I’ve been really intrigued by SLP’s discussions on how you’ve been using Twitter in your courses. I really enjoyed reading about your live tweeting experiment on Trouble. In the spirit of her sharing about her pedagogical experiments I wanted to share one assignment that my students in my Chicana Gender & Sexuality Studies course completed last week. In designing the assignment I really wanted my students to hit upon three main areas – 1) a general survey of what type of information is out there in regards to Chicanas/Latinas accessing information on reproductive health/issues, 2) a generated list of important links for Chicana/Latina Reproductive health/issues, and 3) their take on the single biggest reproductive issue facing Chicana/Latinas. For more information on the specifics of assignment see my assignment page here. This was also a group assignment where students were asked to work together and post three separate blog posts but they had to work on them collaboratively. As I have a very small class (five students) in the end they generated six blog posts, one for each aspect of the assignment.
In general I am very excited by their responses. They seemed to take a lot of time to think through each aspect of the assignment. And as both of the groups mentioned, the access for Chicana/Latinas to information on reproductive issues/health is seriously lacking, so much so that when they were researching for their project they chuckled that one of the results that came up in their search was our blog! I know I’ve mentioned this before but there are just not enough resources out there on Chicana gender and sexuality. I’m glad that one assignment we did for this blog project was trying to organize some resources for others to be able to access.
If you’d like to check out my students’ responses you can see them our our course blog scroll down to October 29th right above the Disidentifications resource and scroll upwards.
This looks really great KCF! I love how you broke it down into multiple parts/posts. I think doing so is central for ensuring that students really engage/participate in the assignment. I think I might have to try something like this for my students in the spring–in my contemporary feminist debates class. I think that I will also pass this link onto my feminist pedagogies students. It fits well with our discussion next week; we are discussing and reading “It’s Diablogical!”.
Awesome! I can’t wait to hear about what your students have to say about our project! Yes, I think the break down was really key. I wanted it to function on multiple levels and I am so glad to see that there is a somewhat annotated resource guide to some important links out there. After I wrote this up I discussed the assignment in class with my students and they were very vocal about how upsetting it was to them to imagine being pregnant and turning to the internet as a resource and not coming up with anything good in terms of information to help them make a decision about what their next steps should be. I thought about this in the context of this false belief of the internet as this liberal (as in free) space that is devoid of barriers or provides equal access to every person interacting with it. I think it was great in the sense that it really opened up my students’ eyes to the realization that not everyone who requires information can easily access it on the internet. I am glad that you are thinking about doing a version of this in feminist debates I think it would be great to generate some lists like that on various feminist issues.