Guidelines for Developing Crosslisted Courses

The women’s studies curriculum at DePauw is quite diverse with respect to field and topic, and this is by design. Almost always, courses are designed by individual faculty members in a department, or by two or more faculty members working together, based on their intellectual interests and those departments’ needs. It is important to us that crosslisted courses also meet the needs of majors and other students in the home department(s), so that the program can be be accessible to all sorts of students and teachers and so that the course can become a regular part of that department’s rotated offerings. However, there do tend to be some common features.

Women’s studies courses typically:

• deal throughout the semester with issues of gender, with how gender is constructed both through women’s own contributions and agency and through the activities of others, and with the effects of this on both women and men;
• engage students in inquiry with a variety of readings and approaches;
• ask students to work toward a critical analysis both of the materials they encounter and of the gender systems that have limited us, and to look for ways the latter can be changed;
• attend to ways issues of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation are implicated in and crosscut gender issues;
• have the implicit goal of improving student sensitivity toward these issues and toward those who are different from themselves, and to reflect on their own experiences.

Women’s studies courses also tend to involve intensive reading and writing, asking students to explore topics from a variety of perspectives but also in some depth. Most if not all are discussion based with the implicit or explicit intention of improving skills and giving voice to students, particularly to women students.

However, we are open to the possibility of cross-listing courses that meet some, rather than all, of these objectives; we encourage all interested faculty to discuss their ideas with a member of the steering committee, or with the director of Women's Studies.