Gender Equity Institute 2021

We help K-12 educators integrate equity work, especially gender equity work, into every aspect of school life.

This year, we are providing teachers with an online course on six themes & questions for integrating anti-bias materials & practices into curriculum across departments.

Welcome to TaW's Gender Equity Institute 2021

What is our goal?

We provide teachers (grades 6-12) with resources and practices to bring gender equity work into their classrooms. We use themes and questions to take a transdisciplinary approach so that our workshops are useful for teachers of every subject and a range of grade levels. Inclusive teaching is good teaching. While we focus on gender equity, we present material and practices to explore identity in all its facets and promote equity work across intersectional identities including race, class, ability, sexuality, country of origin, ethnicity, and age.

Who should participate?

Middle and high school teachers who want to advance justice, equity, and diversity in schools by teaching fuller, more accurate narratives of past and present. The Gender Equity Institute has particular appeal to classroom teachers looking to apply a firmer equity lens to curriculum and pedagogy. Because we focus on practices and resources that cut across disciplines, we invite teams of teachers from various departments at the same school to participate together.

What will participants get?

Teachers will walk away with a roadmap for integrating anti-bias and equity work into their discussions, lessons, and units. We offer everything from practical tips for having tough conversations to suggestions for text pairings and assessments. We even provide turnkey lesson plans and worksheets you can use with your own students the very next day. All of us are experienced K-12 educators with lots of ideas for we can use these six themes & questions to enrich our teaching.

It's not just about gender. We take an intersectional approach.

We reject the idea that humans should be bound by and limited by siloed identities. To explore gender without exploring say, race, ethnicity, or class, is to present a picture of reality that is incomplete to the point of being false. In all our lessons, we have been thoughtful about how to include many voices and explore facets of identity that often get shunted to the side in Euro-centric, white and masculinist curricula. We have done our best to reject these conventional barometers, put people of color at the center of our inquiry, and draw on intersectional approaches.
Inclusive teaching is good teaching. We don't define gender by biology–we welcome and nurture explorations of trans identities in all that we do. While we focus on gender equity, we present material and practices to explore identity in all its facets and promote equity work across intersectional identities including race, class, ability, sexuality, country of origin, ethnicity, and age.

How is it organized?

Each session is organized around an equity theme and question. These are your roadmap for integrating equity work into every aspect of your teaching. In keeping with our intersectional approach, we use equity themes that apply to power in many forms–not just gendered power.
A strong equity theme

sneaks up on you
applies to power in many forms
moves easily through different kinds of stories (fiction, nonfiction, folktales, advertising, gossip, anecdotes, scientific studies)
invites students to look at all sorts of things in a new way

What are the themes?

Invisibility—What keeps some people and experiences from being seen?
Carelessness—Why do some people get to be careless while others do not?
Normal--How does the media reflect and enforce narrow cultural norms?
Sacrifice—How does [identity] shape the ways individuals share work in hard times?
Victims/Heroes—Who benefits from a culture of fear?
Resistance—What does resistance in a dominating culture look like?

Download printable with all 6 questions: 1 pager (handout) * 6 pages (wall or bulletin board)

An online course in Six Sessions

elesson

asynchronous
free

interactive webinar

synchronous
donation-based

master classes & coaching

upon request

Each session is designed around a theme and a question and has three parts:

an e-lesson you can watch on your own schedule,
an interactive webinar, where you can come with questions and hear different scenarios for incorporating this theme into your teaching. You can see the dates/times and sign up below.
Finally, some teachers have agreed to provide tailored master classes and coaching upon request to teachers who would like to dive more deeply into this work. Contact us here to set that up.

The Gender Equity Institute 2021

Session 1
Theme: Invisibility
Etymology for Social Justice:
Language & Power

Date: Monday, February 8, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Benjamin Joffe

Watch e-lesson

The words we use every day carry hidden messages: latent misogyny, racism, and so many other ways that we separate members of society and culture into different categories.

Embedded within the often convoluted spellings of the words that make up our modern languages is a rich history, a preservation of societal norms, sometimes bygone and sometimes still very much a part of the habits and mindset of our current age – latent misogyny, racism, and so many other ways that we separate members of society and culture into different categories. To know these stories is to be empowered to take on the challenges they pose, and in this workshop, we will not only examine several examples but also explore how a focus on the etymology of everyday, even seemingly innocuous vocabulary in our classrooms can be a valuable series of social justice lessons to support any subject. Through observation, close examination, and discussion of texts, we can help students see how the ideas that pervade modern society have often been held up by the otherwise anodyne language we use to refer to them. And ultimately, once we equip students with the tools to understand what our words carry, we can better prepare them to tackle the systemic modern complexities they will face and make their world more just.

Session 2
Theme: Resistance, Part 1
Reclamation as Resistance: Gender-Identity and body-based ritual

Date: Monday, February 15, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Samantha Sherman

Watch e-lesson

How can we encourage our students to decode the messages of power inherent in gender performance? This lesson approaches dance as a reclamation of identity and a rejection of patriarchy.

This workshop will examine the idea of reclamation as an act of resistance, specifically in Indigenous communities in the United States. We will use three main resources to look at reclamation of gender identity among Two Spirited people within certain Indigenous communities in the United States, as well as the reclaiming of cultural practices through the music and dance of the Lakota Sioux, specifically through the Ghost Dance. We will use "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" by Judith Butler as a way to ground our conversation around gender expression and identity. Even though she is a white scholar and does not come from these Indigenous communities, Butler's scholarship will help place our conversation within a larger dialogue around theory and practice of expression, reclamation, and cultural and political resistance.

Session 3
Theme: Normal
Who has the power to decide what is normal?

Date: Thursday, February 25, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Mookie Kideckel

Watch e-lesson

Who has the power to decide what normal is? Who gets to make and enforce cultural norms? How do schools and institutions participate in creating sexist cultural norms? How can teachers address this?

Who has the power to decide what normal is? Who gets to make and enforce cultural norms? How do schools and institutions participate in creating sexist cultural norms? Teachers, scholars, and commentators have justified sexism for generations in appeals to history; couched as “tradition,” “evolution,” or “nature,” sexist social organization can appear inevitable. This situation means that teaching about women must involve more than finding “room” for women in the historical narrative—it must examine how people created that narrative in the first place.
This workshop offers tools for helping students question normality at both conceptual and concrete levels. It will provide resources on the historical evolution of ideas about what is “normal” among people of different genders, from “separate spheres” to the idea that girls like pink, and on how varied people portrayed these as normal situations that have “always existed.” The workshop will also suggest exercises that teachers can use to help their students notice similar examples in their own lives, research their origins and manifestations, and act to change them.

Session 4
Theme: Victims & Heroes
The Pitfalls of Colonial Feminism: What happens when 'we' try to save Muslim women?

watch e-lesson

Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Georgina Emerson

Organizing lessons or a unit around this lens puts women's rights in a global and intersectional context and can help move away from speaking about feminism as primarily a white, middle class issue.

This webinar will present teachers with a tool for engaging their students in critical thinking and reflection on social justice in general, and gender and power in particular.
Organizing lessons or a unit around this lens puts women's rights in a global and intersectional context and can help move away from speaking about feminism as primarily a white, middle class issue. Moreover, it deepens students’ understanding of how facts can be picked and chosen to suit certain agendas and used to justify aggression and even oppression.

Session 5
Theme: Carelessness
Carelessness to Constriction: Choreography for Reading Comprehension

Watch e-lesson

Date: Monday, March 8, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Linda van Kesteren

What does it feel like to lose your freedom? How do we help our students understand and empathize with those who experience a dramatic societal shift that constricts all aspects of their lives?

What does it feel like to lose your freedom? How do we help our students understand and empathize with those who experience a dramatic societal shift that constricts all aspects of their lives? Through personal exploration using sense memory, energy and movement, participants will embark on a physical journey to simulate life-altering changes, aimed at helping students better empathize with the lived experiences of others.

In this workshop, we use a passage from Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran as our jumping off point. Rather than asking students to explore the themes of the passage with words, we ask them to undertake three movement exercises to choreograph a response in dance. It’s an experience that is sensory, artistic, and embodied. This is a transdisciplinary way to approach reading literature and understanding history. It’s another way of doing the reading comprehension activities that have long been a hallmark of solid teaching.

In a time when we are all constricted by Covid-19 lockdown measures, the process becomes a way of dealing with the pain of isolation and exploring the freedom and limitations of remote communities.

Session 6
Theme: Resistance, Part 2
The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans and 2 Spirit People

Watch e-lesson

Date: Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Time: 5:00-6:00pm EST
Presenter: Kemeyawi Q. Wahpepah

This lesson provides a rich case study for understanding how systems of oppression (e.g. colonialism, sexism) are interconnected and shift, develop, and persist over time.

The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans, and 2 Spirit People (MMIWGT2S) hasn't gotten a lot of mainstream media attention despite Native womxn's ongoing efforts to raise awareness. It provides a rich case study that could anchor the practice of several academic skills, including: (1) data collection and critical data analysis (2) critical media consumption and use of "new media" in the classroom (3) understanding how systems of oppression (e.g. colonialism, sexism) are interconnected and shift, develop, and persist over time, and (4) how "real world" strategies (e.g. petitions, letters, social media campaigns) can be leveraged to give learning purpose and impact.

Get these resources for your classroom.

Purchase any of the resources below on Amazon after clicking our link, and TaW gets a 15% referral fee. That money goes directly to paying the teachers involved in the Gender Equity Institute. Thank you for your support!

Invisibility

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Resistance

The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader