New curriculum targets ‘girlfighting,’ builds allies
Contact: Kay Hyatt (207) 581-2761
Orono, Maine — A new research-based curriculum is targeted to help middle schools change the subtle — but hurtful — ways girls fight and bully one another. The goal of “From Adversaries to Allies: A Curriculum for Change,” designed by researchers and students at the University of Maine and Colby College, offers strategies for girls to relate to one another and better understand stereotypical messages that often lead to behaviors such as betrayal, exclusion, rumor mongering, teasing and harassment.
The curriculum will be piloted in 10 Maine schools, then evaluated and refined. It is available to any interested school, according to Mary Madden, assistant research professor at the UMaine College of Education and Human Development. Madden and Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colby, are co-authors of the curriculum. They will present a workshop on the project at the October 22 “Girls Will be Girls: A Curriculum for Change” conference at UMaine.
The curriculum is the result of two years of development based on research not only by Madden and Brown, but also on the work of others over the past 25 years who examined the ways adolescent girls interact and express themselves as they struggle to find a place in a culture that overvalues beauty, romance and perfection.
“Girls too often come to see themselves and each other as bodies to be looked at or as girlfriends of popular boys,” Madden and Brown point out in the curriculum. “It’s not surprising, then, that adolescent girls are most likely to compete and fight with other girls over boys, sexuality, attitude and appearance.”
While the subtly of “girlfighting” is often under the radar screen of educators, the pain of targeted girls is obvious to their parents, Madden believes. “What girls do to one another can be awful,” she says. “We want girls to understand how the culture sets them up to be cruel to one another through unrealistic images and expectations. This causes insecurity, which girls often divert from themselves by targeting another more vulnerable girl.”
This negative cycle can be broken, Brown and Madden say, and that’s the goal of the activities presented in the eight-unit, step-by-step curriculum, which begins with creating a facilitated group where girls meet once a week, become an active alliance and learn to challenge damaging attitudes and assumptions about girls and their behavior.
While girls who are allies aren’t necessarily friends who hang together outside the curriculum group, they are willing to value differences, understand experiences girls share in common and support the right of girls to be all they can be, according to Madden and Brown. This taking control, they say, is an important social action goal of the curriculum.
The curriculum is intended to run through the school year. More information about “From Adversaries to Allies: A Curriculum for Change” is available from Madden mary.madden@umit.maine.edu, Brown lmbrown@colby.edu, or Hardy Girls Healthy Women at www.hardygirlshealthywomen.org. Information about the October 22 conference is available from the UMaine Women’s Resource Center, (207) 581-1508.