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Women who stirred it up: Amazing Iowa women , by Katy Swalwell, Des Moines, RAYGUN, 2018, 67 pp., $20.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-64945-066-1
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This article focuses on the meaning of a “female-friendly” way of teaching history for girls and boys in secondary education in the Netherlands. It shows how girls and boys experienced a female-friendly learning method for two divergent types of subject matter: women's history and traditional history. The research took place in the context of the introduction of women's history as a compulsory examination subject in all secondary schools in the Netherlands. The article starts with an elaboration of the (theoretical) background of a female-friendly teaching method and a description of the research project. With help of the learner report methodology we then investigate the experiences of girls and boys with a female-friendly teaching method in secondary school curricula for traditional and women's history. Our research yielded two results. First, girls as well as boys preferred a female-friendly way of teaching to a more traditional one. In the second place, students' evaluations of a female-friendly teaching method and the subject women's history revealed an unexpected link: Women's history taught in a female-friendly way was not recognized as a body of knowledge.
As the Era of Accountability has given rise to the prevalence of curriculum standards and multiple educational stakeholders have engaged in the writing of these documents, the National Council for the Social Studies has revised its original standards document published nearly two decades ago. This study investigated what the revised document reveals in terms of gendered discourses. Through employing the tools of discourse analysis, the dominant discourses advanced in the document’s curricular recommendations were revealed. Two discourses prevailed in the analysis: gender imbalance with a narrow view of valued masculinity and gender-free with a hidden discourse of males dominating in those spaces. A discussion of the presence of trans and other gender identities in the document is included. As gender is sparsely mentioned in the curricular recommendations, and a binary view of gender is adhered to throughout, there is little guidance for curriculum writers and teachers to teach in transformative ways that challenge the status quo.
There are multiple benefits to women’s history, including identifying women’s experiences as historically significant and recognizing the variety of perspectives of historical actors. Engaging students with resources on women’s history requires teachers to be prepared to deal with students’ misconceptions and feelings about gender and feminism. Using historic photographs from the second-wave feminist movement and a theoretical framework of Social Practice Theory, this naturalistic study addresses how 17 high school seniors defined and utilized gender and feminism in the context of the struggle for gender equity. Students were able to identify and describe various systems of power in nuanced and complex ways. The findings illustrate the impact that students’ gender identities and understandings of institutionalized oppression have on their historical analyses and suggest that teachers should consider students’ understandings about power when developing social studies curriculum and instruction that centers on critical gender equity.
This qualitative case study investigates how two preservice elementary teachers crafted narratives of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement using an intersectional lens. Using Black feminism and Black critical patriotism as theoretical frameworks, the authors examine the process in which preservice teachers attempted to construct historical narratives using Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality. The preservice teachers used this framework to examine the intersecting identities and resulting experiences of women in the past and present in order to present a more complex narrative of the Civil Rights Movement to elementary students. This study is important because it helps preservice teachers and their students become conscious of the ways in which different people experience(d) the world based on intersecting identities as a way to promote empathy and critical citizenship.
Drawing upon classroom discussions in high school women's history courses and follow-up interviews six years later, this article addresses three central questions: “What impression does viewing our history from primarily a male perspective, with the authority of the school behind it, make on students?” “What impression does viewing our history from a female perspective, with the authority of the school behind it, make on students?” “How can a gender-balanced history help female and male students to think about the concerns they have in shaping their own lives and in judging their society?”
This study investigates the representation of Black women in high school history textbooks. To examine the extent to which Black women are represented visually and to explore how they are portrayed, the authors use a mixed-methods approach that draws on analytical techniques in content analysis and from visual culture studies. Their findings reveal that Black women are marginalized in high school history textbooks. Also, the authors argue that despite this dearth of Black women, they are portrayed in a greater variety of roles in the major Black history textbook on the market for secondary students. The study concludes by deriving a framework by which others may interpret the representation of Black women in texts and other curricular materials and by challenging traditional content analyses by bringing the notion of cultural parallax to bear on the widely used content analysis methodology. Copyright © College and University Faculty Assembly of National Council for the Social Studies.
This article explores recently published P-12 social studies lesson plans that include women to examine how attending to women is “getting done” in the field and how the lessons represent women and women’s experiences. Using discourse analysis methodologies, the author demonstrates that women have been included as topics in ways that do not work toward disrupting problematic discourses about gender norms. Through their avoidance of issues of power and patriarchy, most of the lessons fall short of addressing gender inequity – in the past or the present – in a significant way. More critical attention to women and gender in lessons, as well as in other curricular spaces, are important steps toward harnessing social studies’ potential to engage students in the meaningful consideration of inequitable gender relations.
The author's ninth grade world history students communicated the connection they felt to three women whose stories they evaluated in class. The women represented ordinary people living during time periods being studied, and their personal stories demonstrated how the political, economic and cultural events had an impact on people in unique and powerful ways. With the growing body of research into various aspects of historical thinking such as why history should be taught, how historical thinking should be defined, why teachers were or were not engaging in historical thinking instruction, how historians engage in historical thinking, and how historical thinking is being incorporated into classrooms--the author was inspired by several studies calling for more research into the relationship between teacher and student in historical thinking and how the process is experienced in classrooms. Some researchers argued that the novelty of the experience was the major obstacle for students as they attempted to interpret documents, write a historical narrative or exercise historical empathy. As a full-time high school social studies teacher writing a dissertation, the author was in a position to take advantage of the opportunity to study the consistent use of instructional strategies that might expose a new dimension of the complex relationship between these strategies and students' abilities.
Over the past twenty five years, women’s history has been firmly established in the academy. This progress has not “trickled down” into the K–12 curriculum. Most school children recognize the names of Abigail Adams, Jane Addams, and Rosa Parks, but little else. This article discusses the importance of infusing the schools’ curriculum with gender awareness, looking at the ways in which teachers, school administrators, schools and departments of education in universities, professional history, and social studies organizations have been able to work together to reach beyond the already established, male-dominant state curriculum and incorporate the role of women and gender into their history and social studies classes, as well as to bring gender into the curriculum, including a call for greater collaborations between the academy and secondary schools.
This article reports on a review of research into students' reasoning about social change and causes they attribute to selected historical events. In this review, I distinguish studies into social change and causality as two methodological approaches to historical understanding before relating findings into the ways that students reason about agency in social change. I consider two of many possible explanations for these findings, one each from a cognitive and a social psychology perspective. I then turn to sociology for two articulations of agency as tools to enhance students' historical thinking and reflection on their variegated capacities as agents of social life: a) personal agency as nested moments of re-“iteration,” “practical evaluation,” and “projectivity” and b) historical agency as collectively expressed struggle over the ideals, images, and stories people use to reiterate a past in the present so as to imagine personal and social projects. I argue throughout that student attention in classrooms to assumptions about agents and agency used in historical explanations enhances both their historical explanations and capacities as citizens. Rather than citizens, however, I begin this article with a feminist argument that teachers address students first and foremost as agents.
History and social studies not only help to suture together “imagined communities” (Anderson, 19831.
Anderson , B. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, , England: Verso. View all references), they also convey understandings about how people effect change through time. This qualitative study investigates the reasoning of 4 secondary history teachers about agency as both a question of the shape of human interactions and content of human motivations expressed through their teaching and in relation to scholarship in sociology and history. Participants account for the content of agency (with varying degrees of emphasis) with appeals to socioeconomic positions and experiences. A tension exists, however, concerning how best to reconcile such experiences with the motivational force of ideals and existential tensions behind people's actions. Relating to the shape of agency, participants raise questions about the relative roles played by, and interaction between, leaders, discourses and ideals, and social movements. This study explores the ways in which these findings reflect broader forms of cultural reasoning about agency and the benefits of bringing teachers and scholarship together around key historical concepts.
The study reported here provides an example of the complex interface among historical study, current issues, and adolescents' complex social worlds. The authors investigated the ways in which a group of eighth grade students conceptualize the significance of gender in the context of a study of antebellum U.S. history. Fifty students participated in a set of inquiries into women's involvement in nineteenth-century U.S. reform movements, industrialization, and culture contact and conflict on the shifting frontier. Classroom interactions, museum-like displays, presentations, and interviews contrast students' public constructions and private responses to issues of gender and sexuality in the context of historical study. Among other findings, students identified women's experiences as historically significant, recognized, analyzed, and expressed interest in the variety of perspectives represented by women they studied, and worried about “reverse sexism”– studying women at the expense of men. In addition, students' historical inquiries generated discussion about current issues of gender and sexuality, both inside and outside the classroom. In discussing the contrasts between the classroom culture and the encircling “homophobic hallways,” the authors suggest the importance of establishing environments where 1) gender is not an “add-on” or “extra” but fundamental point of analysis, and 2) adolescents build a vocabulary for discussing human rights issues and engage in critiquing current practices in regard to gender and sexuality.
The curriculum of US History has improved substantially in its presentation of women over the 40 years since Trecker's 1971 study of US History textbooks. While studies show increased inclusions, they also suggest that women have not yet claimed their own place in the school curriculum. This paper seeks to better understand the woman who is presented to students and how she is normalised through a US History curriculum. Feminist analysis of the curriculum exposes a concept of woman attached to the domestic sphere and reified through her presentation in the political and economic realms. When considering the images of woman available to young people, it is important to examine the full context around these images that shape the deeper meaning students take from curricular encounters.
Women's history was included as a compulsory examination subject for all secondary school students in the Netherlands in 1990 and 1991. We present some of the results of a research project regarding the impact of teaching women's history to young women. Three levels of women's history content included in the curriculum and the exam are identified—women in traditionally male roles, women in traditionally female roles, and gender as a historical construct—and then considered in the individual responses of the young women included in the study. Attitudes of girls toward history and the implications of historical content for gender identity are the primary focus of this work.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the sparse presence of women in social studies education and to consider the possibility of a confluence of feminism and neoliberalism within the most widely distributed National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication, Social Education. Using poststructural conceptions of discourse, the author applies second-wave feminist theory and Fraser's (2009) work on neoliberalism as lenses to illuminate the limited attention to women and feminism in this text during the 1980s in order to better understand how women have been marginalized in social studies education and to consider the possibility that the feminist principles present in social studies were taken up in service of neoliberal forces.
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