Seventh Graders and Sexism

 "Seventh Graders and Sexism" by Lisa Espinosa

Espinosa views teaching as a way to challenge students to think critically about societal inequity. She is a third-year 7th grade English teacher in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood of Chicago, where she noticed a gap between the expectations for girls and boys.

Girls are expected to...

• Cook & do chores
• Be nice & obey authority figures
• Dream of marriage

Boys are expected to...

• Be leaders & heads of family
• Be independent & strong
• Express their thoughts and ideas
• Dream of an education or a career

Additionally, there were conflicts arising in her school surrounding both gender and sexuality (i.e. rivalries between girls, girls accusing boys of touching them, boys being called gay for acting outside gender norms).

To combat this, Espinosa wanted her students to think about and understand...

• Why girls took a backseat in class discussions
• Why girls had rivalries instead of unity
• Why girls attached their worth to their appearance
• Why boys were afraid to express empathy and vulnerability
• Why boys used homophobic language
• How boys related to girls in the class

Espinosa asked students to brainstorm what it meant to "Be Ladylike" and "Act Like A Man." Students at first said their stereotypical ideas were the "truth" but soon began to understand that they come from families and media, and have no factual, biological root as Espinosa questioned their reasoning.

Brief science tangent: Biologically speaking, sex is more of a correlation of different traits than a simple description of what organs you have (intersex people exist!), what chromosomes you have (people can have XXY and all kinds of combinations!), what hormones are produced by your body, how your body responds to those hormones (not all people have functioning androgen receptors), how your secondary sex characteristics develop, and so on. Neurologically and physiologically, other sex differences are minimal, and only the extreme ends of the bell curves of each sex don't overlap. In other words, we're way more alike than we are different.

To encourage them to reflect more deeply on their biases, Espinosa exposed her students to articles about sexism and rape culture, and asked them to free-write stories about people facing gender or sexuality-based discrimination. They analyzed pieces of media and how they perpetuate stereotypes and expectations for young girls and boys.

Espinosa acknowledges that many of her students still expressed gender stereotypes by the end of the unit, but many of them began to start conversations on media they had seen recently that perpetuated stereotypes. Students still felt like sexism was too big of a problem to solve, but they made significant progress in thinking critically about the media they consume.

Introducing Prezi

Prezi is a mixture of a slideshow tool and a graphic design tool like Canva with a little extra spice. With Prezi, you create what is essentially one big image, and you can click through "slides" where each slide zooms in on a specific region of the image. It's incredibly useful for describing a journey (such as mapping the Hero's Journey with descriptions of each stage), mind-mapping, and anything that has a branching structure with main ideas, sub-ideas, and sub-ideas of the sub-ideas.

To use Prezi, you first create an account, which can be done through Google. On the home page, you will see the Prezi AI tool, but there are plenty of non-AI options as well:

Through the non-AI route, you select "Create new" and then choose a template or start from AI or from a blank:

Some templates can be used with AI while others are defaults:

Once you choose a template, you'll see the editing page, which allows you to rearrange the order of slides and add text, images, and transitions:

You can generate images with AI within the platform:

You can also have presenter notes:

Prezi can be used for essentially any subject as a fun alternative to Google Slides with more opportunities for play and creativity. It might be too complicated for younger students, but I think middle school and up would really benefit from this option.

Final Project Brainstorming

 My current top-of-mind idea for the final project is something I've been contemplating doing for a while: a class newsletter. I found that since I wasn't organized this year it was harder for me to help my students stay organized and catch up on missed work. Especially given the high rate of chronic absenteeism in my school, and the quick turnaround of the units in my curriculum, even a few missed assignments can really set a student back. I tried to help students catch up, but I was learning the curriculum myself week by week, so I couldn't help them as promptly or fully as I would like to be able to in the coming year. My concept would involve a weekly newsletter or a running Google Doc posted on Canvas with key vocabulary and concepts for the unit, as well as what we did every single week, and extra credit opportunities. My hope is this would serve as a way to keep myself organized and to help students who are absent or who work better outside of class.

My other idea is related to the project I did for Practitioner Action Research. Despite my complex feelings about AI, I can see the benefit of helping students access difficult scientific articles at a younger age via Perplexity. I really want my students to start learning about real-life scientific issues and innovations, like renewable energy or brain-computer interfaces. I'm thinking about doing a weekly project with my students where they find one research article through Google Scholar, put it into Perplexity to simplify the language, synthesize it in their own words, and (most importantly) form an opinion on the topic. I hope this will encourage my students to think critically about science and allow them to access "cool science" firsthand, while teaching them that AI can be a tool but it can't form your own opinions for you.

Perplexity Deep Research: