Teaching with #Feminism

Today #Feminism contributor and prof Katherine Castiello Jones discusses how she has used the collection in her college classroom:

This semester I taught an upper level Social Psychology course for a small number of students. I paired several of the #Feminism games with the readings I assigned for the semester: articles on photo albums, selfies, and the construction of self with Selfie, The Managed Heart with “Something to Drink with that, Sir?”, articles on care work and emotion work with “Ma, can I help you with that?” and “The Managed Hand” with Glitzy Nails. In addition to reading and discussing the games, my students also facilitated several of them for a group of Introduction to Sociology students.

The discussions sparked by the games were rich and productive, several of my Intro students commented that they had never thought about or discussed the topics covered by the games before. As a final project, my Soc Psych students wrote their own social psychology inspired game, called The Life Game. My students hadn’t done any role-playing before this semester and don’t have game design backgrounds, but they wrote an incredible game that dealt with structure and agency. They ran the game (for the first time) with a group of my Intro Soc students and it went amazingly well. The #Feminism games were ideal for my course in that they were accessible for first time role-players and they generated thoughtful discussions on a wide range of sociological topics.