V icki Reitenauer wants the structure of her courses to align with the content in her lessons.
A faculty member in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Portland State University, she requires her students to help create the coursework listed in the syllabus and to grade themselves at the end of the semester. Her goal: To make sure classroom practices are consistent with the course’s lessons on power relationships.
“I’m really especially interested in thinking about how I use power in the classroom,” Ms. Reitenauer says. The syllabus for her “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course transfers that power by requiring students to identify their course goals for the semester, the grade they expect to earn, and their plan for achieving both.
This assignment is repeated in the middle and at the end of the semester. Final grades aren’t calculated based on a point system but on a self-evaluation. “In this course, I’ll encourage you to claim every aspect of your experience — your thinking, your feeling, your doing, and your reflecting on that doing — and to grade yourself for your efforts and the results of your efforts,” the syllabus states.
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It also states that if a student’s final self-evaluation is too high or too low, the professor reserves the right to negotiate the final grade. (In most cases when she disagrees with a final grade, it is because the student has underrated herself or himself, she says.)
After they get past the initial surprise of self-evaluation, most students are curious about the process and eager to embrace the new transfer of power in the classroom, she says. For many students, this is the first time they can dig into their own work without thinking about what grade they will earn.
B efore joining Portland State’s faculty, Ms. Reitenauer worked with community-based nonprofit groups, including Planned Parenthood and groups that work against domestic violence. In her first job after college, at a battered-women’s organization in Eastern Pennsylvania, she served as facilitator for a group of men who were largely court-ordered to take a course to help change their violent behavior. She allowed the men to tell their stories, and taught them that there were nonviolent ways to interact with others and deal with personal struggles.
“It was really only by being in a setting where I was open to learning from them, that I could assist them in learning something that could be important for their lives,” Ms. Reitenauer says.
She wants students to have the same experience — a clear transfer of power that makes them more open to learning — in her classroom. She also wants to create trust in the classroom, and having students help craft the coursework and ultimately grade themselves gives them power and confidence.
The syllabus states that students will work on a “comprehensive project of your own design.” Students create a project plan that outlines their proposed research, and includes a timeline for every step.
“A colleague of mine once said something to the extent of, ‘How we teach is what we teach,’ and I love that,” Ms. Reitenauer says. “I think that’s exactly right.”
Once students understand their roles as knowledge producers in the classroom, they can apply those reflections to other coursework and throughout their careers, she says. When she began the self-evaluated grading practice more than 10 years ago, one student, who worked on the campus newspaper and was very involved in other college activities, gave herself a C, she recalls. The student missed about 30 percent of the classes because of other campus commitments, but when she did come to class she was highly engaged. In her self-evaluation, the student wrote that because of grade inflation, her attendance and behavior in Ms. Reitenauer’s course would have resulted in an A in any other course. But because she felt that she did not do A-level work, she gave herself a C.
“The depths of those reflections and the seriousness with which they take self-grading and the integrity with which they do that is really profound to me,” Ms. Reitenauer says. (She did not change that student’s grade.)
Sally McWilliams, chair of the department of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Portland State, says that Ms. Reitenauer’s classroom transforms students from mere consumers of feminist and gender-studies knowledge to producers of such knowledge. “She has an amazing knack to connect with students from a variety of backgrounds and to get them to really think about what’s at stake for them in the work that they’re doing,” Ms. McWilliams says.
She saw that firsthand when she visited a session of “Writing as Activism,” which Ms. Reitenauer teaches at the Columbia River Correctional Institution, in Portland. Half of the two dozen or so students are incarcerated men, and the others are Portland State students. The course meets in the facility twice a week. Like her traditional women’s-studies courses, this one allows both groups of students to examine power dynamics, Ms. Reitenauer says. The Portland State students quickly realize that not much sets them apart from their incarcerated classmates other than circumstances like their social class, and how involved their parents were in their upbringing. The first time Ms. McWilliams attended a class at the facility, she realized that the course was able to tap voices that had previously been silenced or marginalized. She saw one of the major goals of feminist scholarship playing out in real time.
“It’s the work of feminist pedagogy,” Ms. McWilliams says. “And a feminist instructor like Vicki, that can really open things up.”
Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a breaking-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.
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