Shop Girls to Show Girls: Teaching Resources on New York’s Working Class for Community College Students is an interdisciplinary project intended to improve student understanding of the historical contexts for the professional fields they are pursuing. The initiative is being developed to address needs initially identified by faculty during a pilot project at FIT. The pilot revealed that the inclusion of robust labor history in pre-professional course curricula can have broad value for a diversity of disciplines at community colleges. The project entitled “Shop Girls to Show Girls” is grounded on the premise that the humanities bring essential context and a deeper subject understanding to pre-professional studies. By learning about the historical influences that have shaped the professions they will enter, community college students will be better-prepared for the demands of the 21st-century workplace. This knowledge will enhance their own careers and potentially empower them to improve the industries in which they are working.
Shop Girls to Show Girls has three core objectives that address NEH priorities:
- To collect or enhance humanities resources for the purpose of teaching, including aggregating oral histories, readings in literature (fiction/non-fiction) and clips in film/documentary to be used for teaching purposes, teaching modules, and guidelines on how to use humanities resources in the classroom
- To generate partnerships and collaborative projects in the humanities (collaboration with regional museums, libraries, or historical societies to share resources for teaching and learning)
- To engage faculty and students with new resources, to empower the community with a critical understanding of the nature and scope of the changing labor market.
In conjunction with FIT’s faculty development office, the PI’s will facilitate robust dissemination of materials and best-practices and accordingly refine the project’s understanding of stakeholder needs. In meetings held during the regular semesters, the Shop Girls to Show Girls research team will help faculty identify needs for new courses on the proposed themes, multidisciplinary if applicable, and identify needs for developing new materials for existing courses taught in multiple sections. The PI and co-PI’s, along with FIT faculty participants, will meet with representatives of each community college during the summers of 2021, 2022 and 2023 to address demand for curricular materials on the region’s working-class history. When materials are fully developed for a dedicated website and shared through OER networks, it is anticipated that this content—which addresses the business and labor history of a major U.S. economic center—will be of interest to the entire community of FIT and also serve as a model and resource for other community-college faculty on a national scale.