Gender, Confinement, and Freedom: Team Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies

I. Introduction

In 1993, writing about their years of feminist collaboration, Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose explained that while they sometimes found such endeavors challenging, ultimately they were "exhilarating, consoling, and precious" (559). In the years since then, those working in women and gender studies have continued to advocate for collaboration in the academy, calling for interdisciplinary studies and team teaching. In this essay, we (a literature specialist, a sociologist, and a historian) discuss our experiences with feminist interdisciplinary collaboration, reflecting on team teaching Introduction to Women's Studies since 2012. After laying out the philosophical and theoretical background for our pedagogy (feminism, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity), we discuss the theme that unites our research and teaching interests across discipline boundaries and provides an organizing principle for our course: "Gender, Confinement, and Freedom." We then show how the course culminates in two collaborative and memorable experiences. The first, a class visit to the Maryland Correction Institution for Women, connects what we've been talking about in the classroom to the world outside the classroom. The second, an end-of-course discussion of and writing project on Harriet Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, serves to tie the entire semester together. In the next section, we assess the class based on three criteria: critical understanding of the course theme, implementation of an interdisciplinary perspective, and awareness of implications beyond academia. In our conclusion, we reflect on what we learned and discuss ideas for changes moving forward. Ultimately, we show that although we succeeded on the first two criteria, we have more work to do if we want to fulfill the promise and potential of feminist pedagogy.

II. Practical and Theoretical Grounding: Activism, Interdisciplinarity, and Collaboration

Our pedagogy finds its practical and theoretical grounding in two interconnected ideas: that feminist pedagogy is invested in the promotion of social awareness and civic engagement and that interdisciplinarity and women's studies are inherently and productively linked. Clearly, feminist pedagogy emphasizes connecting the classroom to the world outside academia and agitating for change, specifically regarding the intersectional issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. For instance, Leeray M. Costa and Karen J. Leong remind us that "the field of women's and gender studies has always been civically engaged, founded upon a feminist epistemology of collaborative, community-based, engaged pedagogy rooted in an ideology of social justice for all" (172). As such, they encourage those of us in women's and gender studies to "participate in the broader national discussion about civic engagement in higher education" (179). So, too, do Robbin D. Crabtree and David Alan Sapp explain that using the feminist classroom to promote social change "provides students with a language of critique that allows them to analyze differences among social groups, their construction both within and outside the academic setting, and their roles in various forms of domination, subordination, hierarchy, and exploitation" (131–32). In other words, feminist pedagogy insists on critical examination of identity formation and negotiation, academic and nonacademic spaces, and the ways that power operates in both kinds of sites (which are not, of course, as separate as they might appear to be). Crabtree and Sapp further explain that the "central educational goals of feminist pedagogy" include helping "students critically reflect on and analyze their place in society, especially in terms of racism, sexism, oppression, and domination" (132). Thus, feminist teaching is always already personal and political, both for teachers and their students, demanding deliberate examination of intersectionality, power, and agency.

Just as feminist teaching is socially minded, so too is it more effective when it embraces interdisciplinarity. In a particularly provocative 1998 article, Marjorie Pryse argues that interdisciplinarity might be a "much more theoretically significant feature of Women's Studies than we have recognized," offering a powerful "analytical flexibility" (2). For women's studies, "interdisciplinarity conceptualizes a 'space' between the disciplines which feminist scholars have figured as a gap between the perspectives of women and nondominant men and the assumptions, models, theories, canons, and questions that the traditional disciplines...