‘Gendered Presence, Gendered Futures’
Class blog breaks down classroom walls

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

As conversation has become a hodgepodge of e-mails, tweets and tags, public discourse has moved from town halls and newspapers to computer screens and Facebook walls. So the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality 101 class took to the World Wide Web to share their research into gender issues.

Instructors Melissa Forbis and Christine Labuski created a blog — “Gendered Presence, Gendered Futures” — for their class to create a venue in which students can share their ideas with the world and keep a finger on the pulse of the public.

“Because the class itself is about analyzing public discourse, thinking and opinion, it’s important for students to be out there and involved in it,” Labuski said. “You have to be a part of it to truly understand it.”

The class of about 40 was divided into groups that chose various current topics, including maternity leave, gender-neutral housing, Proposition 8 and circumcision. The groups were asked to research and then blog about their topics, and then take a stance one way or another.

“We wanted to break down the walls of the classroom and put our students into the world,” Forbis said. “We wanted to show them that what they’re learning here matters out there in the world.”

Nothing conveyed that notion better than the comments that appeared on students’ first postings.

“I don’t think a lot of our students expected that people would be reading what they wrote,” Forbis said. “When we called the blog up during class one day, I said, ‘Look, you have comments,’ and their eyes got wide. Then we talked about the comments and how to answer them.”

Layo Obamehinti, a Brown College freshman, has gotten a lot out of that process. She said the blog pushed her beyond her comfort zone and made her question her previously held views. But the comments have been most interesting.

“When someone comments on our blog, it’s interesting to see whether he or she has totally conflicting view,” she said. “It opens my eyes to the smorgasbord of views that are present in the world.”

Jones College sophomore Claire Taylor said that the blog format makes her even more conscientious about her work.

“It’s strange to think that people I do not know are reading my thoughts and opinions and comparing them to their own,” Taylor said. “It definitely increases my attention to detail and makes me think through my opinions and supporting reasons.”

Her group usually meets to discuss a topic, divvies up the research and sends the portions and thoughts to Taylor. She then compiles the personal analyses and critiques into one coherent post.

“The most rewarding and didactic part of this blog project has been to demonstrate in a public forum my own ideas and perceptions,” Taylor said. “I have never had that ability before. It’s empowering!”

That’s exactly what her instructors wanted to hear. One goal of the class blog project was to help students find their voices and place in the information age. With more and more people presenting online ideas, facts and ideas disguised as facts, it has become increasingly important to analyze what you read, Labuski said. It’s her hope that by virtue of the project, students can see what goes into a blog post and develop the tools to think critically about what they read.

Forbis added that whether their students go into the field of gender studies or not, they are learning important lessons through the blog project.

“More than anything, we’re giving our students the skills they need to communicate in the world,” she said. “We’re helping them develop their cultural literacy — how to evaluate what they’re reading and watching, how to question, how to answer.”

Despite the great amount of time and thought that goes into the project, the class is more than blogging.

“A transgendered guest speaker completely shook up everything I had ever known about gender identification,” said Lena Silva, a McMurtry College freshman. “I come from a very conservative suburb in south Texas where boys are boys and girls are girls, and if you’re gender variant, you just try your best to be inconspicuous. So after the guest speaker talked to our class, I immediately called my mother and boldly announced that I would be a women and gender studies major.”