A Feminist Approach to Teaching Community Psychology: The Senior Seminar Project

Since the establishment of the first women’s center at the University of Minnesota in 1960, women’s centers on college campuses have provided a wide variety of resources, including but not limited to support services (such as counseling, childcare, and sexual education), as well as workshops and networking opportunities that can benefit the individual both personally and academically (Byrne 48). Women’s centers, in particular, often meet needs that institutions are unable to address given a growing diverse student body, and they are frequently established by current students who are seeking a space for community (Kasper 185). Unfortunately, not all colleges and universities house women’s centers, despite the need for such spaces for their students. Having taught feminist courses, I saw the need for a women’s center at my current institution, the University of Washington Bothell (UWB). UWB is home to over four thousand students, with 51 percent identifying as female and 28 percent identifying as women of color, respectively (“Fast Facts”). As UWB has grown in size, so has our ethnic diversity, with over 51 percent of students in the 2013–14 academic year identifying as being a student of color (“Fast Facts”). Our institution prides itself on being a diverse and inclusive college campus, yet lacks the centers needed to foster a sense of community that promotes these values. Knowing this, I designed a senior seminar grounded in feminist pedagogy and community psychology principles to develop a space where students could learn to work as a collaborative group to facilitate social change on our campus. Over the course of one quarter, eighteen community psychology undergraduate students investigated the need for a women’s center on our campus through student surveys and faculty interviews. This paper is a collective illustration of their class project regarding establishing a campus women’s center as written by their faculty instructor and all eighteen students.

Feminist Pedagogy in Community Psychology Senior Seminar

As a feminist teacher and a community psychologist, I design my classrooms to be spaces to foster collaboration, understanding, and social action. Feminist teaching has been largely defined as an “act of love” (hooks 187), characterized by developing community in classrooms, promoting active engagement, raising awareness of power and privilege, and contextualizing examples that resonate with students’ social worlds (Robertson 11; Shrewsbury 8). It is a collective engagement where teachers often relinquish some control to their students, empowering them to create action (Byrne 48; Shrewsbury 10). In feminist classrooms, this “liberatory environment” is both “ecological and holistic” (Shrewsbury 8) where we use it as a place to connect students to current issues and equip them with skills that they can use to facilitate action.

Community psychology defines itself as a field committed to empowering persons and/or groups to facilitate social action (Rappaport 1). Specifically, a community psychologist is most often concerned with “person-environment fit”; spaces that are “good” fits match the needs, values, and goals of the individual whereas spaces that are “bad” fits do not (Rappaport 1). As a feminist community psychologist, I interpret this in my classroom by providing my students with the skills and resources they need to create change, develop their collective identity as both learners and change agents, understand their role in social action, and continue this action outside the classroom (Byrne 48; Shrews-bury 11). It is my intention that students build on the skills they have acquired in other classrooms to work toward a collective goal that is focused on improving their community, as defined by themselves.

In spring 2014, I taught a senior seminar entitled Community Projects. The course was designed as a space for faculty to engage undergraduates in research projects ranging from participating in a local elementary school community garden to analyzing previously gathered survey data. Since arriving at the university in the fall of 2011, I had been involved in various conversations with students and staff about the need for student-focused centers on our growing campus, specifically a women’s center. The need for a women’s center was a consistent theme among classroom conversations with...