News & Events

Feminist Pedagogy in a Digital Age:
A Workshop on Teaching with Technology

Thursday, April 30th, 7:30 – 9:00 PM
The Stata Center, Building 32 Room 144

two smiling faculty members looking engaged and happy The near-ubiquitous use of use of social media (and particularly networked and mobile communications technology in one form or another) by students and faculty invites questions about how these tools might be used in the classroom to facilitate dialogue and to foster collaborations between students and even across institutions. FemTechNet, a group of feminist academic scholars and teachers located within and beyond academe, has proposed a DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) model of pedagogy that enables instructors engaged in feminist pedagogy to connect with each other and use technology to bring students and faculty from many different locations into shared dialogue. 

This workshop will introduce participants to FemTechNet and demonstrate selected teaching techniques now available to instructors seeking to use technology in their courses, including:

                        • Electronic feedback and response                       
                        • Creative use of video as a form of student writing and response
                        • Classroom use of Google docs, Google+, and Twitter to created curated
                           and collaborative  learning environments
                        • Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, geo-locative software, and shared open
                            source maps (will demonstrate the FemTechNet Situated Knowledges
                            map project)
                        • Feminist video dialogues & inter-institutional Open Office Hours

Workshop leaders Kim Surkan, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT and Jennifer Musto, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College will lead workshop participants in an interactive dialogue about these teaching techniques and the question of how teaching with
technology might be done through a feminist lens.

**This workshop is interactive.  We encourage you to bring a laptop, though there will be ways to engage if you cannot.**

Kim Surkan, Ph.D. has taught in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MIT since 2005. Dr. Surkan does interdisciplinary work in queer,feminist, and new media studies with a humanities focus, and is currently writing a series of articles on technology and the (trans)gendered body.

Jennifer Musto, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, technology, and globalization. Her research focuses on the laws, policies, and technologies designed to respond to prostitution, human and sex trafficking, and forced labor in the United States. Her forthcoming book, To Control and Protect, is under contract with the University of California Press, for release in 2016.

Sponsored by The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies with support from the MIT Office of Digital Learning

DIRECTIONS AND PARKING INFORMATION:

The event is in building 32 room 155 at the Stata Center at MIT.

The Stata Center is at the corner of Vassar Street and Main Street in Kendall Square. It is an easy to find building - one that is brightly colored with towers that shoot out at odd angles. There is parking available on campus, but it is limited. If you can, please come by T, as the parking lot may fill up early in the day both days. 32-155 is on the first floor. Enter at the entrance on the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. Follow the hallway straight until it merges with the building's central corridor. Look to your left, room 155 is the room with a red wall in front, closest to the Forbes Cafe.

To get to the R&D dining room from the Kendall Square T stop:

Get off at Kendall Square and head up to Main Street. Walk down Main Street away from the river until you get to the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. The Stata Center will be on your left. Use the entrance nearest to the corner of Vassar and Main, it is directly behind a large silver mirrored sign that says "Stata" in front.

To get to the R&D dining room from the Hayward Parking Lot:

If driving, you can park in the Hayward Parking Lot, a lot that is free after 5 PM on weekdays and free on weekends that is located on Hayward Street between Main Street and Amherst Street in Kendall Square. You can access the lot by driving down Main Street and turning on Hayward; you'll know it by the Au Bon Pain on the corner.

From the Hayward Lot, walk back to Main Street. Then walk down Main Street away from the river until you get to the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. The Stata Center will be on your left. Use the entrance nearest to the corner of Vassar and Main, it is directly behind a large silver mirrored sign that says "Stata" in front.

Next Steps

Contact Us

Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14N-211
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-324-2085