Visualizing Women's Studies

Staking and Stewart will offer critical reflections on a successful workshop they facilitated at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in June 2006. The workshop, “Visualizing Women’s Studies: Facilitating Visual Learning in the Feminist Classroom,” was designed to assist feminist instructors to better integrate visual concepts and visual technologies into their women’s studies curricula. Like many interdisciplinary social-justice-oriented humanities fields, one of central aims of women’s studies teaching is assisting students to “see” the world differently. And yet many feminist instructors–instructors who are deeply invested in teaching students how to resist sexism in the visual landscape–struggle with teaching visual literacy. Many also feel intimidated by the prospect of using technology in the classroom. At this Digital Dialogue, Staking and Stewart will share how they successfully worked with a somewhat technology-a-phobic population of instructors to inspire them to take more risks to integrate digital technologies into their humanities teaching. See The Visual Literacy Toolbox.