The Go Girlz Community Initiative is a program the Women's Resource Center at the University of Utah developed in 2004 designed to teach empowerment, through an interactive curriculum, as the key to academic success. We simultaneously address the stated goal of the University of Utah to recruit and retain women and minority students. Curriculum-- 8 workshops per academic semester
Self (Advocacy,
Empowerment)
Identity & Resiliency
Self-Care
Community (Advocacy, Involvement, Empowerment)
Healthy Relationships
Bullying
Personal Power (Advocacy, Scholarship, Empowerment)
Putting ourselves out there
College Awareness
Leadership (Advocacy, Scholarship, Involvement, Empowerment)
Voice
Celebrating & Sharing Strengths
Methods:
Our program applies various methods of evaluation, maintains consistent goals and tracks the completion of individual and group efforts. We follow methodology across disciplines including: Media Literacy workshops, Higher Education Awareness & Career/Major Exploration workshops, and multiple literacy introduction via poetry, hip-hop, pop-culture references and mindfulness practices. Pedagogy:
While our programs seeks to motivate participants to reimagine educational futures, we acknowledge that participants have many other options. With this in mind, our programming centers on the idea that we create spaces where knowledge sharing is valued. This with the goal to empower students to reflect upon their positions in a classroom (as facilitators and as learners) to each consider themselves as holders of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 2002) and to rediscover their love for learning and creativity. We assume that through their own experiential knowledge (Yosso, Villalpando, Delgado Bernal and Solorzano, 2001) girls have acquired the ability to be resilient, flexible, creative and deserving of being recruited and mentored into higher education. Through our curriculum, we seek to awaken students’ consciousness of personal power and agency while reframing participants’ ability to feel good about themselves, make healthy choices in their life, and be positive members of their communities. The pathway to higher education we create is reciprocal, inter-generational and fluid. And actively seek to do this according, to the needs of participants and also facilitators at each step.
