Fall 2004/Winter 2005

Volume 34
Numbers 1-2

Engagement, Resistance
and Student Learning

I am in an extremely privileged position: I teach at a feminist institution. This is something few college faculty members can say, except perhaps those who teach at a handful of elite women's colleges. Not so long ago, my institution staked out an identity that addressed gender issues prominently, and that agenda has paid off for all of us: faculty, staff, students, alumnae, and alumni.

Back in the early 1980s, when FIPSE was still actually funding projects to help improve postsecondary education, and Wheaton was still a single-sex institution, the college was awarded a grant to embed more gender-balance in the curriculum. For almost a decade, the faculty worked hard at the project, addressing the question, "where are the women?" in each individual syllabus. Faculty members met in study groups to read the latest scholarship on feminist pedagogy and on feminist theory within each discipline. This pedagogical and political project generated fervent intellectual energy across the campus, and the faculty supported the aims of the gender-balanced curriculum in huge numbers. Even when, in some disciplines or courses, they found it difficult to do more than what Peggy McIntosh called "Add women and stir," they were happy to do that much and to support their colleagues who were making more wholesale transformations.

Then the Board of Trustees decided to admit men. At first, many faculty members were angry and disappointed, worried that the college's longtime commitment to women's education was being compromised. They felt betrayed--especially at this juncture when they had been devoting so much of their research and their pedagogy to improving the representation of women in their disciplines and their syllabi. The fear was that the college would abandon its feminist commitment to women. But the administration wouldn't budge; Wheaton could not survive as a women's college, they said, so it was to become a coeducational college.

I was hired around this time, part of a cohort of young feminist faculty members from the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities brought on board to strengthen the gender-balanced curriculum after the FIPSE grant had run its course. As the Wheaton faculty came to recognize the importance of scholarship and teaching that valued work by and about both men and women, departments naturally began to hire recent Ph.D.s whose work complemented the new curricular goals. We new hires didn't need to be told to gender-balance our courses--we had been hired precisely because we were feminist teachers and scholars.

After going coed, the college, led by its new president, Dale Rogers Marshall, dedicated itself to the task of retaining an identity that foregrounded gender awareness; having gender-balanced the curriculum, we didn't want to become just another coeducational liberal arts college. President Marshall began to frame Wheaton's quest to retain its feminist mission as the desire to be "consciously coeducational," to be constantly aware that we serve both male and female students and that we owe all students an educational experience that makes them conscious of the importance of gender. Today, students understand that the message at Wheaton is one of gender equality: as one (male) student government officer recently put it, "Wheaton is the kind of place where a woman can feel free to call herself a girl, and a man can feel free to call himself a feminist."

Our new president, Ronald A. Crutcher, the current chair of the AAC&U Board of Directors, has said that the college's gender-conscious identity was part of what initially drew him to the presidency: "The gender-balanced curriculum is a unique and powerful educational asset. Women are empowered here, as students as well as faculty and alumnae. That special character was not lost during coeducation."

From the beginning of the gender-balanced curriculum project, Wheaton recognized that gender does not exist separately from race, class, and other identity categories, and since going coed, the college has moved in a direction that encourages study of those intersections. The new curriculum inaugurated last year calls for every course to be reimagined, in the same way the earlier gender-balanced curriculum project did. This time, however, according to the curriculum, which the faculty passed by a vote of 91-3, "Courses will be transformed across the curriculum to ensure that the education of Wheaton students emphasizes the study of race/ethnicity and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, religion, and technology in the United States and globally".

This "infusion" project has absorbed the faculty, as did the gender-balanced curriculum project. Faculty members are meeting in study groups, reading and discussing recent research in workshops, and transforming their courses in exciting ways across many departments. Because the curriculum also calls for us to formally "connect" courses across disciplines to provide students with a more interdisciplinary experience, we are finding that the "infusion" part of the curriculum often overlaps with "connections," and the study of race and ethnicity comes to join the study of gender and class issues in interdisciplinary contexts.

Nationally, feminist studies and feminist pedagogy have never stood still, which is reflected in my experience at Wheaton. Just as the gender-balanced curriculum project moved faculty members to focus more of their own research on women, so the new curricular initiative of infusion has moved us to make sure our research, while gender-balanced, also takes account of race and ethnicity. I see more and more of my colleagues teaching in exciting new ways that foreground the interactions of race and gender, of class and religion, of the many complex manifestations of identity that have an impact on scholarship and the world. Through all our changes since coeducation, Wheaton has remained gender-conscious, what Dale Marshall called "consciously coeducational." This consciousness, which benefits male and female Wheaton students alike, is proof, I believe, that feminism was not a passing scholarly and pedagogical fad of the 70s and 80s, but a profoundly transforming approach to scholarship and to teaching.