Tuesday, October 11, 2022

A Reflection on the UN International Day of the Girl 10.11.22

Today is the UN International Day of the Girl. 

"Our time is now—our rights, our future".


Before you read this, I want you to stop and think about a girl you know.  Maybe she is in your classroom, your team, your club, your neighborhood, or your family. What is her strength? What is important to her? What barriers might you be able to remove so that she can accomplish a goal or work to solve a problem?


I am going to share a story of a girl whose leadership impacted my work as an educator. I have been thinking a lot about her as I read the stories of young women across the world who are being denied an education.  The current data from UNESCO estimates close to 130 million young women are unable to attend school, especially secondary school.  I met her when she was 19, and a refugee from Baghdad who had lost a year of education in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where she wasn’t allowed to go to school because she had no transcripts. She spoke functional English, had experienced war, and faced classmates who were younger, and who had very different life experiences and cultural practices. Her goal, to graduate from high school, become an engineer, and help other refugees. The barriers in her path - the Ohio Graduation Test, American Literature, and 24 hours in a day.  She was added as a student in my environmental science class. On the first day, she got out her notebook and asked me what she needed to do to be successful.  I did a lot of research on the best strategies for supporting dual language learners in science.  She gave me feedback on what worked, suggested strategies that she found worked for her and then helped to implement those strategies in my classroom and work with teachers in the classrooms where other students who spoke various arabic dialects were struggling.  [Our favorite strategies - visual word walls, side by side text English/Arabic, sentence stems, and real time feedback in Google Docs] We developed a trust relationship which led to richer conversations, including what I could do to support other dual language learners  in our school.  She suggested we start a study team for other Arabic language speakers. This resulted in a daily lunch time discussion we co-led around culture, literature, math, science, language, and setting goals - often with her translating between 3 or 4 different dialects. She gained confidence and volunteered as a translator at the Cleveland Refugee Center.  She often stayed up until 4:00 in the morning completing assignments from her various classes, first painstakingly translating them, then writing responses in Arabic, then translating that back to English using Google translate, and eventually with her own growing English skills.  As her teacher, watching the  process she developed for learning and completing assignments, the importance of building working vocabulary and cultural experiences for dual language learners became important to me. Idioms, references to pop culture, local customs and phrases, lack of common experiences with classmates who had grown up in the community,  all posed significant challenges to her ability to actually get to the core of the learning she needed to focus on.  I was more intentional about the texts I chose for all my students to work with as a result. I looked for text with graphic support and explicit definitions of vocabulary. I spent time previewing texts to identify words or cultural phrases I would need to pre-teach, or find an alternative for.  We worked together to prepare for the OGTs. She was able to pass the math, social studies, and science OGT, and her academic grades and attendance met the requirements for a waiver request, allowing her to graduate.  Her goal, to become a chemical engineer.  She persevered through Tri-C, then Cleveland State University, and led her engineering teams as a student. I think she still stayed up until 4:00 AM and I would still receive requests to share feedback with her in a Google Doc all the way through her college career.  She is now a chemical engineer for a cosmetics company and has a daughter of her own.  


 As educators, it is easy sometimes to not really see the power that is inside the girls we teach. Deficit thinking prevents us from finding ways to build on a student’s strengths and closes doors to opportunities that we should be providing.  Girls are leaders at all ages. They bring their own experiences and perspectives to the table. They need advocates and allies who are willing to set aside time to help them find resources, network with other leaders, organize their work, build the knowledge or skills they need, and amplify their voice. They need a safe environment to do their work.  We should be careful of the messages we unintentionally send to them, “you talk too much”, “put your hand down and let someone else answer”, ‘you are too loud”,  “you are being bossy”... to a person, every young woman in leadership that I have spoken to shared that they had heard these statements or a variation, as they moved through school. To a girl who is working to find her own leadership voice, these messages can shut that down very quickly.  So, as we recognize the International Day of the Girl, let’s be intentional about celebrating the unique perspectives the girls around us bring to our work and clear the path forward for them as they accomplish their goals and find novel solutions to problems we all face. This starts with asking them what they need.    


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