Putting feminist pedagogy to the test: The experience of Women’s Studies from student and teacher perspectives

Critics of women’s studies (WS) have charged that WS teaching overemphasizes students ’ personal experience and is overly politicized. They claim further that WS classes discourage critical, independent thinking and stifle open, participatory learning, causing student dlssatisfaction. This study provides empirical ebidence of the process of WS teaching from the perspective of 111 teachers and 789 of their students from 32 campuses in the United States. Contrary to WS critics, WS faculty and students reported strong emphases on critical thinkindopen-mindedness and participatory learning and relatively weaker emphases on personal experience and political understanding/ activism. In addition, student ratings of positive class impact were higher for WS than non-WS classes. The results support the pedagogic distinctiveness of women’s studies. The field of women’s studies (WS) has shown tremendous growth since the burgeoning of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Accompanying an explosion of feminist scholarship across virtually all dlscipl ’ ines in higher education, WS courses have been developed on most campuses in the United States and, indeed, in coun-tries around the world (Klein, 1991). There is little argu