Curriculum Transformation Project
The Curriculum Transformation Project helped faculty throughout Maryland’s public university system to integrate scholarship on women, gender and other forms of diversity into their courses and to develop inclusive pedagogies that acknowledge “difference."
The Curriculum Transformation Project (1989–2010)
The project’s central undertaking was its faculty summer institutes, which brought together faculty from a wide range of departments to discuss issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and religion and to consider how best to incorporate them into specific classes. In its final years, the project focused on “visual literacy and diversity.”
From the mid-90s on, the Curriculum Transformation Project also emphasized the importance of incorporating international perspectives into work in women’s and gender studies across the disciplines. This work was supported by a series of grants from the Ford Foundation, enabling exchanges of ideas and scholarship and collaborative curriculum development, not only within Maryland but among women’s studies programs and faculty in eight institutions around the world: Bar Illan University (Israel), Central European University (Hungary), the University of the West Indies (Jamaica and Trinidad/Tobago), Makerere University (Uganda), University of the Western Cape (South Africa), Ewha University (Korea) and Beijing University (as well as other universities; China).
The project was originally housed in the Office of the President of the University of Maryland, eventually becoming a unit of the Department of Women’s Studies.
From 1990–2010 Deborah Rosenfelt, professor of women’s studies, was the director of the Curriculum Transformation Project.