Faculty Resources

Including your courses in Women's & Gender Studies electives:

The Women's & Gender Studies Program has a list of core courses and electives in the undergraduate and graduate programs.  These courses must fulfill criteria created by the Women's & Gender Studies Advisory Board.  Curriculum review occurs every two years.  At that time, we review our course list and add or drop courses as needed.  Feel free to send us this information at any time, but be aware that your added course cannot appear in the catalog or in our brochure until it has been officially approved by the University Curriculum Committee.

Criteria for elective courses taught in the Women's & Gender Studies Program (revised 10/02):

Women's & Gender Studies courses must meet three of the following criteria:*

• One of the principal areas of focus of the course must be the roles, perspective, experiences, contributions or representation of women in a variety of contexts, i.e. regional, national, global.
• The course should equip students to identify systems of power and analyze stereotyped assumptions and biases about gender and other intersecting identities like race, class, sexual orientation, etc.  A Women's & Gender Studies course uncovers, rather than ignores or dismisses, these assumptions.
• The course draws from recent feminist theory and scholarship.
• Feminist pedagogy encourages active learning.  When appropriate, the instructor should use teaching techniques that encourage student participation.
• The course teaches about gender and its place in culture and cultural formation in a manner designed to empower students to participate in activism.

We encourage all Women's & Gender Studies syllabi to state explicitly the ways in which the course approaches the topic from a Women's & Gender Studies perspective.  Project-based courses should provide clear guidelines for how a student can receive Women's & Gender Studies credit for the course.  5000-level courses should clearly state the expectations for graduate level work. 

*These criteria have been formulated with the help of the Women's & Gender Studies programs at Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA) and Colby College (Waterville, ME).

Apply to have your course listed as a Women's & Gender Studies elective: 

To have your course become a permanent Women's & Gender Studies elective, send us a copy of your syllabus along with a completed Women's & Gender Studies course cross listing form to Sabin 225, 0509. Please see the bottom of this page for the link to the faculty cross listing form. 

WGS Course Cross-Listing Form:

We understand that some courses are taught infrequently or on a one-time-only basis, and you may not yet have a syllabus prepared if you are teaching such a course.  In that case, please send us a brief description of your course, (no complete syllabus needed) along with a completed Women's & Gender Studies course cross listing form as soon as you know that you will be teaching the course.  We will add the course to our list of electives for that semester only. Please see the bottom of this page for the faculty cross listing form.

Once your course becomes a WGS elective, please let us know when you are teaching it:

Every semester at scheduling time, Women's & Gender Studies collects information about which courses faculty will be teaching in our program.  With faculty in over 20 departments teaching Women's & Gender Studies courses, it is difficult to gather all of the information we need every semester.  It is important for us to know what WGS classes you are teaching, and when they are being held, so that we can try to minimize scheduling conflicts and ensure that enough WGS courses are offered every semester.  Our deadline for getting information to the Registrar's office is the same as your departmental deadline. 

We gather information in the following ways:

• The Women's & Gender Studies secretary sends out requests for information to faculty in our Women's & Gender Studies Weekly Announcements. As soon as you know your schedule, please let us know! Here is an example of the information we need from you: 
• Professor Jones will be teaching the following Women's & Gender Studies course in Spring/Fall 200X: COMM: 500X, Rhetorical Theory , TTh 3:30-4:45.
• The Women's & Gender Studies secretary contacts the secretaries & schedulers from other departments requesting information about courses being taught in Women's & Gender Studies. Since department secretaries & schedulers are not always privy to information about which courses are Women's & Gender Studies electives, it is best for you to respond to our request.
   

Graduate Handbook:

 If you would like to access the current guidelines for both the Applied Track and Thesis Track, please see the Graduate Handbook in our up-to-date Google Drive. If you have any difficulty connecting to any of this information, please contact the Women's and Gender Studies office at wgs@uni.edu.