Curriculum and Case Notes GENDER , THE PUBLIC POLICY ENTERPRISE , AND CASE TEACHING

Public policy teaching cases serve two important pedagogical purposes that intersect for me. First, they fulfill the professional school student’s demand for “real world” materials and skills (Barnes, Christensen, & Hansen, 1994; Kenney, 2001a). Second, a central tenet of feminist social science calls for examining social policy from the point of view of the objects of policy, giving voice to women’s experiences. Yet when I looked for cases for courses on the politics of public affairs, women and public policy, and feminist organizations, I faced, as case writers would say, a daunting challenge. Policy schools have lagged behind the disciplines in integrating women, gender, and feminist analysis into their curricula (Kenney, 2001b). The absence of women, women’s issues, gender analyses, and feminist perspectives in policy schools’ curricula is stark, despite the fact that women have been a majority of public policy students for many years (Webster, 2003). While feminist sociologists, historians, and political scientists have developed a rich scholarly literature of feminist case studies (Ferree and Martin 1995), they have not converted such materials into teaching cases. Using the most inclusive classification system, I searched for cases with a female protagonist, cases that raised a women and public policy issue (broadly defined), cases about a women’s organization, or cases that gave any indication of gender as a category of analysis. The result was a grand total of less than 1 percent of existing