Context
I teach at Lindblom Math and Science Academy, a selective enrollment high school in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago's south side. Students take an exam to gain acceptance and, while facing many issues of other urban school students, have an academic confidence that is either shaken or strengthened during their first years at Lindblom. Nearly all the students who enter Lindblom were at the top of their grammar school classes and feel confident in their ability to rise to the rigor of a selective enrollment curriculum. While much has been done to smooth the transition from 8th to 9th grade, many students' academic sense of selves is shaken upon arrival. The resilient respond well and make the necessary adjustments but other students remain on wobbly legs for the remaining three years of high school.
Women's Studies is an elective course for students who either have multiple AP courses in non-History subjects or who have been broken by or never tried the grueling death march of an AP class. That said, they are bright young men and women but, for many, they have yet to fully believe in their place in the academic world. I love teaching this class for that reason. Most of us became teachers for the purpose of reaching the reluctant students whose fear of failure keeps them from the intellectual risks required for joyous learning. The students in my Women's Studies course are mostly seniors who have waited two years to take this course and, for that reason, I generally do not have an issue with overall student investment. However, getting them to go beyond the basic requirements of the assignment remains a challenge.
Even though Women's History is an elective and draws the attention of many interested students, it is hard to ignite a sustained intellectual fire with the story of the Seneca Falls Convention. I might spark their interest with the story of Frederick Douglass rising, when others were repelled, to second the motion for woman suffrage. But in the end, the question, "How does this relate to me?" is difficult to answer to their satisfaction. On some level I agree with their resistance. The Declaration of Sentiments, while beautiful to me, has little resonance with the issues facing my students today. The style of writing and the issues presented feel unapproachable and not applicable to the struggles of adolescence today. That is why I joined with an English teacher to team teach a class that included Women's Literature and Women's History, hoping to find multiple access points where the young men and women in our class could enter the material and find themselves. To further this effort, we have organized the class around female archetype/stereotype units that focus on topics such as the slut, wife, mother, bitch, and tomboy. These archetypes allow us to weave history and literature together in an exploration of the changes (and continuities) in those roles over time in American history. At this point, I applied and was accepted to the Yale Teacher's Institute biography seminar. The seminar provided the unifying strand, the biography project, that will inform and be informed by these individual archetypal units.
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