Female Students and Online Participation

At a Writing Across the Curriculum symposium I attended earlier this year, a music professor presented some observations of student engagement from her experience in facilitating student blogs within her classroom. She asked students to submit reviews of music performances and also to comment on each other’s blog posts. Though female students and male students equally submitted the initial review blog posts, only male students commented on these posts.

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Immediately, I thought of how the Internet can be a hostile place for women.

Because of intersectionality, numerous groups of people may feel excluded from any given assignment within a classroom environment, and it is important to foster a welcoming atmosphere that addresses the concerns of every student.

In the article, How to Stop the Online Harassment of Female Journalists (which also has a problematic comment), the interviewed writer Ann Friedman has a few suggestions for how to prevent misogynist trolling in comments sections. She believes small communities and comment moderation can curb this behavior, which should be possible to achieve in a closed online learning environment. Additionally, she suggests having commenters log in through Facebook so that their real names are associated with their remarks. This may not be as applicable to the online classroom, as students who do participate in hate speech will likely face institutional consequences.

Counter to this, it may be advantageous to allow students to anonymize themselves (by using neutral handles such as “Anon 1,” “Anon 2,” etc.), and to only offer comment credit if all 25 of your students do comment on a given post (this would also compel students to self-enforce). That way, female students do not feel singled out. Of course, if students do leave confrontational comments this can backfire, so it may be worth looking into allowing admins, such as professors, to see who the commenter is, without permitting student users to.

Mya Poe also has some interesting thoughts on designing assignments for racially diverse students, which may be applicable here. In her article “Re-Framing Race in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum,” she argues that race should be situated locally:

Instead of starting with generalizations about teaching writing to racially diverse student populations, it is better to start with discussions about local students and local needs. By describing specific students — students in our classrooms and programs — we can root our conversations locally, where all teaching and assessment stories should begin.

That is, it can be more productive to think about your individual students in your current course or academic program, rather than to think more abstractly about the gender, race, religion, first language, or national origin of your students. This may be where we can begin to address disproportionate involvement online, though armed with the knowledge that different groups of people may have different experiences with online forums, and may therefore be more adverse to engaging with that platform.