Help! I don’t love my husband” Advice Columns as Teaching Resource for Gender and Sexuality: Experiences from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the use of teaching materials that are salient to students’ life experiences, hold their interest and facilitate transformatory learning and critical feminist thinking about gender and sexualities. Based on the experience of the use of Ghanaian advice columns as part of the curriculum in a gender and sexuality course, some of the challenges of teaching for transformation in the university classroom are presented and discussed. The paper shows that the students displayed a basic grasp of gender dimensions of the social construction of sex. They could easily relate to the issues raised in the letters published in the advice columns, which provided ample examples and spaces for exploration and discussion on gender and sexuality in the classroom. However, the issue of critical self-reflection, a crucial goal of transformatory learning, proved to have eluded the class. Creating evaluation methods that facilitate transformatory learning remains a challenge.