Equity Journey

Students explore their growth in learning about gender equity. Hi, We are Emily Sullivan and Jackson Hoffman, former students of Ms. Venditto. Our purpose for writing this post is to inform people about our journey learning about gender equity through a program led by Ms. Venditto and about the knowledge we have gained on our own about this topic since the program.

In fifth grade, we joined the gender equity class that Ms. Venditto had created. We talked about one type of gender equity in particular, which was gender equality between boys and girls. We used one particular resource to learn about gender equity, which was Girl Rising, an organziation that creates media presentations to tell stories of girls’ across the world who are facing challenges because of their gender. Girl Rising is an organization that helped us learn more about gender equity and you can learn more about it in the Publications section on this website. After Ms. Venditto taught us about gender equality, we did some activities with the younger kids and we could see that even the kindergarteners already thought that certain things were only for boys or certain things were only girls. In our conversations with them we explained that gender shouldn’t decide what you like or what you get to do.

Ms. Venditto invited us to the United Nations celebration of International Women’s Day, which was the best educational experience we’ve ever had! At the U.N., we got to watch female speakers from across the globe discuss their experiences. It was amazing to hear not only about the struggles they overcame, but also how U.N. initiatives were helping them!

The other topic we wanted to talk about is the LGBTQ+ Community. The LGBTQ+ Community is important to bring up because it is a different type of gender equity we’ve learned about on our own. We have learned with Ms. Venditto about how boys can like “girl things” and girls can like “boy things” but after, when we got older, we started to learn more about the LGBTQ+ Community. We realized that the topic of gender equity really expanded for us. We’ve learned that in a way, there can be more than two genders. I guess our take away from all that we’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter whether you are a boy or a girl or a girl that likes boy things/wants to be a boy or a boy that likes girl things/wants to be a girl. As long as everyone is equal, you feel comfortable being yourself, and you are happy, no one should tell you otherwise.”