VG in the Classroom

VG is designed primarily to serve as an active learning component in the literature classroom where the works of women writers of color are read and studied. Students can not only access the information provided on this site, but also participate in shaping the site by contributing a page on a writer of their choice. In this way student work, rather than ending up in a file drawer or the wastepaper basket, becomes part of the wealth of knowledge that is accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web.

We have several categories of Classroom information:

| Essays and Experiences | Research | Student Writing | Syllabi |

Author Susan Power with students

It is our strong belief, sustained by experience, that students who are involved in this kind of real-world, collaborative project take a greater stake in their work. By taking advantage of this unique publishing opportunity, students can, either singly or in groups, research, write, and submit a new author page which will appear, with their name(s) credited, on the Web, available to anyone with access to the Internet.

Student contributors to VG have said:

"It was so exciting to be working on this project! The time I spent working on this, and I was always learning." -Sarah Monahan

"I feel confident in the future to publish something on my own." -Angi Dedinsky

"We all wanted to do well, and produce something we would be proud of and tell our friends about." -Molly Cade

We invite teachers of high school and college classes throughout the United States to consider using VG in your classroom. By taking advantage of this unique publishing opportunity, students can, either singly or in groups, research, write, and submit a new author page which will appear, with their name(s) credited, on the Web, available to anyone with access to the Internet.

If you are interested in having your students contribute one or more author pages to our site, please read our more extensive Note to Educators: VG in the Multicultural Literature Classroom

Ideas for Alternative Contributions

If you wish to contribute to VG but you're not interested in creating an author page, we'd like you to consider other ways of contributing. For example, you may choose to expand on our timeline (click here to see the timeline) or add to our list of authors (click here to see the list of authors). Or you may wish to append information on current author pages, for instance, by adding a paragraph on a writer's most recent publication. Or you may come up with a wonderful idea for our site that has never even occurred to us.

In any of these cases, please don't hesitate to contact us; we'd love to hear from you.

Please feel free to contact the editors at:

VG
Department of English
207 Lind Hall
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

612-625-1834 (phone)
612-624-8228 (fax)
voices@umn.edu (email)

We will be more than happy to provide any assistance you need in using this project in your classroom.