Feminist Pedagogy in a Digital Age:
A Workshop on Teaching with Technology
The near-ubiquitous use of use of social media (and particularly networked and mobile communications technology in one form or another) by students and faculty invites questions about how these tools might be used in the classroom to facilitate dialogue and to foster collaborations between students and even across institutions. FemTechNet, a group of feminist academic scholars and teachers located within and beyond academe, has proposed a DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) model of pedagogy that enables instructors engaged in feminist pedagogy to connect with each other and use technology to bring students and faculty from many different locations into shared dialogue.
This workshop will introduce participants to FemTechNet and demonstrate selected teaching techniques now available to instructors seeking to use technology in their courses, including:
• Electronic feedback and response
• Creative use of video as a form of student writing and response
• Classroom use of Google docs, Google+, and Twitter to created curated
and collaborative learning environments
• Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, geo-locative software, and shared open
source maps (will demonstrate the FemTechNet Situated Knowledges
map project)
• Feminist video dialogues & inter-institutional Open Office Hours
Workshop leaders Kim Surkan, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT and Jennifer Musto, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College will lead workshop participants in an interactive dialogue about these teaching techniques and the question of how teaching with
technology might be done through a feminist lens.
**This workshop is interactive. We encourage you to bring a laptop, though there will be ways to engage if you cannot.**
Kim Surkan, Ph.D. has taught in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MIT since 2005. Dr. Surkan does interdisciplinary work in queer,feminist, and new media studies with a humanities focus, and is currently writing a series of articles on technology and the (trans)gendered body.
Jennifer Musto, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, technology, and globalization. Her research focuses on the laws, policies, and technologies designed to respond to prostitution, human and sex trafficking, and forced labor in the United States. Her forthcoming book, To Control and Protect, is under contract with the University of California Press, for release in 2016.