on our minds
Report on Towson's
FIPSE Project
'
In the period since Towson officially completed its three year
on-campus FIPSE project to incorporate materials on women into
the curriculum, project members have been engaged in extensive
local, regional, and national outreach work. The academic year
1986-1987 saw approximately twenty faculty from the project
giving formal presentations and workshops at community and fouryear
colleges and at meetings of a variety of national professional
organizations.
Work with community colleges in the Baltimore-Washington
area was conducted under a dissemination grant from FIPSE (Fund
for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education), and sessions
were held at Anne Arundel, Prince Georges, Montgomery, and
Harford Community Colleges and the Community College of Baltimore.
The sessions, which ranged from half- to full-day meetings,
usually included both formal introductory presentations that defined
the large issues involved in curriculum transformation, and informal
workshops or small group meetings in which, with Towson faculty
as consultants, community college faculty identified more specific
issues in their disciplines or subject areas that need to be dealt with in
the process of curriculum change. Nine members of the Towson
project also gave presentations and held workshops at the annual
meeting of the Association of Faculty for the Advancement of
Community College Teaching (AFACCT), which was held in the
spring of 1987.
During the Fall 1987 semester, work will be undertaken with
Dundalk, Howard, and Catonsville Community Colleges, and
follow-up work with the colleges visited last year will also be
pursued during the current academic year.
Increasingly, Towson project faculty are being invited to discuss
issues of curriculum transformation at four year colleges as well. In
June 1986 Sara Coulter and Judith Beris served as consultants to a
committee dealing with curriculum reorganization at Gettysburg
College, Gettysburg, Pa. Project directors Coulter and Elaine
Hedges gave a full-day program on curriculum change to the faculty
of the University of Richmond in May, 1987, and together with Dan
Jones of the English department participated in a two-day retreat in
Chestertown, Md. with members of the liberal arts and business
faculties of the University of Baltimore, to discuss ways of integrating
materials on women into a set of core courses that the school is
currently designing. After this June meeting a follow-up meeting
was held in August with the University of Baltimore School of
Business, with Sara Coulter and Linda Mahin of the English
department as consultants. In September 1987 Elaine Hedges
addressed the Goucher College humanities and social science faculties
on issues of curriculum change. During the academic year
Fall 1987
A newsletter of the
Women's Studies Program
Towson State University
Baltimore, MD 21204
Vol. I No. 2
1987-1988 Towson faculty will be official consultants for a project
at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore, which has received a
grant from the Association of American Colleges. Under the terms
of the grant, workshops will be held for fifteen faculty who will read
in the content and theory of the new scholarship on women and
revise syllabi. The year-long project will begin with presentations by
Sara Coulter and Elaine Hedges at a meeting in October.
Towson's outreach work with two and four year colleges makes it
clear that curriculum change projects must be designed to fit the
individual nature and resources of each institution, and that institutions
need to make long-term commitments to faculty development
projects if the complex work of curriculum integration is to be
successful. (For an example of such long-term work, see the article in
this issue on Montgomery College by Myrna Goldenberg.) It is also
apparent that educational institutions are currently addressing a
variety of issues, including general education, the question of a core
curriculum, international education, teaching methods, minority
issues, writing across the curriculum, career preparation, and excellence,
and that the need for developing materials and perspectives on
women can and should be introduced into all these areas.
(Continued, Page 8)
"The Berks": A Special
Kind of Conference
by Judith Beris
The 7th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women convened
at Wellesley College on Friday, June 19, 1987. This three-day
meeting of feminist scholars and teachers from many disciplines, like
the six that preceded it, was sponsored and organized by the Berkshire
Conference of Women Historians, a group formed in the 1920s
when women scholars were excluded from the male-dominated
American Historical Association meetings. Beginning in the early
1970s these conferences, known as the Berks, have focused on
women's history. The conferences are now held every three years.
The next is scheduled for Douglas College, 1990.
The scholarship presented at these meetings and the number of
participants attending - 2200 preregistered for 1987 - demonstrate
the vitality and growth of women's history in the past fifteen
years. The scope of this year's program also demonstrates the
breadth and diversity of the field: of the 181 sessions almost half (81)
dealt with non-U.S. women. Some of these focused exclusively on
women in other cultures; others offered cross-historical and crosscultural
analyses. In addition numerous sessions explored the diversity
of women's experience across race, class and sexuality.
(Continued, Page 4)
