Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

For my part, I have utilized various ICT technologies in my teachingpractice, most notably via virtual learning environments like Moodle, whichallows instructors to set upon and facilitate discussion boards, chat groups, livechats, on-line quizzes, Wiki modules, and to publish a course-specific, studentgeneratedglossary of key terms and concepts. I have likewise observed thirdwave feminist colleagues who have creatively curated the learning environmentsin which teach by incorporating self-produced and directed short-videos oncourse themes, weaving self-designed DVD collages of relevant moving andstill images alongside lectures, and producing course blogs, websites, andpodcasts. 9 Students have also brought their technological leanings, insights andskills into the classroom. Here I have simultaneously embraced my students’showcasing of their impressively assembled interactive PowerPoint presentations,their sharing of recent “viral” You Tube clips and reflective blog entries,and their invitations to be friends on social networking sites like Facebookwhile remaining ambivalent about the overall educational or emancipatoryeffects of these media. On the one hand, I have come to think of such mediaand technology as having the potential to connect with students within andoutside the temporally bounded confines of the classroom via the screens thathave become such an integral and intimate part of their lives and identitiesand encouraged their making of critically meaningful linkages between theoreticalcontent and images, texts, and non-human interfaces. On the otherhand, I have also witnessed numerous students’ short-lived attention spansand at times, their anomic responses to lectures and student presentationsorganized around “prefabricated bite-sized chunks” of PowerPoint slides, theirusage and reference of YouTube clips as a way to side-step rather than criticallyengage with course concepts, and their distaste of all things Moodle andits underlying requirement for active participation outside the bounds of thephysical classroom. 10 At the fore of my anxieties is the sinking suspicion thatrather than fostering students’ critical thinking and active learning, such mediumscan instead encourage their detached consumption of gender vis-à-visneatly-packaged slides, video clips, and informatic sound-bites. Anotherpotential side effect is turning the classroom into an edutainment space,9For an illustrative example of how one third wave feminist is creating original media content for the purposes ofteaching, see a description of Loran Marsan’s work at: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/Newsletter/Nov07/Nov07_marsan.pdf.10Cecile Crutzen, “Questioning Gender in E-Learning and its Relation to Computer Science: Spaces for Design,Working, and Learning,” in The Making of European Women’s Studies, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Annabel van Baren(Utrecht: Athena, 2005): 40.103