Notes from Inside A 2023 'WOMEN & CRIME' College Classroom

Time to Soar to Unimagined Worlds of Learning & Future Possibilities 

Photo Credit: Marc Oliver Jodoin on Unsplash

 The greatest hallmark of higher education is not only learning but also remembering.

 This century, a pandemic, and just the sheer evolution of how best to approach teaching and learning have all forced upgrades for a great many of us on the way forward. So this fall, teaching my Women and Crime class for the second time, I decided to upgrade the deeper meaning of empowerment and communal learning. Doing so of course has prompted far more innovative thinking about the classroom, assignments as well as the wider reach of learning that lie far in the future. 

This time around I chose to think even more deeply on the assignments and skillsets that can emerge by giving assignments that are both timely and interesting. 

Let's face it, far gone are the days when undergraduates were asked to write twenty-page papers like I was - back in the day - in college. 

Instead this semester we will connect even more digitally in a host of ways. Not by merely consuming information and keeping it close, but by thinking even more expansively about the best ways of giving to the future through the sharing of knowledge that disrupts silencing women/girls in the telling of the American and moreover the global past. New terrains of knowledge can and will emerge that can hopefully ensure a future of memory; including through class blogging. By doing so, students can share with a much wider audience across the global classroom about the critical importance of centering - not sidelining - women and girls in a semester-long probing of gender, crime, criminality, policing, as well as tracing women and girls forced in and out of carceral spaces across the global world. 

Even more by intellectually sharing, students can help to embolden much smarter learning for the future.

* * * *

In the coming days, weeks, and future blog posts, you will hear from a range of unique voices who are enrolled in the class, as they share about the learning gained in the college classroom amid a vastly evolving global world of change, division, pushback on the need or importance of any discussion or deeper learning of women/girls among current/future curricula. 

Among the course assignments for this fall semester, what I was especially excited about was encouraging each student to reflect on their course learning gained through this one-of-a-kind course and amid this time in global herstory/history.  

Stay tuned for new insights, unprecedented insights from the minds of student thinkers on the past and the coming future evolving. Those who choose to share widely will be featured within. So get ready for an upgrade in your and the future's herstorical learning.

Onward we rise with knowledge,

Dr. Mustakeem