On the occasion of International Women's Day on the 8th of March, I designed an activity that would make my students use their critical thinking skills to decide whether some popular songs have sexist content, whether hidden or not. The aim of this activity was, in a way, to activate the 'sexist radar' in my students and to be aware of sexism in our society.
I chose some current hits but also some older songs, in an attempt to show that these issues are not new. Terms such as infantilisation, objectification and banalisation were discussed and we looked for instances of them in order to create awareness of how they can be put into words and images. If there was something I really wanted to achieve was to promote feminism as an equalitarian movement, which favours equal rights and equal treatment between the genders, and that a wrong is a wrong regardless of who does it.
This activity encouraged a lot of debate in class- students helped each other understand the difference between healthy behaviours and attitudes (for example, a feeling of sadness after a relationship breaks up) and unhealthy and potentially dangerous ones (jealousy, manipulation, stalking). We also touched on the role of social media in human relationships, but did not explore this in a lot of detail as this alone would make for a long and complex project.
The assessment rubric was quite simple:
I definitely think this activity works well for older groups of students. Some of the songs and videos chosen were quite explicit and this needs to be taken into consideration in order to choose whether to show the videos in class, or to just talk about the lyrics. The most interesting presentations were, unsurprisingly, about the songs which attempt to hide sexism and about the ones which display deep-rooted sexist behaviours that have, to quite an extent, been normalised to such a point that a lot of people do not perceive them.
I would definitely like to repeat this activity in the future.
Thanks for checking in! See you in the next post!
Maite
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