154 GRANT MONEY INTEGRATES WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES INTO CLASSES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Oct. 23, 2007
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

GRANT MONEY INTEGRATES WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES INTO CLASSES
President’s Commission Funds Unique Courses and Curricula Highlighting Women

(MURFREESBORO) – The President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) at Middle Tennessee State University is accepting applications from faculty for its 2008 Curriculum Integration Grants.
“The commission is thrilled with the growing interest in the grants in the past few years,” Dr. Tina Johnson, PCSW chair and associate professor of English, says.
The 2007 grants, which have been awarded to three professors in allocations of $1,800 each, are being used to infuse courses at MTSU with an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of women.
Dr. Jane Marcellus, an assistant professor of journalism, will teach a course in the spring semester titled “Women in Journalism History.” The course description in the syllabus reads, in part, “Grounded in the assumption that sex is biologically determined but gender is socially constructed, we will ask how ideas about gender have shaped the field and prescribed both men’s and women’s roles.”
“I got the idea out of teaching journalism history and also just working with women students,” Marcellus says. “I really saw a need for role models in a profession that is, by tradition, fairly male-dominated.”
Marcellus points to Margaret Fuller, one of the first woman reporters to be hired full-time by a newspaper; Mary Margaret McBride, who fashioned her mother’s way of talking to her friends into a radio interview technique; and Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane to get an insider’s view of conditions in an asylum, as examples.
Dr. Karen Petersen, an assistant professor of political science, used her grant to create a version of her “Foundations of Government” general education class that would be applicable in a study-abroad context in Cherbourg, France.
“I would like to, in this class, explore the issue of immigration in France, immigration politics, and the way in which women are at the center of that debate,” Petersen says.
She notes that Islamic women in France feel they need protection from Western values, and Western women in France feel they need protection from fundamentalist Islam, while other women are caught in the middle with no real power.
“It makes an interesting case study when so many of their neighbors, or, at least, a lot of their neighbors have made progress toward enfranchising women structurally, of course, using quota systems and the like, and France has not been able to do that,” Petersen says.
Jeremy Rich, an assistant professor of history, fashioned a 3000-level class on “Women in Africa” to dispel the notion that African women are little more than passive victims on the world stage. He posits that it would be a serious mistake to characterize all African women that way when they have been richly diverse in their achievements.
Rich’s course examines the impact of colonization on family life, how African women have coped with economic deprivation and civil war, and the colonial and post-colonial political roles of African women.
Tenured or tenure-track faculty members who wish to pursue the revision of a course, the creation of a new course, the reconceptualization of a current minor, or the creation of a new minor are eligible to apply for the next slate of grants.
Each proposal should include a completed grant application form; a brief description of the project; a statement of goals and objectives; a timeline for completion and implementation of the project; a tentative bibliography, including materials on the theories and methods of curriculum integration; and curriculum vitae.
Current recipients are in agreement about the importance of these grants to the expansion of the curriculum and the enlightenment of students.
“I think it’s an incentive to do what we all should be doing anyway,” Marcellus says, “but it’s an incentive to make it happen, and I think it’s a proactive step on the university’s part to encourage everybody to do that.”
“It’s quite popular to talk the talk about women’s issues and incorporating women’s concerns into the curriculum or into higher education policy,” Petersen says. “But for a university to actually put some funds behind that, which is really what it’s all about, it makes the difference between me being able to do this and not being able to do this under the workload we already have.”
Johnson says the popularity of the grants “shows that there is much interest at MTSU in bringing women’s experiences, issues and interests into the classroom.”
The deadline for faculty to submit grant applications is Feb. 1, 2008. For more information, contact Johnson at 615-898-2705 or ntjohnso@mtsu.edu.


--30--