Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies is an accessible and innovative textbook that introduces students to foundational concepts within the field by using cutting-edge feminist scholarship and relevant examples from current events, everyday life, and popular culture. The structure of the text encourages students to internalize these concepts and produce new ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing, as the title promises. This book is a treasure for students and professors alike.
-Angela Fitzpatrick, Women's and Gender Studies, Coastal Carolina University
A book of this kind has long been needed within women's and gender studies. Students and teachers will be energized by its fresh approach, which emphasizes key concepts and broad methodologies, equipping students with the tools necessary to do feminist cultural analysis. I applaud the authors for their pedagogical innovation.
- Dr. Desiree Henderson, English, University of Texas Arlington
Every page illustrates that the book is a response to the field's signature pedagogies, informed by pedagogical content knowledge, grounded in current research on learning, and focused on helping students learn to do the work of feminist scholars. With this one book, teaching and learning in WGS has taken five steps forward.
-Nancy Chick, English, Vanderbilt University
In Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies, Christie Launius and Holly Hassel make a striking contribution to the ways in which we teach introductory courses in Women's and Gender Studies. Avoiding the topic-based approach to focus instead on foundational concepts, their unique text combines clear articulation of complex ideas with topical examples and applications, providing a critical lens through which students might examine, understand, and affect the world around them. Accessible to students for its jargon-free style and logical structure in which each concept builds upon the next, the text will also be invaluable for instructors, in particular those who may (as many of us do) lack formal training in the field. Instructors will find especially helpful the authors' careful attention to how students learn; each chapter's inclusion of learning roadblocks, questions for evaluations of prior knowledge, and discussion/writing prompts serves to position learning as an active and engaged process. In addition, as a text and not a reader, Threshold Concepts offers a practical solution to the rising cost of textbooks by allowing instructors to choose their own supplementary readings. I am eager to use this book in my own WGST classroom and plan to recommend it enthusiastically to my colleagues!
-Shawn Lisa Maurer, English and former Director of Women's and Gender Studies, College of the Holy Cross
