Abstract
This project aims to provide incarcerated students attending a court school with a Gender and Women’s Study (GWS) credit recovery packet that may be used in place of current English Language Arts (ELA) credit recovery packets. The researcher used current California state educational ELA standards, data from interview participants, and a study of an active Gender and Women’s Studies course taught at River City high school in West Sacramento, California as a basis for the construction of this project. A credit recovery packet is a series of learning worksheets that students need to complete in order to receive high school credits or units (Mountain Ridge Junior High, 2012). A Southern Poverty Law Center (Mozaffer et al., 2020) report argues that the incarcerated students enrolled in the court schools are offered limited educational opportunities. The lesson plans and classroom learning materials used inside the school are inferior compared to lesson plans and learning materials in non-court schools. There is also a lack of female representation in current educational materials, including textbooks. For example, history textbooks for example tend to emphasize events from military and political history, which historically women have had less prominent roles in (Brugar et al., 2014). The GWS learning packet includes lessons on gender in pop culture, general lessons on feminism, history lessons on gender, biographies on women, a selection of fiction, and a selection of essays. The learning packet also includes varies activities including writing prompts, poetry exercises, vocabulary assignments, and essay writing.