Pennsylvania State University-Penn State Fayette- Eberly · Courses
WGSS
5 courses with the subject WGSS, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
WGSS 260A Critically Conscious Approach to Non-Fiction Literature for Children & Adolescents3
This course explores non-fiction literature for children and adolescents that promotes critical consciousness, cultural competency, and social justice. Students will engage with texts that challenge dominant narratives about world events and cultures and provide alternative perspectives. Through reading, discussion, and reflection, students will develop an understanding of the importance of representation in children's literature and its impact on young readers' sense of self and the world around them. The course will also emphasize the role of educators in creating inclusive learning environments and promoting social justice through literature.
This writing intensive course will examine issues of gender and sexuality in the Bible, including the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the Deuterocanon, and the New Testament. It will introduce students to a variety of academic approaches to the Bible with respect to a broad range of topics. These topics include: gender identity, sexual orientation, sex, marriage and divorce, adultery, monogamy and polygyny, same-sex relations, chastity and celibacy, prostitution, gender violence, pornography, fertility, procreation, abortion, divine gender and sex, incest, and many others. In covering these themes, the course will deal with some of the most challenging and often disturbing stories and passages in the Bible, the ancient library of books that is sacred to Jews and Christians and which has otherwise greatly influenced civilization for more-or-less two thousand years. Alongside a close reading of the text (philology), this course will employ historical and literary criticism, investigations into ancient material culture (archaeology), modern theoretical interpretive approaches, reception theory, and other methodologies to examine not only the biblical writings in their ancient contexts, but their interpretation and use throughout history to construct social norms.
WGSS 505Critical and Humanizing Approaches to Research3
This course employs Indigenous, Black feminist, Chicana feminist, and decolonizing research frameworks to mediate and articulate ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of research. These processes assist researchers in enacting and engaging critically conscious and humanizing research. We begin by "becoming" conscious through the specific naming of oppression(s) and the coming of voice. We then attempt to humanize ourselves as researchers through a process of self (re)discovery, recovery, remembering, and reflexivity as they relate to our approaches and attachments to various research projects and inquiries. Next, we interrogate ethical research engagements with vulnerable communities through the discussion and close reading of several research studies and perspective pieces. We then consider how these discussions show up in our writing, citations, and in our overall life's work towards a more just world.
This course traces concepts of gender in the West from Classical understandings of sexual difference that foreground gender hierarchy, to the multiple gender imaginaries formulated in the premodern period (one sex model, Galenic humors, Christian and Jewish interpretations), to Enlightenment period reconfigurations reliant on the conceptual frameworks of degeneracy, atavism, and race science, up to modern articulations of sex/gender/sexuality indebted to nineteenth and twentieth-century sexology and psychoanalysis. Contemporary articulations of sex and gender by feminist and trans studies writers will be woven into the course throughout the semester.
This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of "theory in the flesh," intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.
