Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 16

ARTICLE #1 Class Participation Marks and Gender in the Humanities Sector Abstract Within the Humanities, female students tend to receive lower class participation marks, despite being in the majority within the Humanities’ student body. Research suggests a number of reasons for this disparity, often going back to early childhood socialization. This article explores different seminar activities that can be employed to combat this gender gap, concluding with a consideration of the efficacy of the World Café to encourage all students to participate in active learning and reap the benefits of class participation. Title Class Participation Marks and Gender in the Humanities Seminar Author J. Kistler Humanities teaching is broken into two distinct activities: lecturing and seminar tuition. A good lecture enables students to achieve the first two levels of the cognitive domain: remember and understand (Krathwohl’s revision taxonomy, 2002). Seminars then enable students to take charge of their own learning processes, “going beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1966). It is in the seminar that learning becomes student-centred and collaborative. DOI http://doi.org/10.21252/ vxyp-yt74 Contact [email protected] Unlike many other disciplines, English Literature offers students very few facts. This can be disconcerting for students new to university, who are used to the revision practices engendered at A Levels. One of the first steps of humanities teaching, then, is helping students understand that knowing ‘things’ is only the beginning. The information provided in lectures is not enough; they must take that knowledge and consider how they can use it to think critically about a work of literature. For instance, knowing a sonnet should be fourteen lines long does not help them to understand why a poet might choose to use this form or what effect is achieved by conforming to a conventional mode of poetry. The fact of the sonnet is only the beginning. Keywords Gender Gap, Class Participation, Acti- ve Learning, Seminar Format As R.S. Peters observed in his Philosophy of Education (1973), ‘to be educated is not to have arrived at a destination; it is to travel with a different view’ (20). The most basic role of a humanities educator is to provide students with the core knowledge of the subject material; for instance, in Keats’s ‘On the Sonnet’, I can explain the numerous references to classical mythology (Andromeda, Midas, Apollo, etc). I can guide them through the process of analysing the effect of the references, evaluating how that effect might change based on their own unique perspectives 16