Curriculum overview
Feminist Perspective Unit
Though my inquiry spans my entire student teaching year, the focus of my artifact analysis is on student writing produced within the Feminism Unit in my 12th grade classroom. I will therefore review the reasoning and form of the curriculum for this unit in the following section; the entire unit plan and materials can be accessed at the tab above. I only had an approximately six week window to lead teach in my 12th grade classroom, and Mr. Ford requested that I use this time to teach a unit on the feminist perspective as part of a broader critical perspective unit. Prior to this, Mr. Ford had taught a unit on the psychoanalytic perspective, and after I finished my unit he hoped to teach Marxism and post-colonialism as well. Having an affinity for students in the upper grades because of my experiences with first year college students, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to teach high school seniors and decided to take this chance to adapt some of the ideas and curriculum I had developed in my college writing course to introduce some of these skills in a new context. I thus designed a sequence of reading and writing assignments that I hoped would lead students towards crafting increasingly sophisticated pieces of analytic writing using the feminist lens (for a more thorough overview, see the Unit Plan Overview and Unit Calendar; for examples of student writing for each assignment, see Inquiry Artifacts). This sequence included the following assignments:
Text
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Writing assignment
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We began the unit with a class reading of Kincaid's "Girl" because this is a vibrant and rich piece of writing that has the potential to introduce many of the themes of the unit in a form that students might be able to connect to their own experiences. Thus I had students write their own versions of this piece, focusing on the gendered messages they have received in their lives. Students responded to this assignment with energy and interest and wrote beautiful pieces that form an interesting counterpoint to their formulaic essay writing (Artifact #2). To help students form a nascent understanding of the feminist perspective, we focused our attention on advertising and media images after finishing the Kincaid pieces. First, we watched a clip from Jeanne Kilbourne's influential film "Still Killing Us Softly" in which she analyzes contemporary advertisements with a feminist lens, which was meant to serve as a model of what I would next ask students to do.
The first assignment using the Feminist Perspective Chart that I provided to each student was to locate an ad or image online that seemed to represent women according to one of the categories in the chart (sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, objectification, and stereotypes). This chart was inspired by Deborah Appleman's seminal text, Critical Encounters in High School English, as filtered through my own views on feminism with an eye towards making the chart challenging without being overwhelming and overall, user-friendly. Students submitted their ads to me and I created a gallery walk with these images. Students were given models of appropriate comments for a gallery walk and proceeded to engage in a silent discussion around the images as a means to begin to unpack them. Next, I taught students how to look for visual evidence in an image to use for their paragraphs, and we practiced with both a sample image and the image of their choice. Students were then introduced to the paragraph template and guided through how to take their image, a topic and related question from the chart, and two pieces of related evidence from their image, and use these to write an analytic paragraph (Artifact #3).
The first assignment using the Feminist Perspective Chart that I provided to each student was to locate an ad or image online that seemed to represent women according to one of the categories in the chart (sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, objectification, and stereotypes). This chart was inspired by Deborah Appleman's seminal text, Critical Encounters in High School English, as filtered through my own views on feminism with an eye towards making the chart challenging without being overwhelming and overall, user-friendly. Students submitted their ads to me and I created a gallery walk with these images. Students were given models of appropriate comments for a gallery walk and proceeded to engage in a silent discussion around the images as a means to begin to unpack them. Next, I taught students how to look for visual evidence in an image to use for their paragraphs, and we practiced with both a sample image and the image of their choice. Students were then introduced to the paragraph template and guided through how to take their image, a topic and related question from the chart, and two pieces of related evidence from their image, and use these to write an analytic paragraph (Artifact #3).
I often used images as texts to inspire writing in my university classes, where I often integrated art into the writing curriculum. Images work especially well because there are no words to quote, paraphrase, summarize, and thus possibly plagiarize; they are static and can be picked apart in a group more easily than a longer work or a moving picture; and they are open to many interpretations.
These assumptions proved true in the high school classroom as well, and though students struggled at first to distinguish between evidence and opinion, they were able to pick out many key observations from the images and inspired each other's work by sharing their findings. Students wrote fairly competent paragraphs as well, considering we had abbreviated time to work on these in class due to snow days. Students next read bell hook's "Patriarchy," which we used both to better understand the concept of patriarchy as well as to practice writing signal phrases introducing a scholarly author and their claims. The rest of the unit focuses on a fairy tale curriculum, which I will explain in the next section. |
Advertisement used for evidence practice (Lesson #5)
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