
is to afford you the opportunity to tap into the vast treasure trove of
experiences, knowledge, and wisdom available to you from an older woman in your
family, extended family or community. Choose a subject whose oral history serves as
an inheritance for you and others--someone whose history should be preserved
for future generations. Your interviewing will culminate in a 5-page typed essay. The essay will be due on roughly the
fifth or sixth week of the semester. No
other writing will be due that week. In
the coming weeks, I will distribute some guidelines for successful interviewing
and for writing a paper based on interviews.
CLICK
HERE to see examples of students' oral history essays.
You will interview your
subject to learn more about her life, her insights about being a woman, and the
times through which she lived. You will
interview her to find out how she believes her life was shaped because she is a
woman; how it was affected by the social, economic, and political conditions that touched other women of her generation; how her
experiences as a woman changed over time; and how her experiences might reflect
those of other women of her social class, region, age, race, ethnicity,
physical ability, or national origin.
Keep the focus of your questions on her reflections about her
experiences as a girl and later as a woman.
Try to learn from her about her attitudes toward gender and her
experiences as a woman.
As you ask your subject
questions about the various stages of her life, it might be helpful to
encourage her to remember specific experiences that offer good examples of what
it was like to be a woman at different points of her life: from childhood, through education, through
living a single life and sharing friendships, through family life or other
forms of intimate partnerships, and into later years of life. Also be sure to ask your subject to reflect
upon how her own experiences may have been shared by other women of her own
background, culture, class, ethnicity, or race.
You should ask her about her
childhood and the roles or expectations placed upon her as a girl child by her
family and community. What were her
experiences at school and in her community as she grew up female? You might ask her if one experience stands
out with particular clarity when she thinks about what it meant to be a girl in
the times when she was growing up.
What kind of paid or unpaid
work did she do after her schooling? You
might ask her if one experience stands out with particular clarity when she
thinks about what it was like to be a woman in the workforce and if she thinks
there are any differences for women in the workforce today.
Has she chosen to spend
parts of her life single, married, in same-sex relationships or
partnerships? Did she have
children? If so, how did she wish to
raise her children in terms of gender expectations and the kind of male or
female she wished her children to be? If
she had girl children, did she raise them differently than she had been
raised? You might ask her if she
remembers one experience that captures what it was like to be a woman living in
her generation and sharing her life with friends, lovers, spouses, and family.
What major historical events
or movements in American social and political life had an impact on your
subject’s life especially as a woman?
Think about events like the Depression, World War II, the Korean War,
the McCarthy Era and the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s
Movement, the sexual revolution of the 60s, the Viet Nam War, etc.
What does she think about
the lives of younger women today? In
what ways does she think they are similar to, or different from, her own when
she was younger? What were her hopes and
dreams as a younger woman? How were they
fulfilled or changed over time? What
does she think about the hopes and dreams of younger women today?
What does she think about
growing old in our society? How does
aging have an impact on her life especially because she is a woman? Ask her if one experience stands out in her
mind when she thinks about what it means to be growing older.
What is it about her life
that gives her the greatest peace or satisfaction? What would be the one most important insight
or piece of advice she might give to younger people, particularly from her
experiences as a woman?
Format
for your Paper
Ø You should introduce the
person whose oral history you are recording and explain your relationship to her.
Ø Provide a full account of your interview, using direct quotations from your subject
and descriptions of her, her
surroundings, and your interactions. If
you are doing phone or mail interviews, you will not be able to describe the
interview, but you can provide descriptions of this person as you know her.
Ø Analyze the interview material you have gathered in terms of what it suggests
about women's lives; how they are affected by gender expectations, class, race,
sexual orientation, region, ethnicity, physical ability or any other
factors. You should analyze how your
subject's perceptions of her expected roles may have changed over time. Analyze how women's roles and the gender
expectations placed upon them have or have not changed over the course of your
subject's lifetime.
Ø Reflect on how you understand your subject's life. What gender patterns or other social
conditions do you think her life reflects?
What does her life tell us about other women's lives in general or about
women who share her background, culture, class, ethnicity, or race.
It
is essential that you analyze your interview material not simply report
it. Your analysis should focus on gender
considerations and your subject's life.
You should also reflect on your interview and offer your own reactions
to your subject's life, her experiences and her thinking. ANALYSIS AND REFLECTION are crucial to this
assignment. Your essay should not be merely a factual report of what your subject
said; it should be a thoughtful analysis of her thinking and reflection upon
it.
Assessment Criteria
I will assess these papers according to the
following criteria:
Ø how thoughtfully you analyzed the gender issues that your subject’s
experiences and her ideas about them raised;
Ø how specifically you explained her experiences and her own ideas about
them;
Ø how specifically you used her own words to illustrate your ideas;
Ø how fully you explored her thinking about gender and her own
experiences as a woman;
Ø how successfully you made your subject come to life; how specifically
you described her appearances and narrated your interactions with her; how
fully you captured her "essence" as you see it;
Ø how clear, coherent, and correct your writing is.
Web-Based Group Project on International Women's Activism to Promote
Change
Using the Worldwide Web to
connect you with international scholars and activist working to end the
oppression of women, you will research one issue of concern to women in a
particular region of the world. The
objective of the project is to inform the class about a particular social,
political, economic, or cultural issue that adversely affects the lives of
women AND the kinds of actions that women are taking to address the issue and
promote positive change. We want to
develop an understanding of how women are engaging in powerful actions to make
the world a more just and humane place.
You will work with a group
of other students (3-4 depending upon course enrollment) to collect
information, decide upon presentation formats, and present your findings to the
rest of the class. In the coming weeks,
I will provide a web page of links to research sites on the Worldwide Web. These will provide a starting point for your
research on each of the following topics.
The due dates for each of the following suggested project topics will
vary so that we can coordinate the projects with the readings and issues we
will be examining.
As the course progresses, we
will work on strategies for assessing Web sources, discerning their biases, and
determining their scholarly rigor.
Your presentation may use a
number of formats: web-based or
PowerPoint presentations, lecture/discussion, panel discussion, poster presentations,
video clips, audio tapes, round table discussions, interactive activities to
get the whole group involved, etc. Every presentation MUST include a Works Cited
document or page on which you list all the sources you used for information AND
for ALL VISUAL IMAGES or OTHER MEDIA used in your presentation. PowerPoint presentations will include a works
cited page as your final slide. In
addition, each slide in a PowerPoint presentation should list the source of the
information or images contained in that slide at the bottom of the slide. Web-based presentations must also include a
final works cited page.
The purpose of this activity
is to afford you the opportunity to make connections between the issues we are
reading about in class and the real-life situations of women around the
world. The projects are intended to
broaden our global perspective for the course.
As such, they are essential to the work we do together. Your contributions are invaluable to us as we
begin to examine the lives of women globally.
Some possible subjects
include (but are not limited to):
The historical role of women
in the Civil Rights Movement in the U. S.
The demonstrations by
Nigerian women to demand jobs for their families in their oil-rich but poverty
stricken region of
Human rights violations in
Human rights violations in
Argentina, the use of “disappearance,” torture and rape during the "Dirty
War" of the government upon its own people; the resistance/activism of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to demand the return of their children alive or at
least the truth about where their bodies were dumped.
Human rights violations in
Chile under the Pinochet regime; U. S. CIA support of the Pinochet coup and
dictatorship; the resistance of Chilean women to the dictatorship through their
political tapestries (arpilleras), their work in soup kitchens, and their
demand for the return of their children whom the dictatorship kidnapped,
tortured, and “disappeared.”
Female genital mutilation
and international activism by women of various cultures to end the practice.
Surgical intervention to
alter the genitalia of intersexed individuals and the activism of intersexuals
to promote informed consent before any such radical sexual surgery.
Ethnic cleansing, the use of
rape as a systematic part of war in
The work of international
women activists to secure the passage of the international charter, calling for
the end of all forms of discrimination and violence against women worldwide.
The maquiladora (sweatshop)
industry in Central and Latin America, sweatshops in the Pacific-Asian Rim or
other parts of the world (including the U.S.); the effects of a globalized
economy upon women and children; and the activism of women labor organizers in
the maquiladora sector or other sweatshops to end the exploitation of labor.
Sex tourism, the sexual
exploitation of women and children in various places in the world; the
trafficking in women for sexual uses in various places (e.g. mail-order brides for
Western men, or personal “escorts” for Western men on sex tours, the impact
of prostitution promoted by U. S.
military bases in the Philippines, Okinawa or other countries ). Be sure to focus also on the activism of
women to end the exploitation of the international sex trade.
Global hunger or lack of
health care as feminist and human rights issues; the work of women to combat
world hunger and disease.
Reproductive rights as a
global human rights issue; access to sex education, family planning, contraception,
and protection from sexually transmitted diseases; women’s historical struggle
since the early twentieth century to achieve reproductive rights,
contraception, safe and legal abortions.
The Women’s Suffrage
Movement in the
Domestic abuse in the
Women in the
The role of women in the
Pittston Strike in
The work of Code Pink, a U.
S. women’s peace activist group, that is resisting the present U. S. policy of
waging “pre-emptive” wars of choice rather than wars of necessity because of an
immediate military threat to U. S. security.
Final Reflection Essay: What is
Women's Studies? What is Feminism? What
Difference Does it Make?
This final assignment
affords you the opportunity to reflect on how the feminist knowledge you have
acquired this semester has shaped your thinking about gender and about women's
lives across a range of cultures and throughout the world. The essay will constitute a synthesis of your
reflections on the readings and group presentations, the issues they raise, and
your own experiences as a woman or man in society and as a student of women's
studies. CLICK
HERE to read the assignment. The
essay will be 5 typed pages. The essay will be due on the last night of
class.