EDCT 5673 - Strategies for Teaching Gender Equity

Course Description

As teachers what we want most is to empower students; because we know that people learn best when they are most fully themselves. Yet as Sadker, Sadker, and Zittleman (2009) note, “despite decades of effort to create fair classrooms and schools, gender bias is alive and well, and in some ways growing. School practices continue to send boys and girls down different life paths.” Gender privilege and stereotypes are so ingrained in our culture that it takes some conscious work and strategies to undo the habits of thought and action that might inhibit learning and encourage gender bias—both in terms of masculinity AND femininity. This class will facilitate thinking about gender, gender boundaries, power dynamics, voice, stereotypes and more. It's a safe place to think and talk about how our own ideas (conscious and unconscious) about gender impact our teaching. Students will finish this course with a toolbox of new activities and curriculum that will help them work toward real equity for every student in the classroom—girls and boys, men and women.

Course Outline

Week 1: Speculations on Spectrums

Week 2: Sex and the Separate Sphere: Angels, Bluestockings and Suffrag(ists)

Week 3: Gender and the Power of the Patriacrch

Week Four: Enacting Change: A Beginning

Week 5: Deconstructing Girlhood

Week 6: Boy Trouble

Week 7: Where Are We Now?

Week 8: Beyond the Binary: Gender Non-Conformity and Teaching

Week Nine: Getting Over Boy Stuff/Girl Stuff: Students in Non-Traditional Fields

Week Ten: Individual Conferences

Week Eleven: Final Projects Due with researched analysis; Presentations

Learner Outcomes

In this course participants will

Gain a thorough background in current thought and research sources on gender and learn tactics for addressing both masculinity and femininity as concepts.
Learn strategies for reevaluating current curriculum through the lens of gender, and adding curriculum that allows students to think and talk about gender.
Gain resources and methodology for adding women’s and “outsider” men’s voices, knowledge, and history to your curriculum.
Be able to each students the life skill of critical thinking and articulate ideas about gender.