PLSC 2660 Feminist Political Thought Faculty Reflection
In spring 2025, I taught Feminist Political Thought at the University of Denver in collaboration with Anáhuac University in Puebla, Mexico through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) exchange. The DU Internationalization Office connected me with my COIL partner and helped us get the first collaboration off the ground. I chose this partner because I wanted students to reflect on an experience of gender politics very different from their own, and because I have spent enough time in Mexico—and specifically in Puebla—to be familiar enough with their cultural context to anticipate some of the things that might come up. More broadly, I decided to do this collaboration because I always want to internationalize the content in that class. So many of the best readings I have found for that class focus on or implicitly center American feminist perspectives (albeit in deeply intersectional ways), and I wanted my students to have as much perspective as possible from experiences outside that frame.
My course surveys political theory literatures on feminist thinking and activism. We consider the relationship between feminist theory and practice and think about both of their intersections with gender, race, sexuality, and capitalism. Readings include historical and contemporary theories of gender, identity, patriarchy, misogyny, and liberation through critical analysis of various feminist texts in writing and in class discussion. We center trans and BIPOC feminist narratives and practices as a means of thinking theoretically and practically about how to build an inclusive feminist movement. The students in Mexico were from a variety of majors and backgrounds, and were enrolled in an advanced English course. For them, this collaboration represented an interesting way to put their English fluency to the test by having to talk in live time with native English speakers.
There were about 35 students total in each class, and students met in groups of four—two DU students and two Anáhuac students—over Zoom once a week for four weeks and completed structured discussions that facilitated comparative analysis of their experiences of gender politics and the different cultural norms and power structures that affected those experiences. During the final week, students completed and presented a final project over Zoom, in the form of a digital magazine, online art showcase, or manifesto. Regardless of the format they chose, the goal was to articulate a perspective on global feminist politics based on the perspective they developed by comparing the gender politics across their two countries.
There were initially some hurdles to overcome, but these hurdles ended up supporting some of the most rewarding moments for the students. The students from Puebla occasionally struggled with articulating complex thoughts about feminist politics in English, but many of my students spoke Spanish and were able to quickly switch into Spanish to help the Mexican students find the occasional word they were struggling to translate. My partner faculty member also suggested I warn my students that the students in Puebla might be less comfortable with LGBTQIA+ identities because Anáhuac is a Catholic university, but that proved to be a non-issue. The Anáhuac students got along very well with my students, many of whom were visibly and vocally queer and/or trans. If anything, the biggest difference my students noticed was that they simply thought about feminist politics more often, whereas the students abroad had very different concerns—and this felt important to my students as they reflected on the relative privilege that comes from even having a pervasive feminist discourse to draw from as a resource.
I believe strongly in the value of cross-cultural collaboration and learning through immersion-based educational experiences, and I was initially worried this would be a superficial exchange because of the brief duration and virtual platform. However, what I discovered is that COIL is a shortcut to the most challenging and rewarding aspects of international education: direct relationships and contact with people from other countries and cultures. In this sense, I think my students experienced the transformative aspects of culture shock and cultural immersion in surprisingly deep and challenging ways, and without the fun of blowing off steam through tourism while studying abroad. While I expected to find myself pushing the students to deepen their relationships and connections, I instead found myself looking for ways to offer them guardrails and guidance for what were sometimes uncomfortable experiences—in other words, the opportunities for challenge and growth were already far more integral to the process than I expected, and I found that part of my job was to give the students a soft landing place for that growth.
Two of my students’ experiences with the collaboration were particularly rewarding. First, my students learned to glean information not only from what was said in the conversations they had, but also, just as importantly, from what was not said—for instance, they noticed subtle gender norms in how the Mexican students behaved (such as who dominated the conversations or took charge of them) that felt unsettlingly similar to their own experiences of gender norms in the United States. Second, I expected that the experience would be most transformative for students who initially had the least information about Mexico and/or international experience, and that the students in my classes with relatives in Mexico or some form of Mexican heritage would not be surprised or transformed by many of the things their counterparts in Mexico said. However, I found that my Mexican-American students were most excited by the collaboration because they already had some information about Mexican culture and were able to glean fascinating nuance from the discussions. For instance, several of them marveled at how much the perspectives they heard from the students at Anáhuac reflected those students’ experiences as urban Mexicans, whereas several of my students have relatives in rural Mexico with very different perspectives. In this way, partnering with a Mexican university also helped me center my Mexican-American students insights and learning in the classroom in ways that they do not always get to experience in a predominantly white institution.
I absolutely plan to continue this partnership and possibly seek out others. I have already tried a different version of the partnership in my FSEM Food Politics course this fall quarter (2025) to see if different content yields similar results. I think COIL has the ability to quickly and effectively reinforce what I believe to be the single most important lesson from international education: that just as important, if not more important, than simply acquiring new information, education at its best supports students in developing their skills and values in perspective-taking.