Girls Amplified is an after-school program that I have been developing with my sister, a high school drama teacher with an MA in Theater Education, since 2015.  The curriculum seeks to promote media literacy, writing skills, empathetic listening, and public speaking skills through the lens of social justice and community building. Rather than individual empowerment, our aim is to give girls in junior high and high school the tools to collaborate with one another to harness the power of storytelling to create social change. After a successful fundraising campaign in 2015, we were able to create and host our website and pilot our first two program sites.

We’re planning to present on and workshop the curriculum at the International Girls Studies Association Conference at Notre Dame in Spring 2019.

The program in its current form consists of 10-12 week, twice a week course in which junior high and high school aged girls will learn:

1. How to write, perform, and produce narratives, theater pieces, and video
2. How to critically analyze and interpret media stories
3. How to listen to and affirm the stories of others
4. How to start to collaborate, build communities and incite change through storytelling

Girls will come out of our initial program with the confidence and tools with which to start making their voices heard and affecting change in their communities. The program will end with a showcase in which each girl will share a live performance or media piece that tells an important narrative about her life.

In the fall of 2015 we piloted the program at Central City Values High School in Los Angeles, CA, a public charter school near Koreatown. We assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the program through interviews with the initial class of girls and gathered data through surveys given before and after the program.  In the Spring of 2017, we developed a new curriculum for middle school students, which a colleague of mine piloted at a middle school in San Diego with the school’s principal. We’re currently working on implementing our next pilot at Intrinsic High School in Chicago in the summer of 2018. Our ultimate goal is to produce a replicable program guide to send to facilitators all over the country to adapt for their own schools.

You can find out more at our website: http://www.girlsamplified.org.