Girls and Leadership Service-Learning Proposal
Contact Information
Samantha Daley: sdaleyucf@knights.ucf.edu; (954) 636-9096
Rachel Miles: ramiles@knights.ucf.edu; (321) 331-3602
Emily Vrotsos: evrotsos@knights.ucf.edu; (352) 812-2137
Community Partner Profile
Community Partner: Young Women Leaders Program
Address: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816
Contact: 407-823-6502
Mission Statement: “The Young Women Leaders Program is a mentoring program sponsored by the UCF Women’s Studies Program . . . YWLP promotes middle school girls’ leadership abilities, pairing collegiate women with middle school girls. In mentoring pairs and small groups of Big and Little Sisters, participants focus on learning competence and autonomy, independent thinking, empowerment, self-esteem, and encouraging girls to think about their futures.” (http://womensstudies.cah.ucf.edu/ywlp/)
Political and/or Social Basis for Organization: As stated above, the basis for the organization is to promote positive self-image and encourage leadership skills in young girls who are at an important part of their developmental stages (http://womensstudies.cah.ucf.edu/ywlp/).
Community Needs: Members of the YWLP will benefit from extra assistance organizing and running alumni events and UCF day in the form of running lesson plans and engaging the girls in activities that encourage and acknowledge how they are leaders in their everyday lives.
Memorandum
TO: Meredith Tweed
FROM: Rachel Miles
DATE: 30 September 2011
RE: Proposal to Write a Feasibility Report for a Service Learning Project
Need of the Community Partner
Youth leadership is highly undervalued in American society. While complicates the leadership efforts of adolescents in general, it is especially relevant when considering girls’ leadership. With only a few role models, either “real world” or fictional, of women and/or girls in positions of leadership to look up to, and with their own attempts at leadership so often discouraged or ignored, girls may find it difficult to view themselves as leaders. Apart from its potential long-term effects on the emergence of future women leaders, this also has more immediate short-term effects, including possible struggles with self-esteem, self-confidence in themselves and their work, and other issues of self-image and conduct that may go underdeveloped in girls who are so infrequently encouraged to think critically about and give voice to their own experiences and decisions.
Plan Proposal
As part of working with YWLP, an organization focused on helping girls develop and use leadership skills, our project will address much the same need. In response to the specific needs we have so far seen demonstrated by this semester’s group of little sisters, we have shifted the focus of our work with the girls to more effectively address bullying. We hope to support the girls in exploring ways to respond to bullying (including cyber-bullying) of themselves and others, and possible ways to creatively raise others’ awareness of the bullying problem, on- and offline.
Through the creation of a ’zine, a Twitter account, a scrapbook, and two videos by the middle school girls in YWLP and a anti-bullying lesson on UCF Day and an academic blog by our service-learning group, we will be meeting the needs of our community partner. This approach will allow the girls to create and have agency in their own spaces and will allow our group to tackle the topic of bullying directly by engaging the girls to find their own positive leadership influence in their everyday activities and also in technological endeavors.
Rationale for Women’s Studies
Action
In order to fulfill our service-learning requirement, our group has several different components that we will be implementing as a work-in-progress throughout the semester. Apart from working with the girls, we will also be creating an academic blog to which we will be documenting our progress, including our activism logs and other conclusions we will be drawing as the semester continues. We will be attending the weekly meetings and participating on the weekend alumni events.
The largest portion of our project will be compiling a ’zine wholly developed and executed by the middle school girls participating in YWLP. The girls will also be decorating a scrapbook to document their progression throughout this semester’s service-learning project, which will be an ongoing part of their YWLP experience. We will also be engaging the girls on the internet by creating spaces for them on Twitter and Youtube. A Twitter account will be set up by our service-learning group and we will post thoughts the girls turn in on slips of paper at the end of every meeting. The girls will also be creating a YWLP promotional video and an independent video of their own creative design. On UCF Day we will be conducting a lesson on bullying, with a section on cyber bullying. We will also be working on the scrapbook, voting on the ’zine’s title, and filming the videos.
Timeline
Our completed project will be submitted on 29 November 2011. Given YWLP’s schedule, our in-field work will extend a few days beyond this date; however, the bulk of our research will be completed by 17 November, and the major creative components of our project will be ready for our in-class presentation of it on 8 December.
9/23/2011—First Group Meeting (Big sisters met up and created a rough plan)
9/25/2011—Alumnae Potluck
10/5/2011—Big Sister (“Bigs”) Meeting
10/12/2011— Little Sister (“Littles”) Meeting
10/15/2011—UCF Day
10/19/2011—Bigs Meeting
10/23/2011—Alumnae Nursing Home Visit
10/26/2011—Littles Meeting
11/2/2011—Bigs Meeting
11/6/2011—Alumnae Mud Walk
11/9/2011—LittlesMeeting
11/13/2011—Alumnae Soup Kitchen Volunteering
11/16/2011—Bigs Meeting
11/19/2011—Alumnae Picnic in the Park
11/25/2011—Finish compiling the ’zine using girls’ submissions and publish (by combination of printed copies for the girls and PDF for the bigs) to distribute at the last Littles meeting.
11/29/2011—Submit final project report, including creative components (’zine, scrapbook pages, video made with the girls, etc.).
11/30/2011—Littles Meeting
12/8/2011—In-class presentation of project
Works Cited
“UCF: CAH: Young Women Leaders Program.” UCF: CAH: Women’s Studies Program: Mentoring Programs for Faculty. University of Central Florida, 2010. Web. 28 Sept. 2011.
Word Count:
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Introduction Post
Hello!
I’m Rachel (or Miles, as Emily calls me), currently a junior at UCF. I am majoring in Literature and minoring in Women’s Studies, with hopes of earning a certificate in Service Learning and a second minor in some has-yet-to-be-determined field. My interest in this class stems from a few points. First, although I have been a registered Women’s Studies minor since my second semester at UCF, I have never actually taken a Girls’ Studies class face-to-face. I took Leandra Preston’s Virtual Girls class last spring, and while I did not have enough time in my schedule to give it the attention and commitment it really deserved, it was enough to pique my interest in the subject of girls as a field and topic of discussion. Perhaps even more importantly, and as we have already begun touching on in this class, girls as a topic of discussion are too often forgotten or erased erroneously as a lumped-in category of a larger group, usually women in discussion of women’s rights and general children in discussion of children’s rights. If I took away one thing from Virtual Girls, it is that, while this is something of which I have certainly been guilty in the past, it is just as certainly something I cannot afford to continue with in the future as I continue to explore Women’s Studies. Taking this course, then, is not me trying to make amends; rather, it is an effort to start myself, my scholarship, and my growing work as a feminist from a new position, a fresher perspective that will allow me to more accurately work with the issues that have become so important to me since starting college.
Secondly, and, I’ll admit, seemingly contradictory to the last point, I have been interested in this course for reasons of my own experience. Most recently, this is due to my involvement with UCF’s chapter of YWLP, an organization aimed entirely at addressing the topic of girls and leadership. However, thinking about it now, my experience with this topic and the ideas foregrounding it predates my awakening as a feminist. Throughout grade school, I was involved in Girl Scouts, and very proudly at that. But despite my pride, this involvement was something I also felt a sense of external discouragement towards—not from my parents, but easily from my peers at school and friends from other clubs and social activities. This definitely frustrated me, as I could see no legitimate reason for it. Girl Scouts, like Boy Scouts, emphasized developing leadership skills through service projects, community involvement, and the creation of a supportive, networked group of peers undergoing the same. Admittedly, neither organization could easily be dubbed “cool” in a high school setting, but there still seemed to be more of a willingness to accept my male friends’ involvement in scouting than my own. At the time, I didn’t have any of the academic jargon and theoretical terms to use to put my frustrations into words; I just knew that it bothered me enormously that I was almost constantly being told in every setting outside my troop meetings that what I was doing, something that made me feel happy and confident in myself and my decisions, was not something I should want to do. I do have the words to describe it now, but I still feel like those aren’t enough on their own. I want to also understand more about the issues at work, why those actions were and are discouraged for girls and what I can do now, even though I am no longer a Girl Scout myself, to help change things.
And for the record, I have read, understand, and agree to the terms of the course syllabus and the blogging protocols.
I’m Rachel (or Miles, as Emily calls me), currently a junior at UCF. I am majoring in Literature and minoring in Women’s Studies, with hopes of earning a certificate in Service Learning and a second minor in some has-yet-to-be-determined field. My interest in this class stems from a few points. First, although I have been a registered Women’s Studies minor since my second semester at UCF, I have never actually taken a Girls’ Studies class face-to-face. I took Leandra Preston’s Virtual Girls class last spring, and while I did not have enough time in my schedule to give it the attention and commitment it really deserved, it was enough to pique my interest in the subject of girls as a field and topic of discussion. Perhaps even more importantly, and as we have already begun touching on in this class, girls as a topic of discussion are too often forgotten or erased erroneously as a lumped-in category of a larger group, usually women in discussion of women’s rights and general children in discussion of children’s rights. If I took away one thing from Virtual Girls, it is that, while this is something of which I have certainly been guilty in the past, it is just as certainly something I cannot afford to continue with in the future as I continue to explore Women’s Studies. Taking this course, then, is not me trying to make amends; rather, it is an effort to start myself, my scholarship, and my growing work as a feminist from a new position, a fresher perspective that will allow me to more accurately work with the issues that have become so important to me since starting college.
Secondly, and, I’ll admit, seemingly contradictory to the last point, I have been interested in this course for reasons of my own experience. Most recently, this is due to my involvement with UCF’s chapter of YWLP, an organization aimed entirely at addressing the topic of girls and leadership. However, thinking about it now, my experience with this topic and the ideas foregrounding it predates my awakening as a feminist. Throughout grade school, I was involved in Girl Scouts, and very proudly at that. But despite my pride, this involvement was something I also felt a sense of external discouragement towards—not from my parents, but easily from my peers at school and friends from other clubs and social activities. This definitely frustrated me, as I could see no legitimate reason for it. Girl Scouts, like Boy Scouts, emphasized developing leadership skills through service projects, community involvement, and the creation of a supportive, networked group of peers undergoing the same. Admittedly, neither organization could easily be dubbed “cool” in a high school setting, but there still seemed to be more of a willingness to accept my male friends’ involvement in scouting than my own. At the time, I didn’t have any of the academic jargon and theoretical terms to use to put my frustrations into words; I just knew that it bothered me enormously that I was almost constantly being told in every setting outside my troop meetings that what I was doing, something that made me feel happy and confident in myself and my decisions, was not something I should want to do. I do have the words to describe it now, but I still feel like those aren’t enough on their own. I want to also understand more about the issues at work, why those actions were and are discouraged for girls and what I can do now, even though I am no longer a Girl Scout myself, to help change things.
And for the record, I have read, understand, and agree to the terms of the course syllabus and the blogging protocols.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)