Gender, Confinement, and Freedom: Team Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies

In 1993, writing about their years of feminist collaboration, Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose explained that while they sometimes found such endeavors challenging, ultimately they were "exhilarating, consoling, and precious" (559). In the years since then, those working in women and gender studies have continued to advocate for collaboration in the academy, calling for interdisciplinary studies and team teaching. In this essay, the authors (a literature specialist, a sociologist, and a historian) discuss their experiences with feminist interdisciplinary collaboration, reflecting on team teaching Introduction to Women's Studies since 2012. After laying out the philosophical and theoretical background for their pedagogy (feminism, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity), they discuss the theme that unites their research and teaching interests across discipline boundaries and provides an organizing principle for their course: "Gender, Confinement, and Freedom." The authors then show how the course culminates in two collaborative and memorable experiences. The first, a class visit to the Maryland Correction Institution for Women, connects what they have been talking about in the classroom to the world outside the classroom. The second, an end-of-course discussion of and writing project on Harriet Jacobs's 1861 "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," serves to tie the entire semester together. In the next section, the authors assess the class based on three criteria: critical understanding of the course theme, implementation of an interdisciplinary perspective, and awareness of implications beyond academia. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on what they learned and discuss ideas for changes moving forward. Ultimately, they show that although they succeeded on the first two criteria, they have more work to do if they want to fulfill the promise and potential of feminist pedagogy.