Blood, Sex, and Power: A Learning Community

"I hate the World Bank," declared a student representing international environmental organizations as she prepared a statement for class. Her distaste for the World Bank stemmed from research she had done in preparation for an in-class simulation that asked students to evaluate a proposal made by a multinational corporation for developing part of Costa Rica. The simulation was part of our "learning community"—a community dedicated to exploring the themes of gender, violence, and warfare and combining knowledge gained from both classes, one on Global Politics , the other on Latin America. The student's spontaneous reaction represented the culmination of a semester's worth of work in collaborative learning.

Education specialists Jean MacGregor and Barbara Leigh Smith define a learning community as "[A] variety of approaches that link or cluster classes during a given term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, that enroll a common cohort of students. This represents an intentional restructuring of students' time, credit and learning experiences to foster more explicit intellectual connections between students, between students and their faculty, and between disciplines."¹ This was the case with our learning community. The same twenty students enrolled in two classes: General Studies 135: Blood, Sex and Power in Latin America (although it was listed as a general studies course, it was in reality a history course) and International Relations 101: Global Politics. The classes were scheduled back to back so that we could take advantage of a two-hour block of time if we needed it. This became very useful when we showed films, had discussions, and engaged in the environmental policy simulation. We also met weekly to coordinate our themes, thereby reinforcing them in the students' minds. Those meetings also allowed us as teachers to forge stronger relationships with our students. Because the same group became accustomed to working together in two classrooms and in two disciplines, they tended to be much more open to sharing their interpretations and opinions. They did not have the same level of "performance anxiety" as students may have in more traditional classrooms. Since the same themes were used for both courses, students were able to engage more deeply with the subject matter and see the significance of gender as a category of analysis in two disciplines.

The main objective of our two linked courses—together entitled Blood, Sex, and Power—was to incorporate issues of gender analysis in every segment of our respective classes by exploring the interrelated themes of power, particularly patriarchal power, and violence. We explored how the creation of the nation-state codified a certain kind of power that was largely forged through bloodshed and warfare. Students explored the general theories of state formation in the Global Politics course and applied them specifically to case studies in Latin America.

Latin America was a crucial region in which to explore these issues. Nineteenth-century Latin America was a particularly violent region, as liberals and conservatives fought for control over resources. In our classes, students read essays detailing how liberals ultimately seized political and economic power and how patriarchal rule reinforced that hegemony. As we moved into the twentieth century both courses explored resistance to liberal rule. We looked at revolution and how revolution—particularly Marxist revolution—incorporated women. For example, students read about the soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution (non-Marxist) and the important role women played in the Cuban Revolution (Marxist). We also examined military dictatorships and the role women played in resisting military force. We looked at the ways military governments sought to reassert control over women and promote a stronger patriarchal order. Ironically, women's protest organizations such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were able to initially fly under the radar of military dictatorships because the regimes' patriarchal views did not allow them to take women's groups seriously.

The purpose of the Global Politics sequence was to introduce students to the study...