by Shanna Parry
Every school I know can prove that its curriculum is inclusive. We can count the women in a history unit, name the minority figures in a literature anthology, and point to the week when the host country takes over the calendar. Those counts are better than they were ten years ago, and yet something keeps failing to add up. Students still leave with a narrow sense of who has ever done anything that mattered, and adding more names doesnโt seem to change that.
I think we are measuring the wrong thing. Presence is easy to audit, which is why we audit it. Significance is not, and significance is what students absorb. A woman can appear in every chapter of a textbook, and the book will still teach a girl that people like her have never been the reason anything happened.
๐ ๐๐ฎ๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐จ๐ญ ๐๐ญ๐จ๐ฉ ๐๐ฌ๐ค๐ข๐ง๐
When I was in fifth grade, my class staged a play about the Revolutionary War, and my teacher cast me as Betsy Ross. I actually wanted to play Margaret Corbin, who replaced her fallen husband at the cannon at Fort Washington and kept firing until she was too injured to continue. My teacher explained that Corbin wasnโt part of the play since all roles went to male war heroes. After much begging and pleading, my teacher finally included Corbinโs story, allowing me to take on the part.
That stayed with me. Not the refusal, but the fix. I was added. The play did not need Corbin, and nothing about the story we told the audience that evening changed because I was in it. This was the start of a consistent theme throughout all my history lessons.
I now spend my research life immersed in secondary history textbooks, asking the question my fifth-grade play raised and countless history lessons could not answer: not how many women a textbook contains, but whether the story it tells would change if they were not in it.
๐๐๐ฉ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ฆ๐ ๐๐ฌ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ง๐ข๐๐ข๐๐๐ง๐๐
Most curriculum audits count how many women appear and what percentage of named figures are female. Counting is a reasonable place to start and a poor place to stop, because it measures presence and says nothing about function.
Gerda Lerner made this point decades ago. Lerner asserted that women have always been present in history; what they were excluded from was deciding what history means and which activities count as significant. Adding names does not touch that machinery. The names arrive inside a structure built without them.
Joan Wallach Scott sharpened this into a methodological point. If gender organizes what counts as significant, rather than describing a group we can add to the roster, the test of an inclusive curriculum is not who appears but whether their appearance changes what the account is about.
๐๐ก๐๐ญ ๐๐ญ ๐๐จ๐จ๐ค๐ฌ ๐๐ข๐ค๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ข๐๐
Take a standard unit on the Second World War. Women are almost certainly in there: a production poster, a factory floor, a paragraph on the workforce at home. Remove all of it. The causes, the strategy, the turning points, and the outcome: all intact. You can lift every woman out, and the argument does not so much as wobble.
Then remove President Dwight D. Eisenhower and watch what happens.
Now, try a unit covering civil rights. The difficulty there is not absence but timing. Minority communities tend to enter the narrative when they become a problem the nation has to solve, and to leave once it is solved. Rosa Parks is almost always present as the moment a boycott began rather than as an experienced organizer with years of political work behind her. Remove her, and the unit needs a new opening sentence, not a new argument.
This is inclusion that leaves the structure untouched. A curriculum can appear diverse, yet its portrayal of what makes a life or event significant remains unchanged.
The same is true for the host countries of international schools. Unless we act deliberately, the host country appears in the calendar rather than in the curriculum: a national day, a heritage week, a display board, or a wonderful, entirely optional unit. Take those out. Will the school year run as planned? For most of us, it will. And that is our decision, not a publisherโs.
๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง: ๐๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ฅ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ญ
I want to leave you with an exercise rather than an argument. It takes 10 minutes, requires nothing but a unit already taught in your classroom or at your school, and changes a leadership conversation faster than any presentation on inclusive curriculum I have delivered.
Here it is. Take one unit from your curriculum and remove every woman: every named figure, image, sidebar, and primary source. Then read what is left and ask one question: Does the unit still work?
If it does, you have learned something uncomfortable and useful. The women were present, but nothing in the story depended on them.
Now, run it twice more. Once for the minority groups your curriculum claims to represent, and once for your host country. The second and third passes usually sting just as much as the first.
๐๐ก๐ซ๐๐ ๐๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ฌ
The LYIS framework asks us to keep curriculum and assessment under continuous review and to evaluate the formal and informal curriculum as part of self-review. The removal test is one honest, low-cost instrument for that. Here are three moves to make what you find count.
Do it with your teachers, not to them. This is a design question, not an appraisal, and it stops being useful the moment it feels like inspection.
Distinguish the two failure modes. A unit with nobody in it is a resourcing problem, comparatively easy to fix. A unit full of people who could be deleted without loss is a framing problem, and adding more names wonโt fix it.
Change one interpretive question rather than ten resources. Asking students what counted as skilled work in 1943, and who decided, does more than any number of portraits.
An Invitation
I would like to know what you find. Post it in the comments below so other leaders can see it, or send it to me on LinkedIn if you would rather it stay between us. Three lines are plenty: subject, unit, and what happened when you took everybody out.
I am equally interested in both outcomes. If you remove the women, the minority communities, or the host country, and the unit or the school calendar genuinely collapses, tell me how it was built, because those are the models the rest of us need. If everything stays perfectly intact, tell me that, too. That is the more common result, and it is the one that shows us where the work actually is.
๐๐ฎ๐ข๐ฅ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐๐ญ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ก๐๐ญ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐๐ค
Inclusion that changes nothing is not inclusion. It is hospitality. Curriculum leadership means building an account of the past that would break if we took the wrong person out of it. Right now, most of the units we teach only break when we take out the men.
๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ญ๐ก๐จ๐ซ
Shanna Parry is a LYIS Board Member. She is the Co-Founder and Senior Managing Partner of Global Services in Education (GSE), an international school development, management, and advisory firm with experience across more than 35 countries. Shanna is based in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Language, Diversity, and Literacy Studies at Texas Tech University. You can learn more about what Shanna does at www.gsineducation.com.
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