Welcome to the course!

If you are reading this post, you are most likely an MCLA student enrolled in PSYC 356 Psychology of Gender in the Fall 2011 semester. It's been a couple of years since I've had the opportunity to teach this course and I hope you're as excited as I am to get started.

I am particularly excited about this blogging assignment. I've used a variation of this gender stereotype analysis assignment in previous semesters, but I think using a blog will really allow all of you to fully exercise your creative muscles. There are so many ways to customize a blog and this digital format also gives you the opportunity to augment your writing with a wide variety of graphics and even video.

So, here's a little background about me that may help explain the rationale behind this blog. I've been interested in gender issues for just about as long as I can remember. I was an active and athletic girl in the very early years of the Title IX era. Not very many girls were playing sports, but that didn't stop me. I was frequently the only girl on my baseball, soccer, and basketball teams and often faced sexist judgments from both the boys I played with and the parents who coached me. I really didn't believe the stereotype that boys are better at sports than girls and it became my mission, at the tender age of 8, to prove it wrong to anyone who watched me play. And so, my lifelong feminism began. As a graduate student, I was always drawn to research questions that challenged conventional wisdom about gender and I even completed a dissertation about gender development in early adolescence. This gender stereotype analysis assignment is a natural outgrowth of my early personal experiences as well as my graduate training in gender development.

I will use the stereotype that "boys are better at sports than girls" in my future blog posts to help demonstrate what I'm looking for in your own blog posts. This first post can serve as a model of what I expect from your first one. I've written about 400 words here so this is your target length, too. You'll notice that this post isn't very long, so you'll have to work hard at being concise!

Please post a comment to let me know that you've read this post and the assignment distributed in class and understand what you need to do. If you have any questions, feel free to post those as well. Can't wait to start reading all of your blogs!