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CAS 255 – Communicating Gender

Students Teaching Students

In coordination with an undergraduate-run organization called Students Teaching Students, CAS department faculty members mentor exemplary students who develop and teach 1-credit courses on a variety of subjects that advance expertise in communication and its role in public life. This semester, Associate Teaching Professor Lori Bedell is supporting undergraduates Kara Miller (who was in Lori’s RCL course a few years back) and Jess Strait as they teach a course titled “Period Talk: The Impact of Stigma on the Menstrual Equity Movement.”
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CAS 255 – Communicating Gender

This course offers opportunities to explore how gender norms are socially constructed partly through communication. Students develop skills for thinking critically about diverse perspectives on these norms. The course emphasizes the agency of students in developing their own ethical frameworks for how to enact gender performances in their communication, as well as how to respond through communication to the performances of others.

Course Objectives

  1. Engage with diverse theories of gender to examine how it is socially constructed partly through communication.
  2. Draw on concepts from rhetorical theory in order to analyze how gender is communicated within specific cultural texts.
  3. Develop ethical frameworks for evaluating, enacting, and responding to performances of gender.
  4. Participate in conversations about the complexities of gender in ways that are respectful of differences in viewpoint and responsive to the rhetorical situations at hand.