Past Courses
Since 2001, over 40 Stanford faculty have taught at Hope House, many returning multiple times. The faculty have offered a wide variety of courses ranging from Philosophy and Social Justice to Are Women Special? Freedoms and Women's Rights to Laughing Matters: Humor, Race, Class, and Gender. Click here for a list of past courses and faculty.
Below, several instructors share their experiences teaching at Hope House.
A faculty member who has taught numerous courses at Hope House
"Teaching at Hope House certainly was an extremely powerful experience for me. The times that I worked with these women may have taught me much more than I was able to transmit to them. Teaching takes on added urgency and importance when viewed from the standpoint of students who want to reconstruct their lives. I felt an enormous responsibility and challenge to convince them that the classroom could be a venue for transformation, as well as joy and illumination, and not the source of the failure that many had internalized."
Allison Anoll - PhD student who co-taught a course in summer 2014
"Hope House is a fantastic opportunity to learn to teach in a different setting with students very different from Stanford undergrads. The experience has expanded my capacities as a teacher, challenging me in new and unexpected ways. In addition, as a woman, I really enjoyed teaching the Hope House women, many of whom are about my age. The parallels in our lives made it easy to build rapport.
The classroom is louder than Stanford, and while you have to work harder to keep the students' attention, generally I found teaching at Hope House an easy and pleasurable experience. The students were always respectful, funny, sharp, and motivated to learn and interact with us."
Glory Liu - PhD student who co-taught a course in summer 2014
"I had heard a lot about Hope House summer courses through past grad student instructors. While research is fun, teaching is what I love most about being a PhD student, and I’ve always wanted to teach a non-traditional course to a non-traditional population. Allison Anoll led the effort to put together a class on political participation and disenfranchisement in US politics. Getting to curate and teach a class alongside Allison has been an immense privilege; she is a huge inspiration as a fellow grad student, teacher, and friend. For the both of us (and I’m quoting Allison here), teaching at Hope House keeps us personally accountable as academics, and reminds us why we do what we do, and the type of professor or person we want to be. We both share a line of gratitude that goes to the women at Hope House, rather than the other way around.
The women had varying levels of education – some hadn’t finished high school, while some had a BA or Masters degree. Regardless of the level of education, they couldn’t stop asking us very interesting questions. They always wanted to know more, and weren’t afraid to ask tough questions about history and politics.
I think the most valuable part of teaching at Hope House has been learning with the women. I think it’s safe to say that even though both Allison and I are quite familiar with the content of our course, every week we rediscovered something about what political participation, civil rights, inequality, and “justice” meant to the women at Hope House, many of whom were or are disenfranchised themselves. In hearing their reactions to historical cases (such as the suffragette’s movement) or contemporary cases (such as a study done on whether or not felon disenfranchisement would change democratic outcomes), I definitely rediscovered how powerful these historical moments were. In the process of teaching, I was confronting my own beliefs and questions about political participation too."
