Several educators have suggested a variety of curriculum interventions which could be tied to developmental goals. In a recent article (1972) I urged that counselors work with teachers in creating, planning, and teaching units aimed at the career development of females in the elementary, junior high, and senior high. Among suggestions for the elementary years were positive reinforcement and hands-on experiences with tools, auto mechanics, home maintenance, and political leadership; putting girls and boys in contact with atypical role models to help females gain the political savvy they need to assure equal opportunity; equal assignment of chores and leadership tasks; and utilization of both male and female community resource persons and media to show the work that humans do.
At the junior high we can use such strategies as helping teachers provide broad exploratory action-oriented experiences to introduce both sexes to the vocational and avocational implications of subjects; continued exposure to atypical role models both directly and through resource directories and multimedia; strength groups in which both boys and girls focus on potentials and develop action plans to become the kinds of persons they would like to be. Elimination of sex-linked courses in home economics and industrial arts is essential to keeping educational paths open to all kinds of occupations. Values clarification experiences, cross-age teaching, and tryout experiences tutoring young children can increase awareness of work opportunities and satisfactions.
At the senior high we need to help girls and boys continue their values clarification and examine their needs, drives, goals, interests, and abilities as they face real decisions about life style preferences and life patterns. They need information about the reality of discrimination, trends in the work force, stereotypes, and sexism. Apprentice or shadowing experiences with a variety of role models in preferred occupations and tryout tasks will help them reality test their preferences and tentative decisions. They need more specific information about educational paths and exposure to vocational specialties or college majors related to subjects in which they have a continuing interest and success. Direct courses in Psychology of Self, Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and Psychology of Careers as well as Women's Studies can facilitate such development. Life Planning Labs in which students have an intensive opportunity to examine values, potentials, goals, and priorities can also be helpful, as could a variety of well planned consciousness raising and role reversal exercises. Strategies summarized by the author include infusion through curriculum, exploratory work experience (paid and unpaid), career resource centers and multimedia approaches, hands-on experiences, role models, counseling, cross-age teaching, and staff development.
Mitchell (1972) recommended that the mis-education of girls might be redressed through a variety of curriculum strategies not unlike those already mentioned. She also recommends special training for counselors to eliminate sexism in career counseling. Simpson (1972) offered 11 specific steps in "Career Education-Feminine Version," including efforts by elementary educators to enlarge girls' vocational self-concepts; a variety of single and married role models; new curriculum materials portraying women in a variety of constructive life styles and occupational roles; teacher orientation to vocational preparation of women; women's history courses in social studies; training programs including opportunity to prepare for dual roles; and alternatives and supplements to in-school instruction related to vocational preparation.
Practitioner Examples
A number of creative teachers and counselors have moved beyond the conceptual level and have developed units, courses, and strategies for promoting female development. A few examples are presented here.
Ann Schmid, a fourth grade teacher, uses "the teachable moment" to help her children become sensitive to sexism and sex-role stereotyping in their readers and other curriculum materials. They wrote letters of protest to Hallmark regarding ways in which boys and girls were portrayed on greeting cards; they examined their illustrated ABC of Occupations book and rewrote it when they found stereotypic presentations of occupations (A as in Astronaut, B as in Beautician) with new illustrations. Both boys and girls work at the tool bench, bake cakes, rewrite stereotyped materials, and interview workers in non-traditional occupations.
Suzanne Laurich, a first grade teacher, in a series of career development lessons has boys and girls look at such topics as "Who Am I?" "Workers Who Come to Our Home," "Our Parents' Jobs," "Day Workers and Night Workers," and "What I Can Do" in non-stereotypic ways.
Ronnie Tallen and Claire Allyn helped boys and girls get more in touch with their own feelings, values, and self-concepts through a three-week unit on Male and Female Images. Students learned to analyze sex-role images on TV, in newspapers, and on radio; read fact and fiction, biographies and autobiographies; did independent study on women's issues (including the school's athletic policies); studied women in nontraditional occupations; interviewed workers in sex-typed occupations; and even analyzed their teachers' and parents' sexist language. Anne Saxenmeyer taught a Women's Liberation Unit directly in her ninth grade civics class. A counselor and a teacher, Georgia Loughren and Helen Olson, teamed to develop a three-week group counseling course on Women in the '70s. Students built a support system and looked at their own attitudes and expectations through a variety of awareness exercises, did some values voting regarding their attitudes about women's roles, and were exposed to a variety of role models through class visitors and field interviews-for example, the traditional homemaker, the dual career, the two-career family, the single adoptive parent, the single career woman.
Two senior high social studies teachers teamed to create a unit on Women in History under the Minnesota Council on Quality Education. Students investigate several facets of the role and status of women and look at the issues critically. A senior high counselor created a questionnaire for faculty to look at their own attitudes toward women's roles; another created a model for a faculty workshop on sexism in education; a group of counselors and teachers developed an interdisciplinary program called Women's Seminar in which senior women (and later senior men by their own request) spent 10 three-hour weekly sessions looking at women's changing roles and human sexuality. Another senior high counselor developed a Women in Literature course intended to facilitate female development by studying the lives of women who had functioned at higher levels of development based on the Kohlberg Scales of Moral Development and Loevinger Scales of Ego Strength. Erickson (1973) through a curriculum intervention found that it was possible to promote female growth through a positive program designed for that purpose.
Besides the K-12 efforts there has been a burgeoning of activity to promote female development at the post-high level, particularly on college and university campuses. Besides the traditional counseling, these interventions have taken such forms as women's resource centers; courses on assertive training, career planning, and women's search for identity; personal assessment and career planning groups; courses for the mature or adult student, women's support groups (counseling groups, job-seeking groups, feminist groups, human sexuality groups), and special seminars and conferences, women's study programs, creation of alternate study options, and the like; research topics related to women's development; units on sexism in human relations courses; creation of multimedia presentations and video cassettes for training of counselors; and creating and evaluating intervention models.
The Task for Counselors
It is probably safe to say that we have just begun to chip away at the top of the iceberg of the enormous problems and implications of counseling and career development of girls and women. The topic, like the larger career development area itself, is still unfinished business; there is much we need to know about female career patterns, self-concepts, aspirations, and decisions. And yet we know enough to chart some humanistic paths which will lead to greater options and genuine freedom of choice for both men and women. The following poems express the essence of my concern-the first a negative example, the second a positive one.
Besides being bad poetry, this is not career education but career mis-education. This is not what we are about as teachers and counselors involved in career development programs. In contrast, the following poem appeared a few years ago in an elementary level career development project which offered a variety of methods to help children gain more positive self-concepts, to upgrade their aspirations, to feel good about themselves. The poem appeared on the cover of the project booklet.
This poem, adapted from Kaleen Sherman, is a beautiful expression of the openness to life, to knowledge, to growth that a child feels. And yet we do something to females in our society as they grow up, something that keeps the blinds drawn on many of their possibilities and potentialities.
When I say "adapted," I should hasten to explain that the poem originally was written using "he." But isn't it equally beautiful and equally meaningful with "she"? It is exciting to think what we as counselors could do, even with some slight changes, a few facts, some innovative approaches, and a commitment to open the blinds of the school and eliminate our own biases to promote the positive growth and career development of our female clients along with our male clients.
