Transforming Good Girls into Smart Women

As I started reading “Voices and Silences in Our Classrooms: Strategies for Mapping Trails Among Sex/Gender, Race, and Class” by Bell and Golombisky, their notion of the Good Girl deeply resonated with me on different levels.

In my own academic experience, I associate my own silence in the classroom to the notion of the Good Girl in combination with my ethnicity. Bell and Golombisky define the Good Girl as a white, middle-class type, containing the “cultural pressure to conform to the dominant conventional image of the ideal, perfect girl –who is always nice and good, who never hurts other people’s feelings…and who contains her feelings, especially anger.” (p. 296). Further, the pressures and consequences of this type is very different for Good Girls who are women of color. When we insert the Good Girl in academia, researchers found common themes: “white girls begin to silence themselves at adolescence, girls of color are caught in class and racial binds that make them invisible and unwelcome in the classroom, and the education system reinforces this decline.” (p. 297) When the Good Girl is faced with various forms of gender bias, “including a lower quality and quantity of classroom attention”, Good Girls begin to reside in their own silence. (p. 297)

In my own experience, I can relate to the Good Girl. Throughout my undergraduate career, I was a Good Girl. I spent my undergrad laser focused on my academic career, I rarely missed a class, wrote down every single due date in my planner, I took diligent notes, completed every assignment, and assessed every line of the syllabus. I spent most of my undergrad focused on receiving high grades and ducking my head through class. I rarely, if ever, spoke up in a classroom. And though I was deeply invested in the courses I took (mostly my comm courses) and committed to my learning, I was not confident in my own thoughts, opinions, or ideas to share them in front of an entire class. In fact, though I am speaking from past experience, I still struggle with the notion of the Good Girl in myself today. Though I am hyper-aware of the Good Girl in graduate school, I am still working and fighting to change it every time I walk into a graduate class. Reflecting upon this, I think I have made strides of improvement since my undergrad, but there is so much room for more. Put lightly (or maybe not so lightly), I pine for the confidence of a straight white man in a college classroom. But even then, I know that’s not exactly what I really want. I want the confidence of a Hispanic woman in a classroom, whatever that means for me.

Though I personally related to the Good Girl, as I was reading I also thought of several girls in my COMM 1010 class. I have some Good Girls who are white, black, and Hispanic. In particular, I find myself thinking about a group of four Hispanic girls who sit near each other in class, each of which have never spoken up in a class discussion or in front of the entire class at all. But when we do group activities in class, I speak to them one-on-one and they each share their thoughts and ideas with me. They are the quintessential Good Girl. I think as someone who can deeply relate to the Good Girl, I have a soft spot for the Good Girls in my classroom. Though I feel their pain, their discomfort, and even their complicity in the “comfort of the known” of being the Good Girl, I think I have a responsibility to encourage and empower them. I want to be able to create a classroom that invites the ideas of everyone, but specifically the Good Girls who remain silent. Bell and Golombisky describe several activities that can encourage the Good Girl to participate in class, including Think/Pair/Share, Write and Example, Make a List, and Think of Everything You Know About. These activities are easy and applicable to apply to any classroom lecture or discussion. Even further, bell and Golombisky discuss other strategies, such as “pay to talk” days and the closing ritual. In my own classroom, I am interested in applying the closing ritual to each class. Though it seems uncomfortable and awkward, I wonder how this strategy can work in COMM 1010 – does it have the power to truly encourage the Good Girls to share their smart ideas with the class?

As an instructor, I know that I want to encourage the Good Girls to share their smart ideas with the class, because I know they have them. If I can take any part in encouraging a Good Girl in her transformation into a Smart Woman, I will know that I have done something good.

#eyeswideopen