|
Using the Net for women's history
Sometimes the Internet is just the thing for assisting kids in researching less traditional schoolwork. This month, Kidspeak spoke with fourteen-year-old Christa, from Austin, Texas, who had the opportunity to participate in an all-girls technology club and an all-girls women's history class. By Alicia M. Bartol |
 ust over 150
years ago, women suffragists met in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women's
rights convention. Today, the boys and girls in our classrooms may have only a
slight idea of this history, because they're growing up in an era of considerably
more equality. The women and girls' movement still gets notice in the nineties
though, and after talking with one Texas teenager, it appears that girls in our
schools like the attention. This month, Kidspeak spoke with fourteen-year-old
Christa, from Austin, Texas, who had the opportunity to participate in an all-girls
technology club and an all-girls women's history class. Although the two
were not officially related, the skills she learned in TechGrrlz came in handy when
studying women's history.
Christa likes to tell the story about how she entered the women's history class at Fulmore Middle School. "It kinda started as a coincidence, because at the very beginning of the school year, we had about 12 or 15 people that didn't have a fourth period, and they were all girls. Everybody was also missing a social studies course." Her soon-to-be history teacher, Ms. Hiner, set out to work on creating a women's history course, and the class began in mid-September. Christa said, "More girls heard about it and said, 'Well that's really cool; I want to be in that class.' So by the time December rolled around, there were 20-30 girls." |
 Belle Boyd, a Confederate spy. |
 f
course, history is serious stuff, and Ms. Hiner kept the girls thinking.
Christa explained, "Ms. Hiner really wanted us to learn about what women
had done, because things wouldn't have been how they were if it weren't
for women. Like during wars, when women kept up the family farm when
the men were in battle ... I think [Ms. Hiner] really wanted to get
us interested in that kind of thing, and it worked." Christa explained
that the course was research-intensive, and that's where her knowledge
of technology would really come in handy. Not all of the girls in her
class were also in TechGrrlz though; in fact, most weren't. Christa
herself was only a part-time visitor to the after-school technology
club. "Ms. Hiner, my women's history teacher, noticed that [we] were interested in technology, but there were a lot of younger kids that were involved in TechGrrlz, "said Christa. The TechGrrlz, then predominantly sixth-graders, were busily learning HTML and designing a huge Web site called gURLwURLd. Christa, who was considering joining the club with a friend, said, "Well, you know, they were a bunch of sixth-graders, and we were in eighth grade." Ms. Hiner was sensitive to their concerns, but still encouraged them to come. "We still wanted to be involved with that, so [Ms. Hiner] approached us and we had our own part ... and we made our own Web pages." |
 hrista
came periodically to TechGrrlz and helped with the gURLwURLd pages while
also designing her own personal page. An aspiring meteorologist, Christa's
personal page comes complete with Doppler Radar. Christa said, "I
got a lot out of it! When I started talking to Ms. Hiner about
getting involved ... I really didn't know a lot about the Web. I learned
a bunch on the Internet while I was working on that." |
 Abigail Adams, First Lady and women's rights advocate. |
 lthough
she had learned some HTML previously, this was definitely better. "I
really got to use HTML a lot more than I had been. I kinda knew it from
the other class I had in sixth grade, but a lot of that was just copying
off the board, and then just inserting little things about me. Since
I didn't have Claris Homepage at home, which is what we would check
[the code] on, I had to just use HTML. That really taught me that a
heck of a lot better." Christa said she learned all sorts of things
that she hadn't expected, like how to design Web pages well, and how
to search faster and more efficiently. This was an immense help when
it came time to do her regular schoolwork. Her schoolwork included a lot of research for her women's history course, which was made more difficult by a lack of traditional resources. "In the eighth grade American History books today, you don't see women, there's hardly any at all. You see men and their accomplishments. They'll have a whole chapter on men and they did something great, and then they'll have a little paragraph about a woman who did something great." Since Christa was learning more about the Internet though, she felt comfortable going there for more details on women's history. "Actually, a lot of [my research] was on the Net, since books don't have [information]. I mean, unless it's a book about [a] specific woman, which there aren't too many of ... so we had to basically get almost all of our information off the Internet." |
 any
teachers know that topics that haven't traditionally made it into textbooks
are indeed on the Internet, but teaching kids to search safely for them
can be time-consuming. Christa's after-school hours with the TechGrrlz
had given her a lot of practice in finding useful and factual sites.
The Internet was "a pretty good resource," according to Christa. "I
mean, there's so much stuff out there now. It's pretty much impossible
not to find what you're looking for. Sometimes I'll start with a broad
category, like the role of women in the Civil War; that's a huge
topic. From there, I narrow it down until I get one or two or three
specific people that were really active at that point in time." |
 Sojourner Truth, slave, abolitionist, evangelist and suffragist. |
nce
she narrows it down, Christa turns to the Internet. If looking for Sojourner
Truth, for instance, she might "look for 'slavery'and 'famous black
women' or 'famous African American women.'" Sometimes sites are not
specifically about one person, so these types of searches might let
students find both general and specific information on an uncommon topic.
For students who are still narrowing it down, sometimes broad searches
can lead them to the discovery of a person or event they're really interested
in. In this case, we not only found Sojourner Truth in two clicks, but
we also found resources on the role of women in slave families, as well
as links to other female slaves like Harriet Tubman, Ellen Craft, Harriet
Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley. Christa points out though, that not everything
is just two clicks away. In this particular case, women may be listed
under more than one name, and women slaves under two or more names.
Fortunately, many sites found through broad searches often have "links"
pages with connections to more specific sites, where you can get more
clues to refine your search. "If I was looking for information on a specific woman that not too many people had heard of, but who still influenced history, it took a lot longer than, say, if I was looking for Harriet Tubman, which would only take a couple of minutes." Searching for a relatively unknown historical person could take up to an hour, she said. You would have to browse through a number of different Web pages to get information about the subject and the person, and use some of what you found to refine or redefine your search. |
| lthough
some of this lesser-known information also can be found in books, many
specialized resources are not available to school libraries. The Internet
allows students to find information on less well-known, and perhaps
more interesting, research topics. Christa, and many students like her,
are only just beginning to feel the power of the Internet. In her case,
learning to better utilize the Internet's power helped her succeed in
a non-traditional class, where outside resources were often the rule,
not the exception. |
|
