Topical Lesson Plans Using the Global Feminisms Project

These lesson plans were developed with a generous project grant from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory.

Watch the Zoom recording of the October 9, 2021, Global Feminisms conference, “Teaching Global Feminisms: Using Activist Interviews Across Disciplines,” here!

List of Lesson Plans

Art and Feminism
In this lesson, students explore various definitions of art and artists’ roles and compare
them with definitions of feminist art, along with the role and practice of feminist artists.
Students reflect on the connections between art and social, historical and cultural
issues, as well as differences across countries and art forms. In the final assignment,
students create their own feminist art manifesto expressing their views of feminist art.
Black Feminisms
In this lesson, students draw from the analysis of primary and secondary sources to discuss the unique features of Black diasporic feminisms by analyzing interviews with Black feminist women from countries, alongside secondary sources. Students identify common understandings among them, the relation between personal and political identities in Black feminisms, and shared elements with mainstream or dominant feminisms.
Feminist Approaches to Leadership
In this lesson, students learn about feminist perspectives on leadership, including the varied forms of gender discrimination that affect female leaders in their activism, as well as how they translate their negotiation skills to build coalitions for social change. Also, students carry out research to evaluate how feminist perspectives bring new values and principles to organizational culture.
Gender
In this lesson, students are given various kinds of data and analytical tools to gain a gender perspective in analyzing phenomena. They examine images of gendered toys and read/watch lived experiences about gender socialization and/or coming out as an LGBT individual. They learn to analyze these various forms of evidence with the help of texts written by feminist scholars.
Gender-Based Violence: Domestic Violence
In this lesson, students learn to identify gender-based violence in its various forms, articulate global feminist perspectives, and analyze the roles of cultural and legal transformation in addressing gender-based violence.
How I Became an Activist
In this lesson, students reflect on how particular life experiences in women’s lives lead them to become activists and what a feminist activist practice means in different countries and sociohistorical contexts. Students consider relations between activism and leadership, activism and community, and the impact that activism can have in broader society. They identify turning points in life and the relationship between personal and political lives in activist practice. In the final assignment, students create a social media campaign for International Women’s Day.
Intersectionality
In this lesson, students learn about interlocking systems of oppression like gender, class, race and disability that multiply shape women’s experiences and understand how women build coalitions across differences in the United States and globally.
Interviews as Narratives, Data, and Sources
In this lesson, students learn the heterogeneity and richness qualitative methods, specifically narrative research, offers, and the differences and similarities in how different disciplines approach analysis of life narratives. Students will be able to generate new research questions, apply coding and analysis for oral history and life history research, by using the interviews in the Global Feminisms Project.
Representing Life Stories Using Digital Tools
In this lesson, students analyze activist women’s interviews to identify life events that shaped that person’s identity in order to build a timeline of the person’s life. Students discuss these events in light of the historical events from the country of origin of the interviewee, as well as the history of women’s rights in that country. In the final assignment, students use the timeline that they have created to build a digital interactive timeline using the open access tool Timeline JS.
Reproductive Rights/Reproductive Justice
In this lesson, students learn that decisions about sexual and reproductive health that seem uniquely personal respond to larger social arrangements. They are introduced to the concept of reproductive justice originated in U.S. Black Feminist thinking. Then, students examine different feminist perspectives around the world that emphasize the linkages between the defense of reproductive rights and achieving social justice using the example of debates and legislation around abortion.
Transnational Feminisms
In this lesson, students learn how several factors (history, culture, race, class) influence the ways feminist activists organize to fight gender inequality. They will understand how feminists create international coalitions while recognizing their differences through dialogue and consensus-building.
Women During Times of Political Transformation
In this lesson, students learn to distinguish the motivations and consequences of women getting politically involved in diverse contexts. They work with visual primary sources to comprehend how societal expectations alongside feminist activists’ creative strategies interact to create social change.

Who created the lesson plans?

Creation of these lesson plans and the other teaching resources was facilitated by a grant from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory called “Expanding the Reach of the Global Feminisms Oral History Archive.” The entire project team, which included Professors Sueann Caulfield, Abigail Dumes, Abigail Stewart and Wang Zheng, graduate students Eimeel Castillo, Marisol Fila and Özge Savas, and undergraduate students Macy Afsari, Karis Blaker, Zoe Boudart and Hanna Smith, worked on developing the materials. In particular, Eimeel Castillo, Marisol Fila and Özge Savas created the lesson plans, with the assistance and advice of Darin Stockdill, Instructional and Program Design Coordinator for the Center for Education Design, Evaluation and Research (CEDER) at the University of Michigan.

Listen to Eimeel, Marisol, and Özge discuss their creation process for each lesson plan in our Contextualizing Feminist Voices: The Lesson Plans series!

How to find which lesson plan works best for your class?

You can use the search function on the website to search for the key concepts or a method you want to teach. For example, you can search for the word “race” or the phrase “race and gender” or “oral history.” You will be directed to the lesson plans in which these concepts or methods are taught with various activities using feminist and critical pedagogies.

You can also search for the country sites you would like to teach about if your class has a particular geographical focus. Searching for the country site will bring up all the lesson plans that have activities using that country or countries. Of course you can always use material from different countries that you choose yourself! In addition, each country site’s webpage contains further information and materials that could be useful for teaching, with or without the lesson plans presented here.

How to use the lesson plans?

We are aware that each instructor has certain preferences, and every class is different. Therefore, all the suggested lesson plans give you lots of different choices and flexibility to pair things as you wish.

Each Lesson Plan essentially has three different kinds of materials.

A Lesson Plan which includes brief information on each related Activity and Assignment, as well as an overall description, and suggestions for how to use different parts of a Lesson Plan together.
The Activities (potentially more than one in a given lesson plan) and Assignments. These documents provide detailed information for in-class implementation of Activities or detailed grading rubrics for home Assignments.
The Handouts, Excerpts, Power Point Slides and Video Clips. These documents are the student-facing elements of a Lesson Plan that the instructor can choose to use in class or distribute to the students online.

In order to see if the lesson plan on a certain topic might be useful to you, the first document you should look at is the Lesson Plan itself. All the Activities, and Assignments suggested in a given Lesson Plan are linked within the Lesson Plan document, and downloadable separately or as an entire folder from the website.

We propose a sequence that can be found in each lesson plan, but the instructors are free to choose only the Activities and Assignments that are useful to them, especially if they have time concerns or particular different pedagogical goals. For each proposed Activity, the estimated duration is indicated in the Activity sheet, as well as on the page where the Activity is downloaded from.

Finally, consider combining lesson plans into modules or whole courses! Some examples of lesson plans that could be combined include Gender, Black Feminisms and Intersectionality; or How I Became an Activist and Feminist Approaches to Leadership and/or Transnational Feminisms; or Interviews as Narratives, Data, and Sources and Representing Life Stories using Digital Tools. Another combination might be Interviews as Narratives, Data and Sources, Representing Life Stories Using Digital Tools and How I Became an Activist.

We would love to hear from you if you use these materials in the classroom. We hope to continue updating the website with new teaching ideas and experiences. Contact us at info-globalfeminisms@umich.edu if you have any questions or to tell us about your experience with teaching using the Archive. We would like to know which lesson plans you used, which aspects of the lesson plans you found useful, and what could be improved.