Prerequisites No courses, but this is a writing-intensive course and you must be able to write an essay. You also must be prepared to participate in the Discussion Group and the Team project; you must activate and access regularly the Discussion Group account and your yorku.ca email account (or a substitute). If you cannot maintain regular access to the Discussion Group and email and contribute to your group's project, if your writing skills are not up to par, this course may not be the right one for you to take.
NOTE 1: This is a Hybrid course, based in the Internet and the classroom; it requires requires regular deadline -driven posting and classroom attendance.
NOTE 2: The course requires group work for a 20% Final Exam Substitute Project.
NOTE 3: Late enrolment is strongly discouraged; if you enrol after the second week, you do so at your own risk.
NOTE 4: If all this sounds a little harsh, realize it comes from decades of students saying near the end of class, "I wish you'd told me that earlier"!
NOTE 5: I have office hours on Mondays and other days by appointment and am always available by email. Come by or email just to talk as well as to ask questions about the course

This course will be taught as a "hybrid" course: some weeks in the classroom, some online, for twelve weeks. The course depends for much of its learning opportunities on Distance Education, where much more of the onus for learning is placed on the student, where it rightfully belongs anyway. The remaining time we meet in a traditional classroom together where you also need to take responsibility for your learning.

The materials on this website have been developed to be used on the Internet, not printed out and used as a textbook. For those who are new to Internet courses, note that each block of coloured and underlined text is usually a link to another webpage with further information on that topic.

There are no "streamed lectures" or audio tapes either; you will instead work your way through the Learning Units, developed by Professor Louise Ripley, where there are Waving Hand Exercises that we will use as the basis for online and in-class discussion and small group work. These discussions, and the discussion that arises from your responding to the postings of other students and your professor, also form the basis of some of your assignments. We also use an online Course Kit (of which this Syllabus is the first component).

Do note that you cannot require physical attendance at group meetings for work on the project. The course does require team work, and some time may be provided in the classroom, but much of the group work should be done electronically, as is the case for so much teamwork in business today.

You are strongly advised to start posting your responses to the Waving Hand Exercises early, and to keep posting regularly and keep responding to the postings of other students. If you do not wish to participate in online group discussion or to be graded in part by your participation as compared to that of other students, please consider taking a different course. It's not possible to stress too strongly how important participation in the Discussion Group is for this course.

Your contribution to the Discussion Group will be marked so start early and continue to post throughout the term. There are a total of 60 possible Waving Hand responses (15 WHEs X 4 Units) plus as many responses to postings of other students as you choose to do. This part of the mark is therefore determined in part by students in the class, not by the professor, and there is somewhat of a competitive edge to it, as is true of most Business courses. This does not mean that you should set about to compete without ethics. Write and answer the postings of others in order to learn and to have an enjoyable class. As soon as you start to compete for numbers of postings, the fun goes out of it. Just completing all the WHEs does not guarantee you an A, and having the highest number of postings does not guarantee you a mark of A+. Read the York University Calendar on Grades and Grading Schemes to see what a grade of A+ implies. Note that postings sent to the private Discussion Group topics or to the General Discussion or Administrative Topics are not included in the count. Your postings to answer WHEs and your answers to other students' postings count equally toward this count. The count is taken sometime prior to the actual due date of the assignment, from a few days to a few hours, depending on timing, because postings sent on the day an assignment is due do not contribute much to discussion.

Students frequently ask, "How much should I write?" A good rule of thumb from academic articles written about online courses suggest a minimum of one short paragraph and a maximum of two. Avoid postings that are limited to "I agree" or "Great idea!". If you write to say you agree, then tell us why you agree and support your statement with concepts from the website or from readings you are doing for your final exam substitute project or from your own work experience.

The Course Kit for this course is entirely online, including this Course Syllabus and anything linked from it, and five major web page  Learning Units developed by the Professor for this course. The web pages are colour coded: each course has its own coloured stripe down the left side. The Teaching Policy Pages all have a common stripe; in addition to the ground rules and information about communicating, grades, and tests, there is page of frequently asked questions in courses I teach, and a warranty page that tells you that after completing a course with me you have a life-long invitation to return, either to ask for help or to give it, or just to chat. At the top of this page are links to pages that tell you about my schedule, teaching, research, and service, some more about me, a page of important other links, and a general alphabetical index to my website.

This course requires group work for completion of the Final Exam Substitute Project. You will put yourselves into groups on the first evening of class. You should think of doing most of your group work electronically with very few meetings in person, much as is done in the "real world" of business these days.

If you have had bad experiences with teams in coursework in the past, put it behind you and resolve to have a good experience this time. Part of the curriculum of Business education is learning to work in teams; you cannot do the Final Exam Substitute Group Project alone. Take a look now at the project and be sure that you are willing and able to commit to it the time and cooperation it requires. It is a term-long project, and is not to be left until the last week. Most students find the final project an exciting and fulfilling opportunity to explore issues that interest them. Get started on it early and enjoy the opportunity to work with others with like interests. If you are stuck in a group that is not working out, talk to me; there are solutions. Read more About Team Work.

The course is mainly geared toward women looking for ways to succeed in the still largely male-dominated field of management, from a feminist and interdisciplinary perspective, in a North American context. While men are welcome and have appeared to feel comfortable in the past, the course is woman-centered. Let's not allow discussion of women’s issues to be diverted into a moan about how tragic it is for a white man who now can't get a job because even though he holds a Ph.D. in business they gave the job to an unqualified black lesbian one-armed woman in a wheelchair with a minority surname who never finished high school, because the statistics just don't support this myth. 

Feminist pedagogy means we employ methods of research and teaching that may be new to you, particularly if you are a business major. A York professor, dian marino, in the Faculty of Environmental Studies (who so detested hierarchies that she refused to capitalize her own name) insisted that although we still need to read what experts have written, our own experience and what we believe and feel are just as important and as educational. The academic practice of proving our point by lining up behind us all the published, (usually) dead, (usually) white, (usually) male authors who wrote what supports what we want to say, dian referred to as "the epistemological showdown." The statement of our own beliefs and feelings dian called "i statements." Read at these links for more detailed descriptions of these two important elements, both of which should appear in all your course work.

In feminist teaching, we also make an effort to combat the very real problem, documented in the pedagogical literature, that men generally talk more than women in classrooms and are called on more. There are ways to avoid this and recognizing that the problem exists is the first step. The Internet has proven to be a tremendous help in levelling the playing field, but in order to help help resolve the problem, you have to be an active participant in the Discussion Group. 

This philosophy of teaching also means that while the professor is careful not to dominate any discussion or to ever insist that her opinion is the only right one, she does take an active part in discussion and does occasionally state her opinion. You cannot work and teach in the field of gender relations and not have an opinion; if you are looking for a course with a professor who never states her position, you may wish to look for another course.