(Download) "Women's Place in the Academy" by Marilyn R. Schuster * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Women's Place in the Academy
- Author : Marilyn R. Schuster
- Release Date : January 01, 1985
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 3603 KB
Description
Marilyn R. Schuster and Susan R. Van Dyne
The realities of American higher education in the eighties—federal and institutional budget cuts, retrenchment in services and personnel, a highly tenured faculty, a shrinking pool of college applicants, the changing expectations for education and careers of women and men students—have led to the urgent need for a precise definition of the meaning and purpose of the liberal arts. How can we maintain excellence in the liberal arts and prepare students effectively for their lives in the workplace? How can we structure a coherent curriculum after years with few or no “basic” requirements? How can we incorporate vast new areas of knowledge in the curriculum without creating an unwieldy or quickly dated course of studies?
For the first time in history, women represent the majority of the college population. More, a growing percentage of women undergraduates (nearly 20 percent in some institutions) are older returning students. By the year 2000, more than 30 percent of all students in America who may apply to college will be members of so-called “minority” ethnic groups. The challenge these students present to higher education to create a meaningful curriculum is clear.
The case studies collected here focus on institutions, programs, and teachers who have succeeded in designing and implementing new curricular plans that incorporate recent scholarship on women and non-white cultural groups and, in doing so, restore quality and responsibility at the core of the liberal arts curriculum. Further, they show how specific faculty development plans enable highly tenured faculties with little turnover to respond to new learning and to develop new classroom strategies—in short, to become more effective teachers for this new student population.
In the last twenty years more information has been gathered about women’s experience than has ever been available. As is the growth of computer science, the explosion of research on women’s experience is a revolutionary factor reshaping American education in the final two decades of the twentieth century. The adaptability of the computer to all areas of the curriculum and its transforming effect on what and how we learn are widely recognized by administrators. The need for computer literacy has already spurred faculty-retraining programs on nearly every campus and has been identified in many institutions’ core education requirements. The impact of scholarship about women throughout all academic disciplines and on our pedagogy has been steadily growing and may have an even more profound effect than the computer revolution on how we understand human experience, how we organize knowledge, and how we teach our students. As a faculty member observed, “Trying to add material about women to a conventional course is like adding the fact that the world is round to a course based on the assumption that the world is flat.” 1 Just as the impact of computer technology can no longer be confined to the math department, the understanding of women’s experience in every culture cannot be restricted to separate women’s studies courses but has become crucially important to every course in the liberal arts.
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