LIBERAL STUDIES
Director’s Office: 353 Sutton Hall
Secretary’s Office and Mailing Address: 352 Sutton Hall
Telephone: 357-5715
October 1, 1988
SUBJECT: INCLUSION OF MINORITY AND GENDER ISSUES
INTO LIBERAL
STUDIES COURSES
TO: Department Chairpersons, Department Curriculum
Chairpersons, and Academic Administrators
FROM: Charles Cashdollar, Director of Liberal Studies
Maureen McHugh, Director of Women’s Studies
Alphonse Novels, Director of Minority Affairs
When the University Senate adopted the "Criteria for Liberal Studies
Courses at
IUP" last spring, we all committed ourselves to "include the
perspectives and
contributions of ethnic and racial minorities and of women, wherever
appropriate to the
subject matter." We are writing to remind you of that commitment and to
suggest some
ways of beginning.
You will find enclosed two "models" for thinking about the
inclusion of
minorities and women in your courses. One is an adaptation, prepared by the
Liberal
Studies Committee, of an article by Marilyn Schuster and Susan Van Dyne. The
second [this
is available as xerox copy only] is taken from an essay by a geographer Janice
Monk (whom
some of you will undoubtedly recall meeting when she visited IUP last year) .
Although
Monk makes an occasional geography-specific reference, you will quickly see
that her
five-point approach can be helpful to just about every discipline. And although
her model
refers only to the inclusion of women in the curriculum, you should have no
difficulty
using it as a way of thinking about the inclusion of minority contributions. We
are also
enclosing a copy of a questionnaire on "Evaluating Courses for Inclusion
of New
Scholarship on Women" which is published by the Association of American
Colleges; by
extension, many of the same questions could be applied to the inclusion of
scholarship on
minorities.
This is an important part of our curricular revision, and every proposal for
a Liberal
Studies course should show evidence of progress in this area. At first glance,
this may
seem fairly easy in some areas like sociology or history, and almost impossible
in others.
And it may indeed be that initial steps will be more obvious in some
disciplines. But if
we take seriously the University Senate’s criteria, then all of us who are
teaching
Liberal Studies courses must assume a share of the responsibility. We can all
become more
conscious of how we use language. We can all be more inclusive when we choose
examples or
write assignments. Word problems in mathematics or case studies in business can
be
constructed in inclusive, non-stereotyped ways. We can all be more sensitive to
the visual
representations in the books or media we select. We can all think about ways to
include
minorities and women when we bring outside speakers into the classroom or
encourage
students to attend campus events. And, all of our disciplines have a history
and a
theoretical foundation to which recent scholarship on women and minorities
brings new
questions and insights.
Charles Cashdollar and other members of the Liberal Studies Committee will
be happy to
answer questions about their expectations for course syllabi. Maureen McHugh
and Al Novels
are available to consult with departments or individuals about curriculum
revisions, or to
refer you to someone on campus who has some expertise in your field.
Maureen’s office
has a collection of resources which you are welcome to use; Al’s material
will be
arriving as the year goes on. Also, watch for our announcements about workshops
and
speakers. If you have ideas or experiences you are willing to share, let us
know. We want
to do what we can to help, and this will be easier if we know what you need and
what you
can offer to others.
A MODEL FOR THINKING ABOUT THE INTEGRATION OF WOMEN
AND MINORITIES INTO LIBERAL STUDIES COURSES:
"The Stages of Curriculum Reform"
By adopting our new Criteria for Liberal Studies Courses at IUP, we
all
committed ourselves to "include the perspectives and contributions of
ethnic and
racial minorities and of women, wherever appropriate to the subject
matter." Liberal
Studies Committee members have been talking quite a bit about just what that
involves. We
think we now can better understand what can be accomplished, but we also can
imagine the
questions which will occur as individuals begin to rework old courses or invest
new ones.
Actually, integration of new content into courses can occur at varying
levels of
sophistication, from the more simple to the more subtle. It can mean no more
than
inserting a few new names and examples; it can mean as much as a thoroughly
reconstructed
discipline. We would like to suggest a model which might help us think about
those levels.
The model is not our own; it is largely borrowed from a 1985 piece by Marilyn
Schuster and
Susan Van Dyne, although we have reworked their model substantially to fit our
own needs.
We do not suggest that this is the only way of imagining integration or that
all
disciplines will fit into its stages with equal ease. But the model does have
the virtue
of being reasonably straightforward, and it points up what we take to be two
fundamental
notions: that integration may take place at increasingly complex levels and
that the
higher levels need to be preceded by and built upon advances at the lower
levels.
- The simplest, and least fundamental, change which we can make is the
insertion of a
few exceptional women and minority representatives into a current
syllabus. Our
questions at this level are fairly uncomplicated. Who are the great
women--the female
Dickenses, the female Darwins? Or, who are the great African-Americans--the
great black
politicians, the great black poets? At this level we are interested, it
seems, in
affirmative action/ compensatory actions which add new names without
disturbing the basis
of the old course outline. At this level, Marie Curie’s experiments
are given new
attention, Frederick Douglass makes his appearance in a history class, Mary
Cassatt
invites attention to women artists, and Ralph Ellison shows up in a modern
fiction class.
The work at this level is valuable and necessary, but it is also limited.
Women and
minority individuals who are added to the syllabi exist in isolation from
each other;
students might even see them as apparent anomalies within their gender or
race. Part of
the difficulty is that we tend initially to look for new individuals who
resemble the
white males already present in the traditional curriculum; the criteria by
which greatness
and excellence are defined remain unexamined. It is possible, therefore,
for some of us to
become discouraged about the possibility of finding enough people who
"measure
up." In fact, our efforts at this level usually raise more questions
for us than they
settle.
- As we struggle to find answers to those questions, and to incorporate
them into our
courses, we move to another level. We now ask more searching questions
about social
justice and the effects of persistent discrimination. Why are minority
roles and
contributions so often devalued? Why do the levels of health care vary
among racial
groups? Why are there so few women scientists? Or, conversely, why have
other fields, such
as nursing or elementary education, been largely populated by women? What
social
mechanisms are used to deny power and access? We begin now to widen our
intellectual
vision and inquire into the historical and cultural context which affects
achievement and
experience. As we incorporate these new understandings into the syllabus,
our course is
more fundamentally transformed.
- Once we begin to expand our horizons in this way, we move rather
naturally to study
women and minorities on their own terms. What was (and is) women’s
experience?
What was (and is) the experience of Hispanic Americans? What does it mean
to be a black
person in America? Asking such questions encourages us to explore important
aspects of
life which were previously ignored by scholars (and consequently by
university courses).
These might include the history of the family and of marriage, the
psychological and
biological implications of gender, or the origins and meaning of jazz
music. As we all
know, there has been within the last twenty years a veritable explosion of
sound, exciting
research on such subjects. The more we learn of it, the more subtle our
courses become
about gender and race and ethnicity. We now notice and incorporate
differences within
groups. How do the perspectives of urban blacks differ from those of blacks
in the rural
South? Are there significant differences between women’s roles in
western Europe and
in Asia? Students can now view the perspectives and contributions of women
and minorities
with more sophistication and depth.
- Perhaps the most surprising thing about this new scholarship on women and
minorities is
the potential which it has for challenging and ultimately transforming
the traditional
discipline. How valid are our current definitions of greatness? If we
find out, for
instance, that traditionally much of women’s artistic creativity was
channeled into
domestic crafts such as weaving or into more private writing forms such as
letters and
diaries, must we then rethink the definition of "great art" or
expand the number
of accepted literary genres? How must our questions change to account for
women’s
experiences, diversity, difference? Can we use what we have learned about
race to question
in profound ways the frameworks that organize our traditional courses? Can
we use
categories such as gender, race, or ethnicity to transform our perspectives
on familiar
data and concepts? How valid, for instance, are our current divisions into
historical
periods? Does some long familiar economic theory appear any more or less
convincing once
we have focused on its ability to incorporate minorities or women? If we
bring different
questions to Plato’s Republic, do we say different things about
it? If we
enlarge our focus to give equal attention to females, do biological
definitions of what
constitutes sexual behavior have to be enlarged as a result? Or, what
effects do studies
of minorities or of women have upon our diagnostic categories for thinking
about mental
health or our definitions of "normal" behavior? Can we find ways
to use gender
as a methodological category to analyze male experience as well as
female?
- Ultimately, what we are striving for is a thoroughly transformed
curriculum
understanding the experiences of women and men, or of minorities and
majorities, together.
At this level our courses would offer an inclusive vision of human
experience that attends
as carefully to difference and genuine pluralism as to sameness and
generalization. Here
we would see how race and ethnicity and class and gender intersect. Here
the work done in
previous stages — the incorporation of exceptional women and minority
representatives, the examination of the dimensions of discrimination, the
study of women
and minorities on their own terms, the resultant challenge to our usual
ways of thinking
and categorizing — all come together and are integrated with the
traditional material
which was on the syllabus from the beginning.
Citation: Marilyn Schuster and Susan Van Dyne, Women’s Place in the
Academy:
Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum. 1985.
Prepared by IUP Liberal Studies Committee, 1988.