FOR TEACHERS
This page is for teachers! If you want to bring more heroines to your students, here's what Jane Turner (1998) recommends.
Textbooks are only one of many tools educators use to teach students, and they can only include so much information. However, the inclusion of heroines and their heroic narratives into these books can provide a broader, more meaningful context of history.
Turner (1998) examines in her study in making space for women in the Social Studies curriculum the two ways in which women’s history is traditionally included, contribution and bifocal history, and presents a third presentation of history: gendered history. This focuses on the socially constructed gender identities and their backgrounds, both for men and women. Turner also posits that gendered history teaches the present about the past in more meaningful and significant ways.
She recommends changes to three main aspects of the education system and curriculum: the topic, the approaches, and the lenses.
Topics: Social Studies topics must value women’s efforts even in other fields other than those often discussed. Topics that include men need only be expanded for one to see the role of women.
Approaches: Approaches are how a topic is learned or taught, and they link the content to the learner. Turner recommends the constructivist approach to learning history to encourage students to make meaning out of the topics. Students different perspectives and allow them to explore different experiences and schools of thought.
Lenses: Views and perspectives, or lenses, are the eyes through which history is constructed, the angle from which an event or phenomenon is analyzed. A gender lens must be used to analyze the events around men and women to reveal their pasts fully and equally.
And this is just the beginning. Students can learn even more as long as teachers pique their interest further and unlock their potential for knowledge! Here's how:
According to Audrey Gray, "Constructivist teaching fosters critical thinking and creates motivated and independent learners."
The premise of a constructivist approach to learning is the student is an active participant in the learning process rather than being a passive recepient of information. The student acquires knowledge by reflecing on their prior knowledge and past experiences (Glaserfield, 1995). The role of the teacher in a constructivist classroom is to guide their students in constructing their own knowledge. This can be done by knowing the students' prior knowledge and then giving them learning experiences to build on what they already know (Steffe & D'Ambrosio, 1995).
Some of these experiences may be:
Class discussions: It promotes social interactivity which is an important aspect in constructivist learning.
Games: Constructivist games enable students to immerse themselves in an environment which they have control over. This gives them an opportunity to create and experiment with the information and tools provided. A good example is Minecraft!
Experiments: Through experiments, students can manipulate variables and learn by testing their predictions.
Hypernarratives: Hypernarratives are stories where the audience, in this case the students, will make choices that determine what happens to the story. It can help the students better understand a topic by putting them in the story and letting them control it.
Role-playing: This allows students to deeply understand a character or significant figure's role and the environment they are in.
Steffe, L. P. & D'Ambrosio, B.S. (1995). Toward A Working Model of Constructivist Teaching: A Reaction to Simon. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education 26 (2). 146 59
Turner, J. E. (1998). Making space for women's history in the secondary Social Studies curriculum. Ontario: National Library of Canada.