203. Teaching Students to Analyze Power Dynamics: Gender

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In this episode, we are talking about empowering students to analyze power dynamics, using the example of gender identity. We explore some strategies that can engage learners from preschool to high school and facilitate this important conversation. 


This episode is part of a mini-series that’s designed to help educators design curricula for students to understand and analyze power dynamics at any age.


Why? 

Equipping students with the ability to analyze power dynamics and challenge societal norms is crucial for fostering a socially just and inclusive learning environment. Engaging students with relevant and modern media allows them to practice these analytical skills in ways that resonate with their context and empower them to think critically and openly about power dynamics at play. 

What?

Students of any age can analyze power dynamics. Educators can adjust their units to be age-appropriate by choosing the right framework and engaging media for analysis. Here are four steps to follow: 

Step 1: Find a Theory or Framework That Works For Your Context

The first step is to find a theory that is suitable to you and your students, fitting the classroom’s needs. You can find one that’s quite broad or specific to an identity group. Choose one that’s suitable for you as a place to start.  

For example, if you’re looking at power dynamics and gender, you may look at Nussbaum’s theory of objectification. 

Step 2: Break Down Complex Theories

Depending on the age of your students, you may need to break down the language used in your theoretical framework into simpler concepts. You can simplify language, condense the number of attributes, or just think about how your students will understand these complex ideas. 

Continuing with the example of Nussbaum’s theory, you can identify what terms are relevant to your setting and which ones weren’t. When I taught using this framework, I broke it down into three simplified categories that connected back to Nussbaum’s theory: Women as “powerless,” “property,” and “disposable.”

Step 3: Invite Students to Apply Frameworks
Bring these topics to life by applying the framework using modern, interesting media. This is so key in engaging students in the topic, so think of media like advertisements, TV shows, or music videos. Eventually you can apply the framework to historical texts or other documents, but it’s important to start with something that’s highly engaging and interesting to your class. 

With my activity using Nussbaum’s theory, I used real advertisements that related to each category, and students did a gallery walk to assign them appropriately and analyze the representation of women in media. 

You could also do a “gender box” activity that gets students to generate ideas of traditional gender “roles,” looking at how they’re reinforced in media and popular culture, and then discuss how to break out of those boxes and why it’s important to break stereotypes. 

Step 4: Create a Visual Reminder

Use something like an anchor chart and hang it in your classroom to reinforce learning and encourage application to course content.

Final Tip

Once you’ve decided to approach this conversation on dynamics, be on the look out for positive examples of justices, joy, and equity. Curate and share examples of gender expansiveness (or other social justice themes) with your students to inspire and fuel their imaginations and critical thinking.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Critical Analysis Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 203 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 10:35 “I think that it’s an important component to make sure we envision a world—and then work in our lives to create that world—fueled with joy and not oppression.”
• 12:02 “We can be constantly collecting and curating these examples to be able to share with our students when we’re ready to do a unit like this.”

​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. We are digging into kind of my favorite new miniseries and this is inspired by a lot of different people being like. I want to help students at all ages, all the way from a pre-K we're working with a preschool right now and family members and educators in that preschool to help pre-K level students in like three, four years old, all the way to high school students who I have taught and have helped with the same exact thing. And what we're talking about is analyzing power dynamics. So when we support students' criticality, when we get them to analyze power dynamics, I want to first introduce kind of the steps to this and kind of a broad level how I would approach this, and then I want to give some concrete examples to you and I'll be throwing a bunch of links into the blog post for this episode as well. So if you're a person who wants to follow along or just write it down and come back to you later, that's going to be at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 203. All right, let's get to it. So here's the very first thing that I would do I would find a theory or a framework that works for you. Now you can find one that's really broad. You can find one that is specific to an identity group and kind of go from there. But find some theory or framework that speaks to you and I'll be sharing several over the next couple of episodes. Then I would break it down as needed. Some of your students are not going to need the breakdown and some of the theory is going to need to be broken down, especially for your younger kiddos. So, simplifying language, condensing the number of attributes, that's the kind of thing I would do for a breakdown. And again, you may break it down. And then your students are like actually, I like the nuance of the other thing, I can do that and great. But again, I'm thinking very intentionally about the broad range of a three-year-old all the way to an 18-year-old who might be doing this, or above. You know, you might have some students who are 20, 21. So, thinking about all of this and I mean even at the college level I think it's helpful to think about this. So do what's best for your age range. 

01:59
Now, find theory or framework, step one. Step two break it down. Step three invite students to apply it and here's the kicker using modern, interesting media, something that is interesting to them. I have often used things like advertisements or TV shows or movies. Music videos particularly for older students, is really exciting Anything that is relevant to them. It could be a story you're reading in class, but just make sure it's a really interesting story and something that students are excited to do. Now, of course, you can use it in anything you write. You can apply these to historical documents, you can apply these to a novel that is not super interesting, but I think to practice it at first, we want to do it with things that are really high interest for students, so that they're talking about it, using it, figuring out the nuance. High interest for students, so that they're talking about it, using it, figuring out the nuance. And then you'll hang your visual reminder like an anchor chart in the classroom somewhere and you will invite application to more of the course content or texts that you ultimately want students to be able to grapple with and apply these frameworks to. So again, find the theory framework, break it down for students, invite students to apply it using really interesting things, interesting media. Then hang the visual reminder and apply it to course content. That's the flow we're working with. 

03:08
So let's actually just dive into an example. We'll start with a high school example that I used in my gender studies class. Now I use because I was familiar with it with my gender studies background Nussbaum's theory of objectification, so I will link to that in the blog post for this episode and I kind of broke it down. I taught multilingual learners who are fairly new to the English language at the high school level, so I wanted to keep the concepts really rigorous. I wanted to have interesting media that they have seen in their lives or could easily connect to conceptually, but I didn't want the barrier to be the really high academic words that, to be honest, I had to look up. I mean, like she uses words like fungibility and I was like I have no idea what that means. You know and at this point I had a master's degree I'm like this is just something that needs to be broken down for most people. So, all of that considered, and maybe I would do this differently were I to do it again, but here's what I did and I will actually link to a PDF version of the slide deck that I use with my students. 

04:04
Again, this was like your three of my teachings, so perhaps not my best work. Feel free to critique. But this is what I did. I showed the exact kind of wording that Nussbaum uses. So I think she has like seven or eight elements and I put those on the screen for students and then I said, okay, listen, we're gonna break it down. I'm gonna give you a visual and kind of a more simple word to understand kind of the three categories that she's talking about and that I want you to be able to apply, and then we're going to look at print advertisements that relate to gender and you're going to analyze them for the applicability of any of these categories. So how I broke it down were three categories as follows One, powerless. 

04:43
So the idea of women being depicted as powerless in these advertisements was something they were looking for. The second was property women being treated as property, something that is owned, something that is kind of used as a tool of instrumentality, and women being disposable. So again, this is like considering the gender binary, considering presentation of gender. Right, there's a lot of stuff here that we're like asterisking, but just for like simplicity's sake, we have powerless, property and disposable. Now you can think about how to go beyond the gender binary in applying these, but these are kind of the three categories that we put up there in connection to Nussbaum's theory of objectification of women. 

05:21
So again, I presented Nussbaum's language, broke it down into these three categories, had a clear visual with each one, one per slide, and then invited students to go on a gallery walk where I put printed advertisements around the room and then they had to label. I can't remember if I did this on their note sheet or they had to put like a sticky note up. I don't think I was flush with sticky notes at this point, so they might have just written on a note sheet which you know like station one or advertisement one was which one of these? Or are there multiple kind of categories present in this advertisement? And then we would discuss it all at the class. So again, this was during a media critique units and we did a gallery walk of those high interest visuals and use the theory, broken down into those three categories, to apply. 

06:05
Now, if I were teaching elementary school, this would look probably a little bit different. I actually love the idea and I've done this with I think it's always fifth grade, but I think it could work even lower. I would do a student-developed framework and I would invite students to do the gender box activity where students are going to list like traditional gender expectations and again, I would be very specific in my framing of this Like this is not what we in this class believe, but what we often see in advertisements, in people talking about this, that we're like oh, this is such an old, gross idea of, like women have to be this or girl I would actually use girls and boys language, probably but girls are this and boys need to be this, and so really naming that like this is something we're actively working to change. But like, here are some of the gross messages that we've kind of heard. So with girls, I might kind of like cue them if they need a prompt. They probably don't, they're probably eager to talk about this, to be honest. But if they needed a prompt, I might cue them to like beauty standards or kind of like physical weakness or whatever right. Like I might invite them to think about like what about sports? Like what do people say about girls in sports? And maybe it's all positive and that's actually awesome, that's really exciting. And then you can kind of select some advertisements that might counter that and be like wow, that's a really old, outdated thing. Like look at all this great stuff that we brainstormed. So feel free to like, go with the flow of whatever your students are saying, um, but you know, like boys, often we have like the physical strength or like violence being prevalent, and so what I would do at that point is, once you have kind of the boxes of genders and, again I think, problematize the fact that this is like a gender binary construct and to be like actually like boys can be all of the things, girls can be all of the things and we don't even have to identify as one or the other whatever. Wherever your students are, wherever you are in this kind of language, please feel free to lean into any of that. Now what I would do is, once students have kind of identified their own framework or kind of considerations or elements of kind of gender oppression, because it's bad for boys, it's bad for girls, right, it's bad for non-binary folks, it's like bad to even have the boxes. 

08:03
Once we have kind of developed that student impression framework, then we're going to have an activity and I'll link to some examples in the blog post again of inviting students to analyze some sample advertisements. Now, the sample advertisements I'm going to link are actually really interesting. They are video advertisements of toys targeted towards girls or boys, and they are some of the examples used in a study of, most interestingly, music that was very gendered in toy advertisements for children. So I just think there's so much richness in this. Students can analyze the music elements. They can analyze the visuals, the color palettes, who's in there, what are they doing, all sorts of things. But they can use their own framework to analyze those advertisements, which I think will be so cool because it's co-constructed with students. So again adds that motivating factor and that usability factor. 

08:55
So then, once you are done with that, I would if they didn't come out organically in the gender box activity, I would invite students at this point to share any examples of either stories. I mean, think about the stories they read. It could be a picture book, a story they've read on their own. It could be an advertisement, a movie, a TV show, any sort of examples. It could be like their friends who are, like you know, just living examples of gender expansiveness and joy. But invite students to share any examples of gender expansiveness and joy. But invite students to share any examples of gender expansiveness, you know, going beyond the binary gender, bending like all of the, just like breaking out of the boxes and invite students to share that. And, you know, come up with your own too. Just in case students are maybe not having examples at the ready, you can be ready to share some of yours, to show them what is possible. Because I think one of the things that I did when I was teaching early on that I would like to do better if I were to go back and reteach those same students in that same unit would be to think about the ways in which we counter oppression that could be fueled by joy, right, and could be fueled with like. This is kind of the way that we like things to be. 

10:13
I think often about the interview with the creators of Schitt's Creek and how they very intentionally wanted to develop something that doesn't have homophobia as like part a one of the main characters who identifies, as I think he identifies as pansexual in the show. I think he identifies as pansexual beyond the show, but anyways, I think that that is a really important component is that we make sure that we envision a world and then, of course, work in our lives to create that world and make that come to life that is fueled with joy and not oppression. So I think the the next piece of this is to invite that. If students generate, it, great. If you can add some ideas, great. 

10:59
One of the resources I will link to in the blog post for today is a clothing company called primarycom. I didn't realize they existed until someone recommended them for toddler clothes, which I absolutely love because they are very intentional in designing gender neutral clothing. They have a whole article about gender neutral clothing design and the principles behind it and the why and the how. It's super fascinating. So I'll actually link to that article in the blog post. 

11:24
But like that's an example, and so something as simple as like, from a design standpoint, considering gender expansiveness or the intentional selection of a male presenting child to, or a male identifying child to wear a dress, to model their dress, that they have right, like that is a choice, that is a gender expansive, socially just world, beautiful, making choice right. And so just maybe to have a couple things in your mind that you've identified. And one of the beautiful things about this right is that as teachers, we can be on the lookout for things like this. We can be kind of constantly collecting and curating these examples to be able to share with our students when we're ready to do a unit like this or as it comes up naturally in student conversation. And I think that's just one of the really fun parts of being a human and a person who is constantly learning and on this learning journey of life. But that's something that you know, you can consistently look out for, now that you're kind of thinking about it, curate that ready to share. 

12:29
So, again, I will link to all of those resources I have named in this episode in the blog post. I will also link to a free resource which is a slide deck for promoting students' critical analysis in general, so you'll see things like an intersectionality wheel. You'll see some of the questions posed by Dr Goldie Muhammad from her book Cultivating Genius, where she defines criticality for us. There are so many resources in here. I want you to go grab all that stuff and that's going to be at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 203. I'm super excited to learn how you're going to use these frameworks in your class and what kind of activities you'll go through, but I'm also really excited to learn how your students engage and what kind of cool conversation and observations and creations come up. So please let me know how this goes.