Girls Worms and Body Image

In tonight's assignment I focused on the article Girls Worms and Body Image by Kate Lyman. Lyman is a 3rd grade teacher in Wisconsin. It starts with her eaves dropping on two elementary school students fighting over a health video because they"needed it cause they were fat" the students then walked away. It seemed to Lyman that something had made the girls feels self conscious about their body image and she thought about her own upbringing. She started to plan lessons around gender and media in her classroom.

First lesson she separated her students by gender in her classroom and made them write 10 things of what they think about the opposite sex. The student all came back with different stereotypes about the opposite gender. Stereotypes like women were better at making, and men made more money that women. The student argued vehemently about these stereotypes and she realized that she had failed.

In another lesson she planned a discussion  around toys and the stereotypes about gender. She had the student plan a lesson around analyzing a barbie doll. She made them ask questions about the doll. What does the doll look like? Does it look like any of the women that you know? etc. She asked them why she though the toy manufacturers made her look that way, "the consensus was that girls want to look like her so that men would like them better" The students responded well, she guided them to come to the conclusion that the Barbie doll was teaching them what pretty was supposed to look like and that they didn't know anyone that looked like that. The teacher wanted the students to be able to critically analyze the hidden message in advertisements.

The last lessons she planned was an old fashioned day in which the students had homework to ask their parents how school was when they were in school. Students came back with many different responses. The old fashioned day was planned and female students were asked to come in with dresses (they could not were jeans) and that day the students were treated differently by their gender. They used similar disciplines of the old days: the dunce caps, the harsh repetition writing punishments. The teachers called on the boys more than they called the girls, to criticizing the girls for more sloppy handwriting. Lyman was interested to see if the girls and the boys notices the differences in gender. Not only did they notice but the boys seemed happy and the girls were very unhappy saying things "you paid more attention to the boys than you did the girls"

What I learned from the article as an outsider is that teaching lessons around media literacy on social issues is hard. Lyman shows examples of 4 lesson in her article but she does not stop trying. What she does well in her lessons is that she is giving these children real life examples of the issue that she is facing.