Gender in the Political Science Classroom

Description

Gender in the Political Science Classroom looks at the roles gender plays in teaching and learning in the traditionally male-dominated field of political science. The contributors to this collection bring a new perspective to investigations of gender issues in the political behavior literature and feminist pedagogy by uniting them with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The volume offers a balance between the theoretical and the practical, and includes discussions of issues such as curriculum, class participation, service learning, doctoral dissertations, and professional placements. The contributors reveal the discipline of political science as a source of continuing gender-based inequities, but also as a potential site for transformative pedagogy and partnerships that are mindful of gender. While the contributors focus on the discipline of political science, their findings about gender in higher education are relevant to SoTL practitioners, other social-science disciplines, and the academy at large.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Teach It Forward: Gender in the Political Science Classroom and Beyond / Ekaterina Levintova and Alison Staudinger

Part One: National and Institutional Trends
1. Gendering the Political Science Classroom while Mainstreaming Gender in the Discipline: Understanding the Barriers and Exploring Solutions / Ingrid Bego
2. Divergent? Gender and Methodological Diversity in Recent Political Science Dissertations, 2012–2014 / Rina Verma Williams and Laura Dudley Jenkins
3. Gendered Representation in Political Science Textbooks / Daniel Mueller
4. Gender Mainstreaming and Political Science Teaching in New Zealand: Still a Work in Progress / Jennifer Curtin
5. Student Perceptions of Gender in Political Science Teaching and Advising / Ekaterina Levintova

Part Two: Classroom Evidence and Solutions
6. Getting to No: The Need for Gender-Conscious Pedagogy in Service-Learning Courses / Daisy Rooks
7. Class Format, Gender, and Student Attitudes Toward Political Participation / Sara Rinfret and Michelle Pautz
8. Beyond Gender Neutrality in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Classroom / Alison Staudinger
9. Thinking Through Movement: Embodied Learning as Feminist Pedagogy for the Social Sciences / Valerie Barske

Conclusion: Gender Forward: Momentum for the Future / Ekaterina Levintova and Alison Staudinger

Index

Sujets

• EDUCATION
• Higher
• Level
• School
• Political science
• Higher education
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253033246
• Langue: English

Extrait

GENDER IN THE POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASSROOM
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Jennifer Meta Robinson, Whitney M. Schlegel, and Mary Taylor Huber, Editors
GENDER IN THE POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASSROOM
Edited by Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2018 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03320-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03321-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03322-2 (ebook)
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Teach It Forward: Gender in the Political Science Classroom and Beyond / Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger
Part One: National and Institutional Trends
1 Gendering the Political Science Classroom While Mainstreaming Gender in the Discipline: Understanding the Barriers and Exploring Solutions / Ingrid Bego
2 Divergent? Gender and Methodological Diversity in Recent Political Science Dissertations / Rina Verma Williams and Laura Dudley Jenkins
3 Gendered Representation in Political Science Textbooks / Daniel Mueller
4 Gender Mainstreaming and Political Science Teaching in New Zealand: Still a Work in Progress / Jennifer Curtin
5 Student Perceptions of Gender in Political Science Teaching and Advising / Ekaterina M. Levintova
Part Two: Classroom Evidence and Solutions
6 Getting to No: The Need for Gender-Conscious Pedagogy in Service-Learning Courses / Daisy Rooks
7 Class Format, Gender, and Student Attitudes toward Political Participation / Sara Rinfret and Michelle Pautz
8 Beyond Gender Neutrality in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Classroom / Alison Kathryn Staudinger

9 Thinking through Movement: Embodied Learning as Feminist Pedagogy for the Social Sciences / Valerie Barske
Gender Forward: Momentum for the Future / Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger
Index
Acknowledgments
W E WOULD LIKE to thank the many people and groups who supported this book and made it better. University of Wisconsin Office of Professional Development (OPID), Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program (WTFS), University of Wisconsin–Green Bay Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) and its Teaching Scholars Program provided us with funding and logistical support and often enabled us to make connections with scholars interested in our topic. Jennifer Robinson (Indiana University) encouraged us at various stages of the manuscript preparation to move along and push ourselves to make this book happen. Two anonymous reviewers, Aaron Haynie (University of New Mexico), Indiana University Press (IUP) Series on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning editors, and the IUP Editorial Board gave us invaluable feedback that improved this book dramatically.
A Note on the Cover: As discussed in chapter three, political science textbooks currently depict the world of politics in a gendered way, reinforcing the continued overrepresentation of certain groups in the ranks of the powerful. Although our discipline has the same inequalities, we choose not represent them pictorially, but rather center an image of the political science students of the twenty-first century.
GENDER IN THE POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASSROOM
Teach It Forward: Gender in the Political Science Classroom and Beyond
Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger
I N 1991 , J OHN Wahlke published his groundbreaking “Liberal Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession,” one of the first in-depth studies of curriculum in political science since the 1960s. The 1991 Wahlke report, as it came to be known, called for more structured curricula overall and for attention to gender specifically. Among other recommendations, the Wahlke report prescribed “that the character of . . . gender . . . diversity . . . of particular problems and policies be addressed in all relevant courses —‘mainstreamed,’ in the pedagogical vernacular—not treated as a separate and unique problem to be dealt with in a particular course or two by a particular faculty member.” This call went largely unanswered, following historical patterns in political science of waxing and waning attention to teaching and learning (Ishiyama 2006).
Others have made the same call, arguing that mainstreaming gender in the social sciences would extend their analytical reach (Kramer and Martin 1988), given that gender “underpins the modern political system” (Elison 1997, 204). The absence of gender analysis parallels an absence of attention to other facets of inequality and oppression. As a 2011 American Political Science Association (APSA) report noted, the discipline is less diverse because “it tends to treat identity as given and outside of analysis” (2). The APSA report recommended treating “diversity, inclusivity and inequality” as a category of analysis “that inform[s] each unit of study rather than be[ing] seen as a separate or supplementary unit” (2011, 3). Yet, this also has not yet occurred (Cassese, Bos, and Duncan 2012). One reason may be that “gender mainstreaming,” although it aims to suffuse the curriculum, is insufficient for producing shifts in how knowledge is produced and shared in political science or for gender justice, because it offers gender as an analytical tool while shying away from the normative implications of such analysis.
Gender mainstreaming is sometimes criticized as a potential justification for the elimination of social-justice or identity-focused programs, such as Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS), and as a depoliticizing force (Hawthorne 2004). Certainly WGS programs, along with ethnic studies and other politically targeted fields, are often attacked under the banner of austerity and budget cuts. The need to support these programs in intellectual solidarity does not relieve political science, or any discipline, of the responsibility to consider and integrate the insights of WGS and LGBTQ+ studies in the classroom and the world, or to develop gender-forward scholarship and teaching in their own disciplines. Whether this should be called “mainstreaming” is debatable. PS: Political Science and Politics , published by APSA, recently printed “The Teacher Symposium: Mainstreaming Gender in the Teaching and Learning of Politics,” featuring six compelling arguments for why and how to mainstream gender, especially in introductory and methods courses (Ackerly and Mügge 2016). However, this symposium also demonstrates that, thus far, calls for gender mainstreaming have yet to succeed. Most contributors to the symposium argue that “it is possible to teach the need for feminist analysis without teaching theories of gender and feminism” (Ibid., 543). Although we agree, we worry that without these theories, we will struggle to make clear the stakes in terms of democratic and just outcomes. We want to respond and extend the work of that symposium by pursuing the questions it raises through close study of evidence of student learning as well as practical approaches in the classroom. As Cassese, Bos, and Duncan (2012) argued, departments still need to assess and promote equality; the same researchers also demonstrated the continued need for studies of the results of gender mainstreaming and asked what comes after mainstreaming, or what would make it possible. Our book responds to this challenge, arguing that, if gender-mainstreaming is to work, some scholarship and teaching in political science needs to be explicitly gender-forward, making connections to WGS and to gender-forward instructors in cognate disciplines.
While we speak to political scientists directly, we also include voices from kindred disciplines, and these classroom approaches are applicable in many fields. In particular, we are interested in how political science can serve as a “trading zone,” just as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) does, for linking the hard sciences with the social sciences and the humanities, as aspects of all of these disciplinary cultures thrive in political science. 1 SoTL, which we discuss in relation to political science below, serves as a reflective and yet systematic approach to understanding and improving our work as teachers. While SoTL builds on classic works of pedagogy and traditional education research, for us it is unique in its focus on public dissemination of work with our colleagues and its thoughtful reconsideration of our practice in light of our shared inquiry. Because SoTL brings instructors from many disciplines together with each other, as well as with students, librarians, and instructional designers, it fruitfully allows for the sharing of new methods, ideas, and strategies—what is traded in th