A newsletter of the project
Integrating The Scholarship On Women:
Transforming The Curriculum Towson State University
INTEGRATING
RE-VISIONS THE SCHOLARSHIP ON WOMEN
TRANSFORMING lHE CURRICULUM
Number l:. Wlrt'TER 1984
TO THE READER
This is the first issue of a newsletter
that will describe the activities of a
three year, grant supported project at
Towson State University. The purpose
of the project is to integrate the scholarship
on women into the curricula
of selected disciplines throughout
the university. Subsequent issues of
the newsletter will be published near
the end of each semester for the next
three years.
The newsletter is being sent to you
as a faculty member or administrator
interested in curriculum development
whom we hope will want to be
kept informed of the activities of the
project and who might like to participate
in the conferences to be held
over the next three years. In the
spring of 1986 there will be an area
conference for institutions of higher
TOWSON RECEIVES GRANT TO
INTEGRATE THE SCHOLARSHIP
ON WOMEN
Towson State University has been
awarded a three year grant of approximately$
250,000 from the U.S. Department
of Education's Fund for the
Improvement of Postsecondary Education
(f'IPSE). These funds will be
used to integrate the new scholarship
on women into representative
survey courses in eight discipline
areas. This project, conceived within
the women's studies program, will be
administered by Elaine Hedges, coordinator
of women's studies and professor
of English, and Sara Coulter,
professor of English and women's
studies. It will involve a series of
workshops, led by women's studies
faculty, supplemented by two conferences,
one on pedagogy and one on
interdisciplinary study.
Throughout this series, faculty in
art, literature and writing, history,
psychology, sociology, biology, business,
and education will research,
read, analyze and select materials;
revise syllabi; explore pedagogical
and interdisciplinary issues relevant
to curriculum change; and test and
evaluate the revised courses in two
semesters of classroom teaching. The
project will conclude with an area
conference for secondary and postsecondary
teachers and administrators
in the Baltimore area to begin to
extend curricular reform to those
schools.
Towson's project is one of between
.35 and 50 such projects that have
been or are being conducted on college
and university campuses across
the country. It is thus part of what is
by now a nation-wide effort to extend
the scholarship of women's studies,
and the perspectives that scholarship
has developed, into the traditional,
or mainstream, curriculum.
Women's studies itself emerged in
the late 1960s, as teachers and scholeducation
and of secondary education
in the Baltimore area to explain
the nature of the project and to share
materials and experience. We hope
you will find the newsletter informative,
and we encourage you to call the
project directors with any questions
you may have.
We would like this newsletter to
reach people who are seriously interested
in the work of the project. If you
want to continue to receive copies,
please return the form on page 8.
Also add the names of others, at your
institution or elsewhere, whom you
think would be interested in receiving
the newsletter.
ars in higher education began to deal
with the fact that the experiences and
perspectives of women were almost
completely absent from the traditional
curriculum. Surveys of academic
disciplines revealed, for
example, that history textbooks devoted
less than 1 percent of their
coverage to women; that literature
courses contained, on average, only
8 percent women authors; that the
most widely used textbook in art history
includes not a single woman .
artist; that generalizations about
"human" behavior in psychology
courses were based on research, 90
percent of which had been done on
males; that in sociology courses the
study of women was more often than
not confined to special units on the
family or on minority groups; that
even scientific procedures were often
less objective than is commonly believed,
since they are influenced_ by
