Activism Log #6

Activism:

My activism this week included attending a Big Sister meeting and a Facilitator meeting. My group members and myself are getting ready to bring our project to a close for this semester, so we are working on this semester's scrapbook and editing the videos so we can put them up on Youtube. The Twitter is up to date with only one week left worth of tweets from our Littles. We have not gotten enough submissions for our 'zine this semester, so we will be creating just one 'zine overall from both the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 terms, unless the Littles bring a lot of submissions to the final Alumnae event this Saturday, Nov. 19th. I am still working on our UCF Day lesson and researching different possibilities for improving it and making it more accessible to all of the girls, and not just those girls in our group that are bullied.

Reflection:

This week's reading of "Girl Talk" made me strongly consider the effects of socioeconomic status upon girls' ideas of leadership. As they surveyed 150 girls from "high need" areas with open-ended questions about leadership that allowed them to use their own language in their answers, it showed that informal leadership was a type of leadership that they definitely valued, even if they didn't have the same language as we do to express it (Shinew and Jones 55). Other surveys that did not have accessible language that the girls could understand completely were difficult for the girls to identify with in their own lives. In coming up with a more accessible bullying lesson for the girls in which we hope to incorporate more of their own voices in response to our open-ended questions, we hope that the girls can take what they are learning and recognize its existence already in their lives. "[The surveyed girls'] emphasis on informal leadership roles and more feminine definitions of what it means to be a good leader implies that much of the formal curriculum and language used to cultivate leadership among these groups fails to resonate with their lived experiences" (Shinew 65).

Reciprocity:

This week's reading and research has taken me back to my own girlhood and has led me to consider all of the ways in which my first-world, white, upper middle-class, educated, Catholic upbringing (among many many other facets of my life) affected how I approached leadership then and how I approach leadership now. I consider how in middle school if I didn't win the elections for Class Mayor I wasn't a good leader, when in fact I was a great leader because of my informal leadership acts like loving my little brother or helping the librarian in the school library. I am coming to recognize now what the expectations of leaders were, and that these often transactional expectations that may have limited the type of leader I always saw myself as even just up to a year or so ago. I can appreciate how I have arrived in the place I am, today, and I can understand both the strengths, weaknesses, and endless conundrums that make up the conditions that shaped the leader I am and the leadership qualities I value.

Works Cited

Shinew, Dawn M. and Deborah T. Jones "Girl Talk: Adolescent Girls' Perceptions of Leadership." Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005: 55-65. Print.