Women's history conference

On January tenth I spoke at a women's history conference. The objective of the conference was to give school teachers, and student teachers, information on how to create a more inclusive lesson plans.

In the morning, an archaeologist, was explaining how local history ties with national history. She had a mass dig in Toronto a local elementary school where she uncovered two graves, which, after 20 years of research, lead to the discovery of a tale of the underground railroad.

The afternoon there was a choice between a women speaker on black history settlements or a women speaker of indigenous and aboriginal history, pre contant and present day. I decided to go with the indigenous presentation. The history that I learned that day was quite basic, but it hit home and I enjoyed it.

At the end of the day, Brandon, Moon and I, all high school students, had to talk about our history experiences in school. They also wanted us to speak about the secondary school curriculum and how it has affected us. We had to explain how we learned it -what were beneficial strategies, and what could improve, ect.

This was a great opportunity for me. After being in my IDC course (gifted course) I was able to discuss the benefits of self-learning. The IDC course (interdisiplinary course) gives students a space where they can research subjects that they want to learn. They can research topics that are important to them, specific to their values, learning styles, and personal and acedemic goals.

When it came to speaking about history... I talked about inclusive history being more beneficial.

Of course for documents to be considered 'history' they must be 50 years old or older, but in our history texts books we learn one bias. There is information out there, there are documents and history books out there from other peoples perspectives.

An example is female history. In your history books I bet there are 5 pages that mention women in them. They probably mention that women were nurses during the war, or that women just started to get factory jobs.

Women are not well known in history courses- and they should be. Females need people to remember in history to feel a sence of belonging. Who were the women that gave up everything they had to fight for women's rights? We stand everyday to Oh Canada to remember the soldiers who faught for our freedom .. well we don't learn about the women who faught for MY freedom.

Another thing I touched upon at this conference was innovative learning. We're slowly developing different learning techniques - i.e smart boards, but other methods should be more normalized. For example DISCUSSION. Open discussion in the classrooms allows students to speak their mind freely, and to learn a variety of perspectives from different people. It is when we learn from other people, that we learn more about ourselves.

Another thing was how we actually sit in the classroom - row on row like soldiers. Robots. Machines. In my media literacy course, almost once a week we'd break routine and everyone would move their desks into a circle. This way we presented our info to a 'community' rather than, well, robots...