Announcements

INDIAN ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES (IAWS), in collaboration with Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, AMU, is organising Two-Day Workshop on Pedagogy for Women’s Studies, (For WSCs of North and North Eastern Region), 28 February- 01 March 2023.

Concept Note:

The basis of women’s studies is to unearth women’s contributions to give visibility to the unacknowledged fact that there is no history without women’s participation. Women’s Studies pedagogy cannot just be only classroom interaction. Each and every course has to be integrated with fieldwork inclusive of documentation and dissemination. Feminist pedagogy would guide our choice of classroom practices by providing criteria to evaluate specific educational strategies and techniques regarding the desired course goals and outcomes. So, theory and praxis go hand in hand in the pedagogy of women’s studies.

The pedagogy must begin in the classroom, breaking the hierarchy between the teacher and learner, which will provide students all freedom and liberty to be creative, open, critical, and appreciative of alternative views and standpoints. The learner-centric, participatory, and informal environment should be part of the teaching-learning process. Feminist pedagogy is taught in diverse ways and has varied purposes within and across disciplines and learning environments, but despite the varied interpretations, there are some key areas of agreement – in addressing and resisting hierarchies of power between students and teachers, especially by students from the margins, which also shape the content and design of the class, and enable critical thinking. Transformative learning is where the students also deliver and design the classroom interaction and equally contribute to the outcomes. Such a process will involve the realization that personal interpretations of experience or social phenomena can be re-read in new critical ways.

Considering the interest in power and critical creative thinking within the discipline, it logically follows that the educational methods and curricula in women's studies should continually focus on power awareness and be reflective, using their experiences, questioning patriarchies, and uncovering unequal systems. In this regard, the workshop also seeks to address the National Education Policy. There is an urgent need to bring women’s studies agenda to the center stage in the discourse on higher education. Obviously, the pedagogy for Women’s Studies need to be charted afresh continuously. The pedagogical design will not be a prescription but a suggestion to keep modifying, taking region, social groups, and intersectionalities into account. The diverse pedagogical practices followed in various WSCs are acknowledged, but there is a need for appropriate women’s studies pedagogy that keeps up the very objectives of women’s studies as a critical discipline.

With these objectives, IAWS is holding a Two-Day pedagogy workshop in collaboration with Advanced Centre for Women Studies, Aligarh Muslim University, on 28th February and 1st March 2023 to facilitate the training of teachers of the Women’s Studies Centres from the Northern and Northeastern region.

Submission:

Interested participants are requested to email their short bio-note (500 words) to Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Aligarh Muslim University at [email protected] by 14th February, 2023.

Candidates will be informed of the selection by 16th February, 2023.