Teaching Intersectionallity in The Liars Club
Why is it important to teach intersectionallity??
The best way to start this discussion is to identify what exactly intersectionallity is. If you don't already know, intersectionallity is: the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual.
As a teacher it is important to teach intersectionallity as a lens because it shows students the way multiple components of our lives make up who we are. For instance, if you are an African American student, that is not all you are. You are a diverse make-up off all life experiences, not just the color of your skin. For this reason, intersectionallity is relevant to students and can easily be taught while also teaching characterization. (Gotta stick to this standards!)
The following link has a Prezi that goes through the pros and cons of teaching literature using intersectionallity. This could be used if wanted.
How to teach it:
There are a million ways to teach this idea, but today I am going to focus on the use of body maps. Body maps are a fun way to teach students characterization, and also offer the teacher a lot of flexibility in the lesson.
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This is an example of some of the questions students can answer, but as the teacher you can adapt them to suite your needs!
Using the above general idea, split the kids up into 5 groups.
Group one will focus on class.
Group two will focus on addiction.
Group three will focus on gender.
Group four will focus on mental illness.
Group five will focus on Mary's overall character.
As an example, the students with mental illness as the theme might answer some of the questions as follows:
What significant events has Mary experienced? Mary's mom was known as Nervous, which caused here to act rash at moments. She stood at the door of Mary's room and held a knife out. She tried to drive the car off the road into the river and kill Mary, her sister and her father. These experiences harmed Mary's ability to trust others.
Each question would be answered in this manner. To spark some creativity and increase engagement, do these on a large poster and have the students actually draw out the character. This also makes for a really cool product to put on the wall!!
The students will answer the questions solely on their focus. Each of the groups will present their version of Mary to the class, based only on their section of her life. Then the last group will show the overall character map. This will show 2 things. 1. It will show the way each of these components individually effect Mary's life, and 2. The way all of these things work together to make the final, and real Mary!
At the end be sure to discuss the way each of the individual parts worked together to create the Mary of the story! Remind the students that people are a unique makeup of a million parts of themselves. This can used to spark a class discussion, or can be used at face value to teach the intersectionallity!
Feel free to leave comments and tell me what you think! Have a way to make this better? Let me know!
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