Nov 22, 2024
OHIO University Undergraduate Catalog 2024-25
WGSS 3910 - Community Engagement in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Includes a 1.5-hour/week seminar and a four-hour/week work experience. The course focuses on applying and evaluating ideas learned in WGSS courses to the “real world” experience of women’s organization and feminist practice. The course and supervised community engagement are designed to help students explore the possibilities and challenges of community work dealing with issues of women, gender, and sexuality. The course begins with readings and discussions which orient the students to the topics they are engaging with their community partners (such as intimate partner violence, sexual and reproductive health, supporting LGBTQ youth, etc.), as well as orientations and trainings for their placement organizations. As the semester progresses, the in-class portion of the course focuses on how WGSS concepts are manifest in everyday work contexts, understanding institutional constraints, and reflecting on the multiple sources and sites of knowledge production (including experiential knowledge). Students engage weekly in reflection of and discussion on their experience, the relationship of this to their positionality, and lessons learned.
Requisites: WGSS 1000
Credit Hours: 3
OHIO BRICKS: Bridge: Learning and Doing
Repeat/Retake Information: May be retaken two times excluding withdrawals, but only last course taken counts.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 6.0 field experience/internship
Grades: Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will be able to define and discuss different perspectives on community engagement.
- Students will be able to describe various perspectives on the role of feminist activism in social change.
- Students will be able to discuss the role of individuals and institutions in creating social change in specific applied contexts.
- Students will be able to demonstrate a developing sense of self as a learner and engaged citizen.
- Students will be able to connect professional experience to their academic knowledge of WGSS broadly.
- Students will be able to adapt and apply skills, abilities, theories or methodologies associated with the discipline of WGSS to problem solving in a professional context.
- Students will be able identify how gender theory and feminist practice are related to one another in the context of their professional experience.
- Students will be able to describe their professional experience in the areas of women’s/feminist/LGBTQ organizing, or in applied and allied occupational fields, using a format, language, or visual representation in ways that enhance meaning.
- Students will be able to recognize situated and experiential knowledge and connect these to academic discourses on women, gender, sexuality, or feminism.
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