Prior reports on the field (Part 3)

In the Spencer report, Carolyn Allen of the University of Washington asks key questions about the future of the field: “What kinds of scholarly projects would help advance the study of women to increase its impact on the disciplines of the professions? What kinds of projects might further loosen traditional disciplinary boundaries and increase their fluidity?” Allen wonders about “the importance of continuing with interdisciplinary work as the hallmark of women’s studies and the possibility of developing a stronger sense of what it constitutes. Could the enterprise be organized around central questions rather than around particular disciplines or departments? . . . [quoting Allen] ‘Is the study of women most successfully advanced under the rubric of women’s studies, or are there others we might consider?’”

Margaret Wilkerson of the Ford Foundation brought up the issue of accountability: “Should we think about accountability in terms of our intellectual enterprise? Within the academy, what are the intellectual spaces that we should be opening up, and what are the other organizations, units, departments, disciplines, or interdisciplinary programs to which we should have real connections and collaborations?” Wilkerson also noted that it is “critical that we somehow get a grip-on [sic] technology.”

According to the report, the closing session of the conference focused on the future of the discipline, and the summary of this session includes pages of valuable questions for the assessment of the field. For instance, Stimpson asks about the relationship between Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, and Judith Allen from the Radcliffe Institute asks about tenure and promotion criteria in the field. Like the Stimpson report before it, the Spencer document calls for “basic research on the state of the field,” ranging from the number of programs to research on the role and impact of introductory Women’s Studies courses and the development of Women’s Studies Ph.D. programs. Participants expressed a wish for a national organization to collect such data but apparently did not feel that NWSA possessed the capacity for this work, a sentiment that is also implicit in the Stimpson report.

Since the early days of Women’s Studies, books and articles have also reflected on the field. Among the most recent of these efforts are Marilyn Jacoby Boxer’s When Women Ask the Questions, and two collections of articles, Women’s Studies on its Own, edited by Robyn Wiegman, and Women’s Studies for the Future, edited by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins. Boxer provides an extremely detailed history of Women’s Studies in the academy, with chapters on key topics such as curriculum development, the movement toward theory, and the relationship between feminist activism and scholarship. While the book is not intended for assessment purposes, its discussions lay out areas that might be included in a program evaluation. Details about course content and textbooks might also be useful for planning purposes. For assessment, Wiegman’s collection includes a forum on institutional pedagogies and articles on “critical classrooms,” in addition to chapters on Women’s Studies graduates and the links between Women’s Studies and LGBT studies. This text contains many articles focusing on the experiences of Women’s Studies faculty members, which might be more useful for a program review than for learning outcomes assessment.

Finally, Kennedy and Beins’s text emerged from a 2000 conference co-sponsored by the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW) and the Women’s Studies Steering Committee of the University of Arizona with funding from the Spencer Foundation. The articles in the collection focus on key questions, such as “What is the subject of Women’s Studies,” “How does Women’s Studies negotiate the politics of alliance and the politics of difference,” and “How has feminist pedagogy responded to changing social conditions?” Many of the articles in this text take theoretical approaches to the questions, inviting reflection on feminism’s agenda and offering new perspectives for inclusion in course syllabi. One could develop an outstanding series of learning outcomes from the discussions in this text and draw up a list of pedagogical strategies, but there is little in this book that would be directly useful in assessing learning in Women’s Studies.