How BU Professors Are Integrating the #MeToo Movement into Curriculum
BU Law faculty are integrating #MeToo and related themes into courses—even as the movement still plays out in real time across social media and in everyday headlines.
In their advanced Spanish conversation classes, College of Arts & Sciences lecturers Maria Datel and Elena Carrión-Guerrero explored the connection between the #MeToo movement and #NiUnaMenos—Not One [Woman] Less—a feminist campaign against gender violence started in Argentina.
Students in the Reading American Poverty freshman seminar of teaching fellow Emily Gowen (GRS’16,’21) grappled with how they felt about studying the fiction of prize-winning authors Sherman Alexie and Junot Diaz after women emboldened by #MeToo accused both of sexual harassment.
And in the School of Law seminar Gender, Violence, and the Law, Naomi Mann and Julie Dahlstrom, both clinical associate professors, asked students to consider how #MeToo might lead to new legal remedies for workplace sexual harassment.
Across BU, from LAW to CAS to the School of Social Work and the School of Public Health, as at other colleges and universities across the country, faculty are integrating #MeToo and related themes into courses—even as the movement still plays out in real time across social media and in everyday headlines. In many instances, it’s students who are driving, even demanding, the discussion. It’s an example of how social media is impacting higher education and helping to integrate real-world, sensitive conversations, from #MeToo to #BlackLivesMatter, into coursework with more immediacy, rather than waiting years or decades to reflect back on changed times.
“They’re hungry to have a place to talk about these issues,” says Gowen, describing the debate over Diaz and Alexie as one of “the liveliest class discussions” she’s ever had.
And from Datel: “I’ve never seen students so engaged.”
New territory
Graduate student Derek Curley (Wheelock) says there have been meaningful discussions about #MeToo and related themes in all his classes at Wheelock College of Education & Human Development and in the CAS English department. “The classroom is much more conducive to rational civil discourse than a Facebook page or even a rally,” says Curley, a College of Engineering IT staff member.
Such classroom discussions, faculty say, are layered with complexity and nuance, raising questions there are no easy answers for.
