I tried something new in my women’s history class this term, and I’m really happy with how it went.  I tend to get students from all over the university in this course, but noticed that there are a good number of education majors who show up.  One of the papers I assigned last year was on the female seminary movement.  Students wrote a primary source analysis of Emma Willard’s “Address to the Public”. 

This is a great document, and Willard is a fascinating figure.  Here, she asks the New York State Legislature to support her plan for a female seminary, and lays out her ideas about what women’s education ought to look like.  This would be a new kind of institution, offering academic subjects and teaching young women that they were rational beings.  Willard’s school would go on to use the same textbooks that were adopted in elite men’s academies and even colleges, and would (with the help of a professor from RPI) offer her students education in the sciences.  It was not, though, a college.  Willard is clear that even as she offered women an education that was more and more like a men’s education, and even as she argued that women and men were intellectual equals, they did not in fact have the same role in society.  Students responded to the document well.  I got some great papers that talked about the complex ways that women were understood in the early republic and antebellum America.

I knew that I wanted to have my students write about women’s education again this year, but I thought I would see if I could get them to put themselves in Willard’s shoes.  This semester, they had a creative writing option: to design their own female seminary.  The assignment called on students to explain what the curriculum would include, what sorts of students would attend, and what the general purpose of such a school would be.  What were the students expected to do with their education?  How was this school supposed to affect the students, the community, and even the nation?  I provided them with samples of seminary catalogues from the early nineteenth century to help give them a sense of what other schools offered and how those schools described their mission.

I just handed the papers back today, and I’m happy to say that the assignment was a great success.  Some of the students really got into the project, and seemed to enjoy the opportunity to take a bit more of a creative approach to their writing.  Some of the education majors seemed to relish the opportunity to think about how an educational program might be shaped to bring about certain pedagogical and social ends.  More than this, the students really showed the ability to connect many of the large themes we’d talked about over the past several weeks in the course.  Yes, they talked about the material we covered in lectures on education in particular, but they also went back to materials on the Revolution, on republican motherhood, and on religion.  A few talked about race; a few looked forward to the women’s rights movement.  Creating their own schools seemed to help some of them to make links across the themes of the course. 

I’m very pleased with how this went, and am interested to think about other ways that I might incorporate different sorts of creative writing into my courses.  Have any of you tried alternative assignments?  How have they gone?