Creating a safe environment
Five learning activities that will help students improve their self-concepts of gender difference and self-esteem.
Activities:
Activities:
- The Journal:
Have students write in journals about school, what they are happy about, not happy about, what they have learned, etc. It’s a student journal so only read it if a student ask you but check regularly to ensure that there are at least three entries per week.
- Shared Learning:
At the end of each quarter/semester, have each student reread her/his journal. After the class sits in a circle, or you can dived the students into small groups, and have each student share one thing she/he has learned about herself/himself so far this year. - Self-Collages:
Using pictures, words, or symbols clipped from magazines that represent things they enjoy doing or own, places they've been, people they admire, or careers they desire, have students create a collage. They place their names on the back, and you can post the collages around the room. You can also have the other students guess which collage belongs to whom and state why they made that guess.
- The Encouragement Game:
Have students sit in a circle and give everyone a piece of paper and pen. Each person should write their name at the top of the piece of paper, then pass it to the person on their left. Each person then writes one or two (or more) positive characteristics about the person whose name is at the top of the paper. After 30-60 seconds, everyone passes the pieces of paper around to their left again. This continues until everyone has written on everyone else's paper. The final step is that everyone receives their piece of paper back again. It may be worth doing a quick check to ensure the comments are appropriate and positive. - Stereotypes Activity:
Students are each handed a piece of paper at the beginning of class. They are instructed not to look at what is on the papers others have. They are given one of the following tasks:
List the 8 most important characteristics that an ideal person should have.
b. List the 8 most important characteristics that an ideal woman should have.
c. List the 8 most important characteristics that an ideal man should have.
Lists of the characteristics they come up with for each three categories are written on the board. Students discuss and evaluate the degree of overlap between perceptions of the ideal person and the male and female stereotypes. This discussion is then extended to include the ideal characteristics of people with certain jobs (e.g. president, teacher, accountant) to look for degree of overlap with the lists of ideal characteristics for men/women.