The General Survey Course on Asian American Women: Transformative Education and Asian American Feminist Pedagogy

The call for a recognition of cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution-one that seeks to restore life to a corrupt and dying academy. ¹

Bell Hooks

Introduction

The general survey course on Asian American women was born out of the 1968-69 ethnic studies strike at San Francisco State.
Ethnic studies called for curriculum transformation and the inclusion of racial minorities. However, simply adding race in the curriculum inadequately addressed concerns for women of color. At that time, many Asian American female students sought a course to empower themselves, discuss identities, and learn about Asian American women's history and contemporary issues. The University of California, Berkeley offered the first known Asian American women's course in 1970. Since then, a general survey course on Asian American women has been taught at over a dozen public and private academic institutions across the United States.

Despite nearly three decades of growth, scholars and educators have neglected to discuss course curriculum development of Asian American women's studies. Such a dialogue could provide a historically-based model for future instructors, and articulate the direction of the field. This study details the evolution of the general survey course on Asian American women (hereafter, the Course) from 1970 to 1998. I focus on the changes in theoretical orientation, curriculum content, and pedagogical approach over time. This study is based on an analysis of thirty-eight syllabi/course materials and interviews conducted with ten instructors who taught the Course one or multiple times within the last eight years. I located syllabi from thirteen public and private institutions across the United States through personal and professional references and at the UCLA Asian American Studies Reading Room. ² They included both teaching and research-oriented institutions. In conducting interviews, I considered several variables including student demographics for the potential impact on classroom dynamics, the status and history of Asian American studies (AAS) at each institution, access to resources and local Asian American communities, and national socio-political conditions. ³

Examining syllabi as historical documents had several limitations. First, some syllabi had incomplete lists of readings, scheduled films, and/or guest speakers. The syllabi rarely revealed classroom exercises or lecture notes, nor did they foretell of unexpected issues raised by students or outside social factors which may have pushed the Course off a designated track. Syllabi were useful, however, in determining instructors' objectives and revealed their pedagogical approach with the type of student requirements. Second, a balanced view of U.S. regions may be in question. California institutions dominated the syllabi collection. Thus, generalizability may be limited to the West Coast and California. However, the number of AAS programs is greater on the West Coast than other regions.

Third, interviewees included only those who had taught the Course in the 1990s, with the exception of one who first taught it in 1988. I felt that May Chen and Judy Chu's articles offer personal voices on the Course experiences in earlier years. ⁴ The absence of student perspectives of how they received or rejected the Course is the final limitation. Their perspectives are needed to fully explore the dialogical relationship between student and instructor(s), and/or between student and class environment. I chose to focus on instructors' perspectives for the purposes of this study, though I hope that future research will reveal students' views. Despite those limitations, the combination of collected syllabi and course materials, interviews, and published articles, mapped out a historically-based development of the Course.

This study contributes to academia in multiple ways. It provides an overview of the Course over three decades. Only a handful of published...