Teaching with Tears: Soap Opera as a Tool in Teaching Women's Studies

Abstract

students in women's studies courses with the structure, goals, and content of the courses their instructors provide. While teachers must design courses to satisfy their own intellectual criteria, as well as those of university governing bodies skeptical about the academic validity of women's studies, students, especially women students, often are drawn to women's studies for immediate, personal reasons. Baffled and angry about the plight of women as they see it, they seek in women's studies an emotional reinforcement of their mood, the key to why things are so, and a program for action. The tolerance they possess for the irrelevance of other courses is here put aside; they expect women's studies to sweep them up, to engage them totally. For the instructor who is herself impassioned about such issues, yet committed to women's studies as a legitimate enterprise, the challenge is to harness the emotional energy of the students into a thoughtful analysis of the condition of women which will give students the tools to work for changes themselves. It is this problem which has led me to use that benighted art form, the soap opera, in the introductory women's studies course at Simon Fraser University. Since the women's studies program at Simon Fraser University is interdisciplinary in approach, Women's Studies 100 must be broad enough to touch on questions that are pertinent to several disciplines without being so general as to be meaningless. The basic framework for