We need HERstory now more than ever. Women are half of us, yet they don't get to have models from the past. Girls are told they are equal now, but they aren't equally visible, equally taught, or equally empowered by historical figures. If you walked into most secondary social studies classrooms, you would scarcely know that women existed. The Remedial Herstory Project is here to change that.
“One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world.” –Malala Yousafza |
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It sometimes surprises people to learn that secondary and collegiate history is not only dominated by the stories and accomplishments of men, but also primarily taught and researched by men. 58 percent of US social studies teachers are men and 65 percent of history professors are men. So while most of us while women represent 75% of all educators, it’s important to ask why men would have a stronghold on history?
Additional relevant data:
• 84 percent of US social studies teachers are white.
• 4 percent of history best sellers were written by women.
• Textbooks name men at 4 times the rate of women.
Men teaching history is not inherently problematic, except that only 6 percent of male historians write about women. If scholars are not writing about women it won’t trickle down to the teachers. Teachers teach what they know and most teachers are not taught women’s history… HUGE names and topics are lost on practicing educators. The primary cause? Women’s history is not required to graduate with a history degree! Teachers who took mainstream routes to teacher certification never took women’s history. Often women’s history is offered as an elective or independent course: Women’s Studies or Gender Studies. What message does that send? That there is HISTORY, and then also women’s history?
• 84 percent of US social studies teachers are white.
• 4 percent of history best sellers were written by women.
• Textbooks name men at 4 times the rate of women.
Men teaching history is not inherently problematic, except that only 6 percent of male historians write about women. If scholars are not writing about women it won’t trickle down to the teachers. Teachers teach what they know and most teachers are not taught women’s history… HUGE names and topics are lost on practicing educators. The primary cause? Women’s history is not required to graduate with a history degree! Teachers who took mainstream routes to teacher certification never took women’s history. Often women’s history is offered as an elective or independent course: Women’s Studies or Gender Studies. What message does that send? That there is HISTORY, and then also women’s history?
Additional relevant data:
• Standards name men at 3 times the rate of women.
• 394 out of over 5 thousand outdoor statues in the US are of women.
• 9 out of 112 statues in the US Capitol are of women.
Studies have show that the effect of a lack of research and emphasis on women in collegiate history trickles down to teachers. 91% of teachers in Orange County Schools incorporate women’s voices in the curriculum, only 25% do it once a week or more, and 46% do it once a month or less (5% of available class time)!
State standards and textbooks here are problematic. The National Women’s History Museum found that standards overemphasized women’s domestic role instead of acknowledging her contributions to every field. The NCSS Framework is largely skill centered and leaves the content up to the states, and since so few states have solid guidelines, this leaves an interesting grey area that can be exploited.
Textbooks remain abysmal. Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault’s analysis of textbooks from her 1986 study titled, “Integrating Women's History: The Case of United States History High School Textbooks" is sadly not that outdated. It provides an outstanding framework for how to analyze a textbook and what texts should be including about women. She found that the textbooks in her time failed to acknowledge that women’s history has been omitted from the textbooks. There is no discussion on how the various points of emphasis in the public sphere have fundamentally and systematically excluded women. Students are not guided in any way to understanding that the exclusion of women is only half the story. The failure of the texts to include substantive information on the effect that race, ethnicity, and social class had on women’s experiences leaves and middle-class women as the norm and virtually excludes minority groups. Like history, women’s history was white washed.
Kay Chick did a more quantitative study of textbooks in 2006 and found that elementary school textbooks were more gender equal than textbooks geared for older students. She critiqued the American Historical Association. She said, “Since the American Historical Association has called for gender balance, they must be held accountable for defining it. If they are calling for a 50/50 split in the gender representations of historical figures, textbook publishers have yet to meet that goal.” The AHA updated their guidelines in 2018, but they remain non-specific, with no outline for an appropriate ratio.
• Standards name men at 3 times the rate of women.
• 394 out of over 5 thousand outdoor statues in the US are of women.
• 9 out of 112 statues in the US Capitol are of women.
Studies have show that the effect of a lack of research and emphasis on women in collegiate history trickles down to teachers. 91% of teachers in Orange County Schools incorporate women’s voices in the curriculum, only 25% do it once a week or more, and 46% do it once a month or less (5% of available class time)!
State standards and textbooks here are problematic. The National Women’s History Museum found that standards overemphasized women’s domestic role instead of acknowledging her contributions to every field. The NCSS Framework is largely skill centered and leaves the content up to the states, and since so few states have solid guidelines, this leaves an interesting grey area that can be exploited.
Textbooks remain abysmal. Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault’s analysis of textbooks from her 1986 study titled, “Integrating Women's History: The Case of United States History High School Textbooks" is sadly not that outdated. It provides an outstanding framework for how to analyze a textbook and what texts should be including about women. She found that the textbooks in her time failed to acknowledge that women’s history has been omitted from the textbooks. There is no discussion on how the various points of emphasis in the public sphere have fundamentally and systematically excluded women. Students are not guided in any way to understanding that the exclusion of women is only half the story. The failure of the texts to include substantive information on the effect that race, ethnicity, and social class had on women’s experiences leaves and middle-class women as the norm and virtually excludes minority groups. Like history, women’s history was white washed.
Kay Chick did a more quantitative study of textbooks in 2006 and found that elementary school textbooks were more gender equal than textbooks geared for older students. She critiqued the American Historical Association. She said, “Since the American Historical Association has called for gender balance, they must be held accountable for defining it. If they are calling for a 50/50 split in the gender representations of historical figures, textbook publishers have yet to meet that goal.” The AHA updated their guidelines in 2018, but they remain non-specific, with no outline for an appropriate ratio.
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The BIGGEST BARRIER to teaching women’s history is our own educations. Those of us who took mainstream routes to teacher certification never took women’s history. How are we supposed to teach it? If you examine where women’s history is taught, you learn that women’s history is a different subject entirely: Women’s Studies or Gender Studies. Although the skill set and learning objectives are the same, the subjects are taught separately. What message does that send? That there is HISTORY, and then also women’s history? Women’s Studies is predominantly taught by women to women, and men intentionally or unintentionally are often not in the room. So learning about women’s experience in history is something only women do. These enlightened women then find themselves alone in a world of people who only learned his-story.
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If our own educations were problematic, the professional development offered to teachers is equally problematic. Social Studies and Science teachers are the least likely to receive professional development in their area of study—this should literally shock no one who following the state of our democracy and the climate crisis. Social studies has the least professional development dedicated to it because it is the “least important” as dictated by standardized testing and the new emphasis on STEM, and has no clear national content standards. It is in this laissez-faire tumult that women’s history is lost. It comes down to the wills of individual teachers, administrators, or even uneducated school boards to decide what is taught: a recipe ripe for failure. Women’s studies are bound to the social studies and the social studies are on the chopping block.
Integrating the stories of women is only half the battle. Girls also need to feel like they belong in history classrooms and that they could have a career in history in order to curb these trends. Study's continue to show that:
- Boys speak up even when they are not called on.
- Co-ed groupings fail because boys have a tendency, both in the class and the workspace, to ignore girls’ contributions.
- Teachers give boys more attention in the classroom.
- Teachers emphasize compliance in girls.
- Schools reinforce traditional binary gendered expectations.
“The problems start with the students attracted to history. Over the past 20 years history has graduated some of the smallest proportions of female undergraduates of any field in higher education—well below all of the other humanities and social science disciplines outside of religious studies…The most troubling aspect of the trends in female student enrollment and graduation is the way history has plateaued at both the undergraduate and graduate level. If women continue to earn barely 40 percent of the degrees in history, that seems to set a rather hard ceiling for the representation of women among those employed in the discipline.”
Robert B. Townsend, “WHAT THE DATA REVEALS ABOUT WOMEN HISTORIANS,” Perspectives on History
To curb these data, inclusive, feminist pedagogies are needed.
Women are not an interest group: they are half of humanity! Women do not agree, they are diverse, and have been present throughout history. We need to QUESTION the history that we think we know. We all need to relearn history to include herstory. When you hear a story from the past that doesn’t include women, you have to literally break your brain and ask yourself wait where are the women?
Be part of the solution.
Bibliography
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What is the Inquiry Model?
The inquiry-model is a model for teaching that is student centered and gets the students puzzling through a compelling question. Students, rather than the teacher, examine the evidence and draw conclusions based on social studies skills and ways of knowing taught by the teacher. In history, students actually get to become historians themselves by analyzing primary material and deciding what is knowable based on the evidence available. In the other social studies subjects students use the skills of political scientists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc to answer questions. This question-driven approach get's the students thinking rather than the teacher pontificating.
Why use inquiry?
Inquiry is so helpful for diversity, equity, and inclusion, because a question like "Was the American Revolution revolutionary?" can be answered more deeply and meaningfully with diverse sources. Students can review American and British sources to get some variety of perspectives. Poor and wealthy American sources will also have differing viewpoints on the success of the revolution. But the failures of the Revolution are even more illuminated when the voices of women, Black, and Indigenous peoples are included. Students learn to work with primary material, evaluate which sources are most credible, and ultimately decide whom they most agree with.
How should teachers use the RHP Resources?
RHP lessons are developed as inquiries. They include a collection of primary materials, guiding questions for students, and activities to help them process the material more deeply. You can find all of these on our Learn page.
These lessons are designed for teacher flexibility. Packets could take between 15-45 minutes depending on the lesson and grade level. Teachers can have students complete the packets as a group, it can be facilitated by the instructor (which could be helpful for younger learners), they could do it as a moving, outdoor activity, or it could be homework before an in class seminar. Below are some suggestions for how to teach with them:
What happens after the packet?
It's up to the teacher, but there are lots of choices. They can end with the packet or extend the learning with an extension activity. Consider one of the following:
The inquiry-model is a model for teaching that is student centered and gets the students puzzling through a compelling question. Students, rather than the teacher, examine the evidence and draw conclusions based on social studies skills and ways of knowing taught by the teacher. In history, students actually get to become historians themselves by analyzing primary material and deciding what is knowable based on the evidence available. In the other social studies subjects students use the skills of political scientists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc to answer questions. This question-driven approach get's the students thinking rather than the teacher pontificating.
Why use inquiry?
Inquiry is so helpful for diversity, equity, and inclusion, because a question like "Was the American Revolution revolutionary?" can be answered more deeply and meaningfully with diverse sources. Students can review American and British sources to get some variety of perspectives. Poor and wealthy American sources will also have differing viewpoints on the success of the revolution. But the failures of the Revolution are even more illuminated when the voices of women, Black, and Indigenous peoples are included. Students learn to work with primary material, evaluate which sources are most credible, and ultimately decide whom they most agree with.
How should teachers use the RHP Resources?
RHP lessons are developed as inquiries. They include a collection of primary materials, guiding questions for students, and activities to help them process the material more deeply. You can find all of these on our Learn page.
These lessons are designed for teacher flexibility. Packets could take between 15-45 minutes depending on the lesson and grade level. Teachers can have students complete the packets as a group, it can be facilitated by the instructor (which could be helpful for younger learners), they could do it as a moving, outdoor activity, or it could be homework before an in class seminar. Below are some suggestions for how to teach with them:
- Independent Work: The most straightforward would be to introduce the topic and inquiry. Then pass out the packet and have students independently respond to the questions.
- Partner Work: Having students independently complete the lesson but work with a partner. This can help support diverse learners.
- Station Work: Put the documents up on posters or on tables spread out around the room. Pass students only the questions. Students move to each document station in shifts. This is a great strategy for kinesthetic learning.
- Think, Pair, Share: Some lessons would be better taught as a "think, pair, share," where a student only examines one document from the lesson and answers the questions. Teachers can distribute documents based on student ability. They then group up with students who looked at different documents and teach the group about their source while learning about others. At the end, the group can pull the information together to answer the big analysis questions.
- Team Work: Depending on how you want to extend the lesson, you may want to consider letting students work in teams. Maybe they are about to debate this? Break them into teams and they can do the packets together.
- Kinesthetic Lesson: Take the class on a walk. Stop every few minutes in a quiet and open space and dissect one of the documents in the packet. The teacher could read it and pose the guiding questions to students. The class hosts a brief discussion then continues on the walk. While walking, students are instructed to engage with their peers on the overarching question.
What happens after the packet?
It's up to the teacher, but there are lots of choices. They can end with the packet or extend the learning with an extension activity. Consider one of the following:
- Discussion: Consider facilitating a discussion of the analysis questions. Ask students to share their response with someone, or if they already worked in a group, ask them to nominate someone to represent their group to the class as a whole. Capitalize on differences between group responses. Why did one group answer differently than another? What impacted them or stood out more?
- Four Corner Debate: Consider a "four-corner debate." In the corners of the room tack up a piece of paper with four differing and possible answers to the inquiry question. After students complete the lesson packet, pose the question to the room at large and ask students to move to the corner of the room (or in between locations) that represent their answer. Then, ask students to explain their choice. As students discuss they are allowed to move closer or further from ideas. This is a great strategy for kinesthetic learning.
- Socratic Seminar: Consider doing a "socratic seminar" to extend the learning and get students to question what they still don't know or understand. Start with the inquiry's question. Students should be encouraged to answer one another's question directly, but also to answer the question with another question. This continues the conversation and gets at more rich ideas. The teacher should try to say as little as possible and let the students lead the dialog. One strategy for this is to seat students in a circle. Give each of them a cup and 2-3 tokens. When a student makes a substantive contribution to the discussion the teacher will walk over an place a token in the cup signaling that they have contributed. Students will become aware of who has spoken and who has not, and leave space for one another.
- Structured Academic Controversy: Consider turning the lesson into a "structured academic controversy." Take the overarching question and turn it into a "debate." Students can choose or be assigned a side in the debate and use the documents provided to argue their "answer" to the overarching question. They can argue over interpretations and credibility of some documents.
- Reacting to the Past: Consider doing some role play with your class. Reacting to the Past is an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games designed by Barnard University. In Reacting to the Past games, students are assigned character roles with specific goals and must communicate, collaborate, and compete effectively to advance their objectives. Reacting promotes engagement with big ideas, and improves intellectual and academic skills. Provide students with a set of rules about staying in character and what types of things they must know about their character. Students should be provided with a packet of role sheets with instructions on their individual goals and strategies for game play. Students can use sources and information from these activities, and can search for more details online about their individual character. Reacting roles and games do not have a fixed script or outcome. While students are obliged to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they have been assigned to play, they must devise their own means of expressing those ideas persuasively in papers, speeches, or other public presentations.
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Remedial Herstory applied the "Bechdel Test" for films to the history curriculum its called the Eckert Test. The Eckert Test emerged from frustration over how many times teachers fail to bring a female perspective into their history lessons. The Eckert Test is a system to hold educators accountable to a more comprehensive and diverse women’s history.
How does it work?
The test is this: 1. There are two women in the lesson. 2. Those two women have different opinions. 3. They represent different backgrounds: racial, sexual identity, ethnic, religious, generational, or economic. At first many teachers just started adding women’s sources to the inquiries, or lessons, they already have. This is called "pop-up" history and it forces one woman to represent and speak for all women. There isn't WOMEN’s diversity. Men get to be diverse and have disagreements in history, but women who pop into history classes don’t get that luxury enough.
Not everyone can name two women from every era, but they could name two men and isn’t that the problem? It’s challenging, but with research it is doable in EVERY period and region of the world as far back as you can go, even Mesopotamia. Start with Kubaba the first woman monarch in world history and Enheduanna the first priest, historian, and poet (male or female) EVER, and you're off to a great start.
But, do we know enough about these early women to have a colorful debate or discussion in a history class?
Yes. In almost every case, enough is known to work with these women, their stories, their ideas, or their legacies.
Current practice in education is for students to BECOME historians themselves using primary sources from the pasts. So how amazing that this far back there are sources not only ABOUT women, but BY women!
How does it work?
The test is this: 1. There are two women in the lesson. 2. Those two women have different opinions. 3. They represent different backgrounds: racial, sexual identity, ethnic, religious, generational, or economic. At first many teachers just started adding women’s sources to the inquiries, or lessons, they already have. This is called "pop-up" history and it forces one woman to represent and speak for all women. There isn't WOMEN’s diversity. Men get to be diverse and have disagreements in history, but women who pop into history classes don’t get that luxury enough.
Not everyone can name two women from every era, but they could name two men and isn’t that the problem? It’s challenging, but with research it is doable in EVERY period and region of the world as far back as you can go, even Mesopotamia. Start with Kubaba the first woman monarch in world history and Enheduanna the first priest, historian, and poet (male or female) EVER, and you're off to a great start.
But, do we know enough about these early women to have a colorful debate or discussion in a history class?
Yes. In almost every case, enough is known to work with these women, their stories, their ideas, or their legacies.
Current practice in education is for students to BECOME historians themselves using primary sources from the pasts. So how amazing that this far back there are sources not only ABOUT women, but BY women!