A Feminist Approach to Teaching CommunityPsychology: The Senior Seminar Project

© 2016 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois Since the establishment of the first women’s center at the University of Minnesota in 1960, women’s centers on college campuses have provided a wide variety of resources, including but not limited to support services (such as counseling, childcare, and sexual education), as well as workshops and networking opportunities that can benefit the individual both personally and academically (Byrne 48). Women’s centers, in particular, often meet needs that institutions are unable to address given a growing diverse student body, and they are frequently established by current students who are seeking a space for community (Kasper 185). Unfortunately, not all colleges and universities house women’s centers, despite the need for such spaces for their students. Having taught feminist courses, I saw the need for a women’s center at my current institution, the University of Washington Bothell (UWB). UWB is home to over four thousand students, with 51 percent identifying as female and 28 percent identifying as women of color, respectively (“Fast Facts”). As UWB has grown in size, so has our ethnic diversity, with over 51 percent of students in the 2013–14 academic year identifying as being a student of color (“Fast Facts”). Our institution prides itself on being a diverse and inclusive college campus, yet lacks the centers needed to foster a sense of community that promotes these values. Knowing this, I designed a senior seminar grounded in feminist pedagogy and community psychology principles to develop a space where students could learn to work as a collaborative group to facilitate social change on our campus. Over the course of one quarter, eighteen community psychology undergraduate students investigated the need for a women’s center on our campus through student surveys and faculty interviews. This paper is a collective illustration of their class project regarding establishing a campus women’s center as written by their faculty instructor and all eighteen students.