Woman-positive writing group

For the first couple of months of the writing group, we earnestly watched for observations we could make that indicated something positive was happening for women in the mixed male/female class. Upon reflection, we are not sure what we thought we would observe. The literacy objective to help students improve their writing ability was always clear. What was less clear was what exactly it meant to both incorporate an approach that was specifically supportive of women students and to observe the consequences of that approach.

We were hoping to create a comfortable, supportive environment in which students, women in particular, would feel they could speak out, offer opinions, express their ideas, bring forward their unique perspective on a variety of topics, and be supported when doing that. We realized that this didn't sound particularly radical. Surely we try to do that in every class we teach. So what then did we think made this writing group particularly positive for women?

At the time, the very act of defining the class as positive for women was one kind of step in that direction. The power of naming the experience, at least for a while, became the experience. Eventually, however, frustration and doubts about what we were doing, or not doing, began to niggle at us. There was no shortage of exciting literacy achievements to observe. We saw students become able to move first draft copy to a more polished state. We observed students develop the ability to critically analyze and comment on each other's work. We saw a growing confidence in their writing skills and pride in their finished products.

We did not have much to record, however, that seemed particularly feminist and for that we blamed our observation skills. We had some comments from female students which raised a women's perspective on a specific issue, but we had nothing of the meaty challenging debate we had hoped to stimulate in this literacy writing class.

JOURNAL ENTRY - MARY ANN ----------- Dec. 4, 1991

Paula started the class by talking about some of the connections to peace she noticed in students' writings. She talked about the joy the women felt when fighting between countries ended and loved ones returned from dangerous situations. In this piece I noticed that there was no mention of nationalist sentiments - no joy about which country had won or lost, but only that people were safe. Is that a woman's perspective? I think so.

In the writing class we used a thematic approach accepting some direction from students on the choice of themes as well as our own choices. During the year, we wrote on the themes of Identity, Peace, and Fashion (chosen by us) and Love/ Hate and Employment (chosen by the students). These themes are mentioned only to show how our thinking changed as we worked through the project. We thought that the first two themes of Identity and Peace would lend themselves particularly to a feminist perspective. We imagined the rich and enlightening feminist discussions that would arise from these themes.