Missing Voices: Struggling to Engage Girls in the Classroom

La princesa esta triste. Que tendrá la princesa?
Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa.

The princess is sad. What troubles the princess?
Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth.

Ruben Dario, Sonatina

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Word of the Day (review)
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment

This post uses a lot of broad generalizations, particularly about gender, that I'm not entirely comfortable making, but it's to the end of verbalizing a vexing problem that I'm really passionate about, so I'm going to make them. Sorry, grey areas, you're being slighted. 

One of the biggest challenges I've faced so far in my first weeks of school is effectively engaging female students in the classroom. To vastly overgeneralize, the girls in my classes are devastatingly shy, particularly in the schools that lie outside the "casco urbano" (urban center, where I live). They giggle, cover their faces with their hands or their books, refuse to even try speaking, or give up easily if they make a mistake. Or just shut down entirely. This behavior isn't exclusively confined to female students, but it is more certainly more pronounced.

Usually the two or three really outstanding students in each class happen to be male. This has lead to some uncomfortable moments for me in which counterpart teachers have made comments like "What's going on here? It seems like the boys are better than the girls!" to urge the girls into talking. There are exceptions of course. One of my most stellar students happens to be pregnant. But in the classrooms I've observed so far, the trend of women outperforming men in the classroom is not in evidence.

Perhaps a communicative English classroom, featuring lots of movement and speaking and activities is more appealing to the active learning style of boys, which is awesome because this doesn't happen enough and according to a lot of teaching research, generally, appealing to more active learning styles is better for everyone. I'm using gendered dichotomies in a way that I don't like here, but I think you get the drift...My fear however is that my methods are somehow disempowering female students.

As a former overachieving student, who was always passionate about learning, and probably a bit of a precocious teacher's pet a lot of the time, I have trouble relating to this phenomenon as much as I am concerned about it. Secondly, as an American, I have to watch my reactions and remind myself that I'm from a culture where messing up is a pretty acceptable and normal part of life. In a classroom in an upper middle class suburb in the States, being shy, nervously giggling, and wasting class time would probably be more embarrassing than just trying to say a word you didn't know. Americans fearlessly butcher Spanish and French and Italian and German and Chinese.

So what can I do to help girls grasp the importance of a second language and motivate them to enjoy it, as well as school and learning more generally? What messages are they receiving outside the classroom from their families, from their daily lives or activities, or even their churches that lead to such behavior and how can I, as an outsider and a foreigner, help to encourage them to achieve and participate? My strategy so far has been to bestow absurd levels of positivity and encouragement on the students. (YES, YOU CAN do it. I know that you can. I would not ask if you couldn't. Just Try! Excellent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EXCELLENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Another, more subtle approach, is to give students women role models in the activities we do. In addition to having a female English teacher (moi, at a minimum) present in the classroom, which can sometimes be kind of rare in Rio San Juan, I try to make flashcards or use images with women in professional roles. For example, for a class on occupations, I made flashcards with a female doctor, police officer and engineer.

Somewhat relatedly to all this, I observed a Musa Dariana (Darian Muse?) contest during school this Saturday. Held to celebrate Nicaraguan poet and national hero Ruben Dario, it featured a female representative of each classroom competing to be the "Musa Dariana" of the school. Contestants had to dress up in traditional folklore costumes, answer questions about Ruben Dario's life (On what date did Dario die, and where? What newspapers did the poet write for? etc.) and then recite a passage from the poet's work, while wearing a different outfit, that supposedly corresponded to their poem. I had mixed feelings about the contest. I appreciated that it was more than a simple beauty contest- their outfits/get up only counted for 20% of their score, and it was awesome to see girls confident enough to take the stage and recite a poem in front of 200 people. However, it reified an outmoded concept, memorization, as the ultimate goal of learning, rather than praising critical thinking, writing your own poetry, being the next Ruben Dario... It is cool that the Nicaraguan educational system exposes kids to so much good poetry though. And that their national hero is a poet.

If any readers out there have suggestions for what to do motivate and encourage girls to feel comfortable and confident in a classroom (or any other public space) let me have em!