Feminist Studies

Advanced High School Assignments

Lesson Plan for 90-minute class or two 45-minute classes

This lesson plan is for advanced high school students to foster and support their developing critical thinking skills in feminist studies in preparation for university classrooms.

Part One: Building Comprehension through Contextual Redefinition of the Key Words Introduced in the Foundational Excerpts

The purpose of contextual redefinition is to offer students specific steps for deducing the meaning of words–both unknown and common–in feminist studies in the assigned reading passage. This strategy encourages students to restate the author’s general intent/meaning in a passage, to interpret unclear terms and ideas, and to refine their understandings of the definitions of common words in the field of feminist studies.

Introductory Activity
Duration: 45 minutes

Select several keywords from the excerpts (especially the feminist studies words that have entered the common lexicon such as feminism, gender, sex, diversity, and so on). Write these words on the chalkboard.
Have students suggest definitions for these terms before reading the excerpts. Most likely, students will provide a range of definitions since the words are considered in isolation from any specific context and have layers of meaning depending on the context.
Record all definitions suggested on the chalkboard.
Have the students read the excerpts, noting the specific sentences in which each of the words appear.
Ask students to revisit their previous definitions and see which, if any, reflect the use of these words in the context of the reading.
As a class, refine the definition of the keywords. Build a word bank of working definitions grounded in a new common understanding of the words.

Part Two: Collaborative Annotation of the Secondary Essays

The purpose of collaborative annotating is that it actively gives students a clear purpose for engaging with complex texts. Collaborative annotating goes beyond underlining, highlighting, or making symbolic notations on a given text. Collaborative annotation includes adding purposeful notes, keywords and phrases, definitions, and connections tied to specific sections of the text.

Small Group Discussion
Duration: 20 minutes

In small groups of 3 - 4, students will practice annotating with other students. Students should highlight, underline, or circle relevant words and phrases and share their choices by:

Identifying

main idea, claim, or argument
supporting evidence
key vocabulary

Connecting their annotations to the content in other texts for that week

Foundational texts, original texts, or even the four essays introducing different sections of the textbook

Identifying any questions or unclear sections that remain for the group

Full group discussion
25 minutes

Full class discussion sharing and expanding upon the collaborative annotating
Exit ticket: Students write down one new concept or idea that they learned deeply and one question that they still have about the text

Out-of-class assignment: Final Synthesis of Information into a Visual Form through a Zine

The purpose of this assignment is to allow students to connect across the readings in a creative way and translate feminist ideas into a visual and artistic medium.

Create a mini magazine-format booklet that narrates one of the particular themes raised in the essay. Zines can take any form and size you wish but should be at least six pages in length. Zines typically include images, poetry, quotes, art, and other creative texts by others (be sure to attribute) or made by you. This is an opportunity to engage with the themes of the class through a creative, visual translation of our seminar discussions into a format that anyone outside of the class could read and understand. You will develop your zine in the context of the course materials using at least two readings as your primary inspirational sources. Here are some examples of what you might include in your zine: a mock interview with the author exploring and imagining how the author might respond to the interview questions, a visual translation of a moment or theme from a text that is representative of the theme you are exploring, turning a reading into a cartoon strip, and so on. The possibilities are endless!

Undergraduate Assignments

Communicating Context

All of the foundational essays in our course textbook are excerpts of longer essays—articles, book chapters, and even entire books. Due to time and space constraints, we clearly cannot read all of the full versions of the foundational texts. But our understanding of the excerpts can be deeply enhanced through better understanding the contexts out of which they emerge. So, we’ll access these benefits through splitting up the labor and sharing our insights via in-class presentations! All students (or pairs or groups of students, depending on class size) will choose one of the book’s foundational texts to present on. The goal of the presentations is to give greater context for these short excerpts so that we can better understand the excerpts.

You’ll begin by reading the entire article or book chapter out of which the textbook excerpt emerges and taking thorough notes. You should make sure you understand the author’s argument, as well as the article’s structure and scaffolding. Your task, again, is to explain to the class where and how the excerpt fits into the full article or book more broadly, as well as the nuances of the text, including but not limited to the excerpt. Some questions to answer:

The author:
Tell us about the author. Who wrote this text? When? Where (that is, where are/were they located geographically and institutionally when they published this text)? Has the author—or other scholars?—discussed their biography in relation to their work? If so, what have they said that might be useful for understanding this text?

The full text:
How does the excerpt we read fit into the longer article or book and its overall argument? What, in other words, does the author argue in the full text that does not appear in the excerpt? How did reading the full text help you to better understand the key points of the excerpt we read? What evidence does the author use in the full text that doesn’t appear in the excerpt and how is this useful for understanding their argument?

The social:
What commonsensical ideas about feminism, gender, or sexuality does your excerpt complicate? How does the essay also complicate other taken-for-granted ideas among liberals or those on the political left, including about identity, experience, community, activism, or any other number of things?

All presentations should be 10-12 minutes long. You should also create a PowerPoint or other type of visual aid. Please practice your presentation in advance so you know that it falls within these parameters. You will upload to the course Canvas site your reading notes, your presentation visual aid, and your presentation notes.

Creation of Cultural Text

In addition to presenting on one of the textbook’s foundational readings, students will create a cultural text that translates the ideas from that section of the book into something that can circulate beyond our classroom. You might focus on the same text as you presented on or another one of the 3 texts in the same section of the book as the text you presented on. Because you did so much work for your in-class presentation, it likely makes sense to focus on the same text or on another text in this same section of the book. However, if you feel especially inspired by another text, you may want to choose to translate that text. It’s your call. This assignment is an opportunity to be creative and to put our class ideas into motion!

The assignment contains three parts:

Locate 3-4 examples of ideas in circulation that run counter to what your course text argues. These may include, but are not limited to, memes, posts on social media, passages on websites, comments on stories, films, newspaper articles, and so on. This is evidence that your cultural text needs to exist.
Create any kind of cultural text. No limits! You might want to consider creating TikTok videos, a short film, an op-ed, cartoons, a series of memes or tweets, protest signs, a piece of art to be displayed, and so on. The point is that it needs to circulate and you need to be behind that circulation. So, if you write an op-ed, for instance, you need to send it out to local newspapers for publication.
Write a 150-200 word artist’s statement to accompany and describe your creative cultural text.

For this assignment, you are encouraged but not required to collaborate with others, either inside or outside of this class! You will upload all pieces of this assignment to the Canvas course site.

Graduate Assignments

Class Facilitation (Assignment for Graduate Seminars)

Each student will be responsible for facilitating class conversation about one chapter of the book—that section’s two foundational texts as well as its original texts—for 45 minutes of a seminar period. We will cover two sections of the book each week. As such, there will be two facilitators each week, and you should plan to work together to whatever degree makes sense to conduct the facilitation. Together, you will facilitate for a total of 1.5 hours.

Part of the work of being a graduate student is learning how to analyze the arguments of texts on their own terms, that is, focusing on what they are doing, rather than what they are not. Part of the work of being a graduate student is to understand how texts extend or intervene in prior scholarly conversations—something that requires tracing the genealogies of texts. And part of being a grad student is learning to think through how you might teach the texts you’re engaging in different contexts and to different people, including in lower division lectures, topics-based classes, undergraduate senior seminars geared toward majors and minors, and so on. Your facilitation should include questions that cut across each of these areas and that are connected to all four readings in your section. In addition, you should prepare a brief (5-8 minute or so) presentation that sets the stage for your discussion questions and outlines how these texts help us to think about the topic of that section of the book.

Following your class facilitation, you will have a formal 20 minute meeting with the professor in which you collectively reflect on how your facilitation went.

Excavating Genealogies (Assignment for Graduate Seminars)

You will choose one of the topics the textbook addresses (power, materiality, the state, experience, identity, and so on) and trace feminist thinking about this topic beyond what exists in the textbook, doing a kind of genealogical excavation. What texts do the authors cite? Why? How? How do these texts intervene in or extend prior debates? What can you learn about this topic from carefully following authors’ citational practices? What key texts on the topic have been published since the texts in the textbook were first published? How do these newer texts extend or complicate the ideas of the authors in the textbook?

Your output will be a 10-12 page essay. The genealogical excavation should culminate in a 5-6 page literature review. In the second half of the essay, you should focus on your own research or a case study that interests you, demonstrating how thinking with feminist analyses of your topic can help you to examine an aspect of your research or the social world more broadly.