Pseudo-Blog Assignments with Discussion Make Undergraduates Better Users of Academic Research on Women and Gender

The long-standing goals for feminist Psychology of Women courses (Paludi et al., 2008), and more recently for Psychology of Women Quarterly’s (PWQ) teaching briefs (Matlin, 2011), have been both academic and activist. That is, they cover a specific content area of academic scholarship and they embrace a personal and sociopolitical agenda for social justice. Although this separation of the academic and the activist is certainly conceptually useful, their implied independence suggests that academic content exists that is apolitical and that some academic content is less scholarly by being more ideological. My immodest goals for the assignment that I will describe here are to bridge these two feminist teaching goals by training undergraduate students to become more effective readers of published research articles and to link these articles to their everyday personal and sociopolitical lives. The undisputed core of any psychology class is published theory and research, typically distilled for undergraduate students in our textbooks and lectures. Articles routinely appear online and in print that have yet to make their way into a textbook, and the richness of their findings and their implications can be glossed over when they are briefly summarized and integrated into a broader textbook narrative. It is common practice to assign original research articles in upper-level psychology courses (Oldenburg, 2005) and for students to need help in reading these often intimidating and dense reports (Varnhagen & Digdon, 2002). My objectives were (a) to make students more effective readers of these primary sources and (b) to show students how this feminist research is personally relevant and can inform the public discourse. To accomplish these goals, I designed a series of assignments, each of which included a pre-reading exercise, selected original research articles (all from PWQ), a pseudo-blog writing assignment, and an in-class assignment-sharing period along with lecture and discussion. I first identified 12 research articles that matched the topical coverage of my course and had these compiled into a course pack that my university’s copy center produced and sold (at a very reasonable price) to students. I intentionally selected articles that were recently published, covered a range of research methodologies, included diverse samples, and had practice implications for students both as budding professionals and for their everyday lives. The Practice Implications subsection in the Discussion section of PWQ’s papers, a mainstay of almost all articles published since December 2012, vol. 36(4), made this source for articles especially appealing. I also thought about general course themes that I wanted to reinforce across readings. For example, a thirdwave feminist argument is that women’s self-sexualizing behaviors can be empowering, and I wanted to challenge that notion. I also wanted to highlight what I consider to be a core message from this course that gender is socially constructed and enacted in our everyday lives so that gendered contexts matter (Yoder, Fischer, Kahn, & Groden, 2007). The choices that I made for my course in Spring 2015 are provided as an online supplement to the present paper. (Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ’s website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental.) Although the criteria I outline here should be considered when making one’s selections, instructors can implement the present assignment using whatever choices fit their own goals for the course. In students’ course packs, I prefaced each paper with a paper-and-pencil activity that was designed to encourage students to think about the paper’s methodology before they read it and that gave students a sense of personal investment in the findings (e.g., ‘‘Do my answers look like those in the study?’’). Most often, I could construct these materials from