New Mexico program introduces curriculum to honor women’s contributions
By Alyssa Munoz
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NEW MEXICO (KOAT) — The New Mexico Historic Women’s Marker Program is introducing a K-12 curriculum to bring the stories of women who have significantly contributed to the state’s history into classrooms across New Mexico.
“It’s not only the women that one would know, like Georgia O’Keeffe, but it’s other people who have made changes within their community,” said Karen Abraham, a member of the program’s steering committee.
In 2007, the program installed its first women’s marker. Now, there are about 97 markers recognizing 125 women or groups of women, each with a sign detailing who they were and what they accomplished. Inspired by this initiative, seventh grade teacher Lisa Nordstrum, who is now the curriculum developer and education director for the program, developed a comprehensive K-12 curriculum for teachers statewide.
Nordstrum explained the curriculum’s accessibility, saying, “The ease of just clicking on to the little section of the groups of lessons and the very specific outlining of every step of that lesson, the materials that are needed, the PDFs that you just download.” She added that students could engage in activities like reading profiles, creating art projects, or having conversations in character as these historical women.
The lessons come with different ways to get students involved, and as the grades progress, the stories delve deeper. “Extending beyond the information that’s on the website and really inspiring older students as researchers and detectives, I’d like to think of history as doing detective work and digging into those historic documents,” Nordstrum said.
Both Abraham and Nordstrum emphasized that the program is not just about women but about people who have made a difference. “It is a program for everybody. It’s just not about women. It’s about people who have made a difference, that happened to be women,” they said.
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