Goals of the WGSS Department
Key:
B - Basic
I - Intermediate
A - Advanced
S - Specialized
Goal 1:
The successful student will be able to question common-sense, dominant assumptions about what seems “natural,” “timeless,” “universal,” “human,” and “normal,” by critically speaking, thinking, writing, and reading.
Outcomes:
- 1.a. Interrogate a variety of dominant narratives especially as relating to sex, gender, sexuality, disability, race, ethnicity, nation, class, etc.
- (B-1) Identify variances within and across cultures and contexts as they have developed across time and spaces.
- (B-2) Recognize cultural assumptions and common knowledge as socially constructed in historical, cultural, political, scientific, religious, aesthetic, contexts.
- (I-1) Detect dominant narratives.
- (I-2) Analyze the role of power in upholding core cultural assumptions.
- (A-1) Map dominant narratives to their particular historical, cultural, political, scientific, religious, aesthetic origins.
- (A-2) Evaluate the connections between core cultural assumptions and various forms of injustice.
- (S) Envision a more equitable and just society.
- 1.b. Evaluate counter-narratives that challenge dominant assumptions.
- (B) Recognize and describe counter-narratives.
- (I-1) Explain the production of counter-narratives.
- (I-2) Compare and evaluate counter-narratives.
- (A) Produce counter-narratives that contest dominant knowledge.
- 1.c. Analyze texts.
- (B-1) Recognize that different schools of thought inform reading practices.
- (B-2) Analyze texts using a feminist lens.
- (I) Compare texts and interpretive frameworks.
- (A-1) Identify the core argument of advanced texts.
- (A-2) Connect complex texts to research questions.
- (A-3) Use texts as evidence for research ideas.
- (A-4) Apply different interpretive frameworks to texts.
- (S) Put theories in conversation with each other.
- 1.d. Articulate clear and cohesive thoughts through writing.
- (B) Demonstrate the components of clear writing.
- (I) Practice appropriate writing styles for different audiences (e.g., blog posts, research papers, essays, creative writing, short response, letters, etc.).
- (A) Provide formative feedback to improve writing.
Goal 2:
The successful student will be able to work and learn compassionately and collaboratively.
Outcomes:
- 2.a. Collaborate with people across difference.
- (B) Explain differential privilege in lived experiences.
- (I) Develop skills of critical listening.
- (A) Decenter one’s lived experience.
- 2.b. Engage with texts in an open and critical manner.
- (B) Recognize texts as rooted in specific intellectual, ideological and cultural traditions.
- (I) Examine the power differential between various intellectual, ideological and cultural traditions.
- (A) Draw upon texts from different intellectual, ideological and cultural traditions while recognizing their roots.
- 2.c. Interact productively and openly across difference.
- (B) Recognize that difference is produced through power.
- (I-1) Examine how one’s sense of self is produced through relational difference.
- (I-2) Examine how one is complicit with power and actively enacting hierarchies.
- (I-3) Interrogate the detrimental uses of difference to uphold dominance.
- (A) Create inclusive spaces and processes that communicate productively and openly across difference.
Goal 3:
The successful student will be able to understand “feminisms” as interdisciplinary, creative, theoretical and social movements.
Outcomes:
- 3.a. Evaluate the multiple forms of feminist thought as derived from different feminist social movements.
- (B) Articulate different feminist social movements.
- (I-1) Connect feminist theories to feminist social movements, as they vary across time and space.
- (I-2) Compare feminisms.
- (A) Evaluate various feminist theories and/or social movements.
- 3.b. Evaluate the relationships between feminist theory and praxis.
- (B) Analyze everyday social practices through feminist theoretical frameworks.
- (I) Demonstrate how feminist theories and practices inform one another.
- (A) Evaluate the relationships between feminist theory and praxis.
- 3.c. Differentiate various disciplinary methodologies and interdisciplinary connections.
- (B) Identify different methodologies.
- (I) Analyze different disciplinary assumptions and impacts.
- (A) Evaluate the interdisciplinarity of research.
- 3.d. Evaluate the critical role of creativity in feminist theory and praxis.
- (B) Identify feminist creative interventions in cultural production.
- (A) Evaluate how creativity can contribute to and inform feminist theory and practice.
- (S) Practice various forms of creative expression as modes of inquiry.
Goal 4:
The successful student will be able to understand and critically engage categories of social difference (such as but not limited to gender, sexuality, race, class, language, ethnicity, nation, empire, geography, and (dis)ability) as intersectional, always shifting, and shaped by hierarchies of power.
Outcomes
- 4.a. Articulate how lived experiences and material realities of marginalized people have shaped knowledge production.
- (B-1) Define marginalization.
- (B-2) Explain lived experiences and material realities of marginalized people.
- (B-3) Define consciousness.
- (B-4) Define subjectivity.
- (B-5) Define knowledge production.
- (I) Explain lived experiences and material realities in relation to knowledge production.
- (A) Explain the relationship among group consciousness, individual subjectivity, and knowledge production.
- (S) Incorporate the lived experiences and material realities of marginalized people into original research.
- 4.b. Articulate how categories of social difference, including, but not limited to, gender and sexuality, are created and upheld by differentials of power.
- (B-1) Describe how categories of social difference emerge, change and evolve across time and space.
- (B-2) Map categories of social difference to hierarchies of power.
- (I-1) Explain how social inequalities are maintained through interlocking multiple systems of power.
- (I-2) Explain how categories of social difference shape each other’s meanings.
- (A-1) Analyze how categories of social difference have been reclaimed for the purposes of empowerment and social justice.
- (A-2) Analyze theories of social difference and power.
- (A-3) Interpret the world by taking into account that categories of social difference are contingent upon one another.
- (S) Imagine new ways of cultivating interactions that create more just and equitable futures.
- (S) Create intellectual, political, social, and economic practices that challenge inequities by embracing the complexity of social difference.
- 4.c. Interrogate the category “women of color.”
- (B-1) Describe the category “women of color.”
- (B-2) Discuss how systems of power work together to create distinct material realities for “women of color.”
- (B-3) Describe how “women of color” challenge universalizing assertions about womanhood.
- (I-1) Demonstrate how “women of color” fit into a history of feminist thought.
- (I-2) Appraise differences within the category “women of color.”
- (I-3) Articulate the relationship between studying “women of color” and “transnational feminism.”
- (A) Appraise how gender complicates “women of color.”
- (S) Design policies and conceptual and analytical frameworks that acknowledge “women of color” as a contested, multivalent, but useful category.
Goal 5:
The successful student will be able to understand the interconnections between the local and the global.
Outcomes:
- 5.a. Evaluate phenomena as expressions of the global and the local.
- (B) Locate the U.S. within a global context.
- (I) Map how local and global acts are mutually implicated.
- (S) Evaluate phenomena as expressions of the global and the local.
- (S) Formulate responses grounded in a feminist critique of the local and the global.
- 5.b. Enact everyday practices with awareness of local/global interconnections.
- (B) Recognize the local and global in everyday practices.
- (I) Evaluate the impact of the local and global on everyday practices.
- (S) Propose everyday practices grounded in a feminist critique of the local and the global.
- 5.c. Locate feminisms geographically and historically.
- (B-1) Recognize that feminisms vary geographically and historically.
- (B-2) Reflect on the limits of one’s own normative assumptions as informed by geohistoric specificities.
- (I-1) Recognize that feminist frameworks emerge out of specific geohistoric contexts.
- (I-2) Recognize that geohistoric contexts are shaped by differential accesses to resources.
- (A) Analyze the hegemonic and normative power of western feminisms.
Goal 6:
The successful student will be able to recognize, analyze and critique their position and identity in society, thereby understanding the potential to imagine themselves and act creatively as feminist agents of social change.
Outcomes:
- 6.a. Engage feminist ways of thinking and acting.
- (B) Identify the connections between feminist theories, practice and lived experience.
- (I-1) Map and critique one’s relationship to power.
- (I-2) Compare different feminist subject positions.
- (A) Reflect on feminism as a practice with the possibility to affect change.
- 6.b. Realize one’s power to participate in feminist social change.
- (B-1) Recognize how the personal is political.
- (B-2) Recognize that feminist social change can be expressed through a variety of mediums.
- (I) Articulate the many modes of the political.
- (A) Reflect on one’s interests and capacities to participate in feminist social change.
- (S) Design feminist interventions that create a more just and equitable world.