Paper short abstract:

This presentation provides a compressed experience of project-based learning (PBL) as implemented in a course on gender, race, and science, co-taught four times for the Boston-area Graduate Consortium on Women’s Studies.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation provides a compressed experience of project-based learning (PBL) as implemented in a course on gender, race, and science, co-taught four times for the Boston-area Graduate Consortium on Women's Studies. Evaluations of the course document a tension between initial discomfort and subsequent appreciation: "you might think you aren't sufficiently grounded by the course [but] being on the other side of it now, I see it works out beautifully." Teaching the course has nudged us to explore this and other tensions that run through PBL teaching what makes pedagogy feminist, and the challenge of drawing students into developing their own narratives about how to learn without a sequence of texts assigned by a teacher to dictate the logic of learning. The project to be explored in this presentation raises all these issues for session participants to explore and share. Handouts with links to webpages will provide the details about PBL and the course that might have been covered in a conventional presentation.