Why Women's Studies on the Web?  The Political

It was while teaching my first women's studies course at USCL that I began to think of offering women's studies courses through distance education.  One of our projects in the course was to study the population of our own campus and to attempt to evaluate the position of women at the Lancaster campus and at the other seven campuses in the University of South Carolina system.  Each of the regional campuses has its own unique flavor and serves a slightly different student body, but I'd like to talk here about my own campus, since obviously I know it best.

A two-year regional campus of the University of South Carolina system, USC Lancaster serves about 1,000 students, most of who come from the central Piedmont area of South Carolina.  Lancaster itself is a growing community, primarily a blue collar town where Duracell and the Springs textile industries dominate the local economy, followed in size by Bowater, a paper mill.  The majority of our students at USCL are first generation college students without a strong academic background, and their adjustment to college can be a difficult one.  Many of our students choose to come to USCL because they intend to go to Columbia to pursue their four-year degrees, but they don't feel comfortable with the atmosphere of the larger campus.  Remaining at USCL allows them to become accustomed to college in a small-town environment.  Many of these students also have extremely close family ties and obligations, and moving to Columbia is simply not an option for those students.  Even when their two years here are complete, some students may chose to commute to Columbia three days a week rather than become resident students there.  Our students are fairly conservative in their political views, but are often not well informed enough about politics to support those positions.  In that first women's studies course, I hoped to help students, regardless of their political bents, be able to understand the issues involved in studying gender, race, and class in their lives, so we began to look at the demographics of our institution.

We learned from the USC online Fact Books that of all USC undergraduate students, 57.2% of the full-time student body is female.  An even higher percentage of female students—62.7%—comprise the part-time undergraduate student body.  These percentages are even higher on the Regional Campuses; at Lancaster, 69.7% of the part-time student body is comprised of women students (“1998-99 Facts and Figures”), many of whom can only attend part-time because of work and family situations.  The students, who had always viewed education as a profession dominated by women based on their high school experiences, were surprised by the relatively low numbers of women faculty.  During the Fall of 1998, for example, 65.22% of the full-time faculty in the state were men (“Fall 1998”).  In studying the status of women at our university, we also found that women’s studies courses were only being offered on three of the eight campuses during that semester; in some cases, campuses simply do not have faculty in place to teach those courses.  In others, heavy teaching loads in their disciplines prevented faculty from teaching those courses.  While women's studies courses are of course not the only way students can learn more about gender and our culture, the fact that such a large percentage of our students did not have access to the kind of classes regularly available on large university campuses disturbed me, particularly when such a large percentage of those students were women.

During this time, I was also teaching my composition courses with computers, and finding a great deal of support from the institution, both at Lancaster and from Columbia, to expand my work in this area.  USCL has been working actively to increase the level of technological literacy of our student body.  In the three years that I have been here, more and more students come in at the beginning of each semester with their own email accounts, but in my first year, very few of my composition students had email accounts, and each semester I have students who have a very difficult time completing assignments online because they don't have access to computers at home.  USCL provides open labs for students, but with a population entirely comprised of commuter students, labs alone can't solve student access problems.  Despite our efforts to engage more fully with technology as a teaching tool, our campus also has a somewhat conservative attitude about the use of computers in classes that don't strictly require them, like Computer Science courses.   I believe that I was hired in part because I teach English online (I used Connect.Net at the time).  But my file reflected the use of an online component to my classes that was relatively conservative, suited to the campus.  It was clear that I’d been brought in to assist in a growing movement to energize the campus's use of technology in the classroom, but also that I’d better do it cautiously.  Many of my new colleagues questioned me about the draft workshop techniques I use in my English courses, and it became clear to me that if these techniques were foreign, workshops online would be quite a stretch.   My colleagues were at that time already gradually growing more proficient with email and the other technological applications that are now a part of the daily life of American universities and businesses—but for perspective, I posted the first faculty web page when I arrived on campus in 1998.

Since that time, more faculty have begun to use computers more regularly in their courses when it seems appropriate.  I am regularly asked questions about what I do with technology, and the benefits I find in doing my work in this way.  USC's commitment to teaching with technology has also expanded noticeably system-wide during just my few years here.  We are currently engaged in an alternate self-study focusing on instructional technology, and our infrastructure has been improving regularly as the University has begun making focused and concentrated efforts to make appropriate technology available to faculty and students.  We still have some distance to go; for instance, in the Fall 2000 semester, USC began for the first time to provide a university email account for every enrolled student, regardless of their location.  But there is a deep institutional commitment to going that distance, and that commitment is to people as well as to infrastructure.  While I was teaching my women's studies course at Lancaster, I began asking questions about the possibility of offering the course as a distance education course, and immediately I was urged to apply for a new grant being offered by the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education to encourage technologically innovative means of delivering courses through distance education.  With a great deal of support, I wrote a CHE South Carolina Instructional Technology Initiative grant proposing to offer WOST 111 as a fully online distance education course.

In the grant, I posed this problem:  women’s studies is a course has been unavailable to most of USC students off the Columbia campus; any sections offered on the smaller campuses—and often times there are none for quite some time—are offered only during the day, when these students are often working or attending to family responsibilities.  Indeed, after coming from large institutions where such course offerings are common, even taken for granted now, I had became increasingly aware that students attending smaller campuses, two-year schools, and technical schools rarely have access to women’s studies offerings.  I proposed that to reach these students, as well as non-traditional students on larger campuses, USC could begin to offer distance education courses over the web, taking advantage of the technology that so many institutions are using successfully, but allowing faculty the freedom to explore their use of the technology, refusing to allow it to define our teaching and learning styles.