Curriculum infusion engages the university community in prevention efforts by allowing prevention educators to work collaboratively with faculty members to design and deliver gender-based violence and discrimination prevention content across the curriculum.  The process of integrating gender-based violence and discrimination prevention education into many disciplines challenges students to evaluate their beliefs about gender-based violence and discrimination and assess their knowledge of this issue on college campuses. 

Prevention educators have facilitated interactive discussions for incoming students in the Departments of Rhetoric, American Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies, as well as the College of Law and College of Public Health, which focus on primary gender-based violence and discrimination prevention and increasing bystander intervention knowledge and skills.

Some other ways to infuse the topic of gender-based violence and discrimination into a curriculum could include:

• Gender Studies may investigate current controversies about sexual behavior and sexual misconduct on college campuses, or examine research specific to engaging men in violence prevention.
• Social science courses such as Sociology could investigate the disproportionate rates of sexual violence on marginalized groups and/or perceived and actual norms to dispel myths about sexism and sex/sexual violence.
• Psychology classes could examine individual factors that predispose an individual for victimization, perpetration, as well as the physiological response to trauma.
• A course on the media or marketing could address the ways in which marketing campaigns perpetuate rape culture and gender-based violence and discrimination, as well as target college students to create brand loyalty.
• Teacher education programs may ask student teachers to study sexual assault awareness and prevention education campaigns at the K-12 level, or in the communities where they will teach, in order to design primary prevention curriculum for the grades they will be student teaching.

If you are interested in infusing gender-based violence and discrimination prevention education into your course, please contact ui-violence-prevention@uiowa.edu. 

Take a Class

The University of Iowa offers classes on numerous topics that intersect with studies on sexual misconduct, dating/domestic violence, and stalking.  Earn credit and become more knowledgeable at the same time. Here are current course offerings.