I've just finished giving my first lecture and seminar as an Associate Lecturer in Colonial American History at Oxford Brookes. So that's one occasion for writing this post. My plan is to come back to this blog, and use it to discuss issues arising from teaching the course, as well as from organising a conference in April 2013. Oxford's IT department are running a programme of social media engagement this term, too - so, it seems a good time.
I've also just read the SOAS Gender Report (PDF), which presents a very straightforward set of concerns and recommendations about the place of gender in teaching. The report is addressed to SOAS Politics and Development departments, but it absolutely concerns teachers in all human disciplines in all universities. Since I want to use this space to reflect on how to teach better (as well as how to run better conferences), this is a good place to start.
What Berry & Roelofs' report basically highlights is the disconnection between academics' own theoretical commitment (on the whole) to gender analysis as at least an important part of any human discipline, and the content of our actual teaching and reading lists. Part of the problem might be that designing teaching is hard and time-consuming. But it might actually be less boring if we thought more about how to integrate our own intellectual goals, interests, and ideas. If we conduct teaching and research in different paradigms, we're kind of letting down one possible justification for research universities as valuable public institutions.
Here's my course module as it stands: there is one main textbook, written by a man; there are nine lectures and none of them are on gender; all primary source reading I had planned is written by men. All of those elements essentially carry over from the original design of the course (which I'm filling in to teach for this semester). But that's not really an excuse. I should do better.
As I mentioned, I've just given the first lecture and seminar - I read the report after I'd finished. One thing made me less disappointed in myself. We took some excerpts from Frederick Jackson Turner's classic essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" as the seminar text, and discussion went well, and in both back-to-back classes we spent time discussing the nature of "individualism" and its relationship with patriarchy.
Granted I hadn't planned this. It's just so obviously present as a contradiction in Turner's text. He declares that the frontier generates individualism, and also that it promotes disaggregation into family units. The contradiction is ideological: in Turner's mind, the individual subject is the white male head-of-household. I'm so glad we discussed this, because it's so central to the American colonial and revolutionary story. But it does make me wonder all the more, if it's so central, why hadn't I planned to include it?
I think too often it's easy to consign all this stuff to the "too difficult to worry about" bin. We should make a decision not to do that, and take the SOAS report's recommendation to take gender seriously. Next week I'm teaching the French and Spanish in America; the following week, the colonisation of Virginia: the combined roles of gender (including masculinity) and race (including whiteness) in those stories are vital, and should have a prominent place in my lectures.
One other thing to add. I am concerned about a slightly different aspect of gender in teaching, which is how gender affects the learning environment. My class felt like it was mostly men. But when I read back over the register, the class is only about 60% male. How do I encourage girls to take a more active part in class discussion? How do I ameliorate the gender-related obstacles here (not least of which, I guess, is that I'm a man too)? Putting women on the reading list must be a start. I haven't finished thinking about it.
