“Reacting to the Past” to Be Proactive in the Present: Feminist Roots of High-Impact Practices

Abstract

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois To longtime feminist instructors, the latest academic buzz phrase, “high-impact practices,” may seem like a self-important guest arriving late to the pedagogical party. After all, women’s studies classrooms have employed student-centered, high-impact practices for many decades. To cite just one well-known example, in 1989 bell hooks called for an “engaged pedagogy,” envisioning education, inspired by Paolo Freire, as “the practice of freedom” (83). hooks’s elaboration of this pedagogy (and the myriad scholars who for decades have developed nuanced practices of feminist pedagogy) anticipates currently touted “high-impact practices” (HIPs) and offers an opportunity for feminist instructors to share with colleagues and students the long tradition of these methods in feminist classrooms and their relation to current HIPs, as well as their effectiveness in inviting students to move from theory to action and to persist and succeed on our campuses and beyond. In this article, I will explain briefly a high-impact role-playing pedagogy developed at Barnard College called “Reacting to the Past” (hereafter, Reacting), which I use to introduce first-year and general education students to feminist history, current feminist issues, and feminist pedagogy. On many campuses, we are being called to design first-year seminars or first-year experience courses that meet the LEAP initiative (“Liberal Education and America’s Promise”) to use innovative high-impact strategies, particularly with new students, to boost our retention and graduation rates. I argue here that feminist approaches and content effectively anticipate and enrich these initiatives, and, when used in first-year general education courses, can become what I like to call a stealth introduction to women’s and gender studies. The current pedagogical climate, then, offers a chance for feminist instructors effectively to introduce first-year (or general education-course) students to concepts and methods that can build our majors and minors and can strengthen feminist intellectual work on our campuses and communities. Let me first offer a quick definition of “high-impact learning practices” (HIPs), drawing on the work of George Kuh, whose 2008 book with Carol Geary Schneider on this topic is foundational. They list “Reacting to the Past” to Be Proactive in the Present: Feminist Roots of High-Impact Practices