May 10, 2019

Gender in the Political Science Classroom

Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison K. Staudinger

Hosted by Lilly Goren

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Summary

Gender in the Political Science Classroom (Indiana University Press, 2018) is part of a series at Indiana University Press on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), and there is much within the book that is directly within the SOTL arena, but this book is significantly broader and more extensive in its reach and analysis. Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison K. Staudinger have brought together, into this volume, a variety of fascinating and important perspectives on political science as a discipline and how it is taught, studied, pursued and understood, especially in regard to the role, presence, absence, impact and understanding of gender. This is a useful and important text that does two different things simultaneously—it explores the ways of and roles in teaching political science (and other disciplines and subject areas that specifically focus on power in some form), while also examining the difficulty of how to teach more consciously in terms of gender, and the interaction between power and gender, especially as those topics and experiences interact with each other in an undergraduate classroom, and graduate pursuits as well. The breath of dimensions studied in this text provide a scope for analysis by teachers and by scholars. There is a lot here that will be of interest to many in Political Science, and in Education, as well as others in disciplines that also consider questions of power, of gender, and how we understand the substance of a discipline, especially one that has been traditionally male for much of its history.