Gender Equality in Schools

1
Gender Equality in Schools

• Mike Younger
• University of Cambridge

2
Presentation outline

• Shattering the glass ceiling?
• The boy-turn moral panic
• Recuperative masculinity
• Pro-feminist approaches
• Gender-relational approaches
• Myth-busting

3
A moral panic

• It is as though the very successes of girls are
  seen as threatening, as undermining for boys in
  schools and for men generally, a threat to the
  group which for so long has dominated Western
  societies it is as if a male reaction is
  growing, a backlash against the feminist
  successes of the equal opportunities movement.

4
The male repair / recuperative masculinity agenda

• Boy-friendly pedagogies
• More male primary school teachers
• Competitive modes of learning
• Less feminised staffing, curricula and learning
  environments

5
Donald Dewar memorial lecture

• We need a personalisation of boys needs to
  include greater use of computers, more sport and
  community service to encourage discipline and
  personal responsibility, a fathers revolution
  where dads take greater involvement in schooling
  and upbringing, to tackle the gender gap in
  educational achievement and avert the prospect of
  a wasted generation of boys.

6
Problems with the recuperative masculinity (male
repair) agenda

• Reinforcing dominant masculinities / stereotypes
• Assumes false homogeneity
• Unproven in practice
• Assumes girls do not need teaching
• All boys learn in same ways
• Ignores the fact that boys and men are frequently
  a problem

7
Pro-feminist approaches

• Can lack practical strategies
• Often inaccessible to many classroom teachers
• Can take boys on a guilt trip
• Offer images of masculinity to which many boys do
  not (or cannot, because of fear of loss of image)
  relate
• Have inherent dangers of counter-productivity as
  boys become hostile or defensive

8
A gender relational approach

• Developing strategies within a gender-relational
  context which acknowledge notions of difference
  and agency,and placing emphasis on boys and girls
• A concern for wider achievement, with social
  justice and equal opportunity
• An attempt to colonise the space of practice
  (Apple, 2001)

9
Intervention Strategies

• Pedagogic learning styles? classroom
  interactions? Approaches' to teaching of literacy
• Individual target-setting mentoring
• Organisational single-sex classes
• Socio-cultural self-esteem as learners

10
Pedagogic Literacy

• becoming a writer
• emphasis on talk / more oral preparation for
  narrative
• to enable children to work collaboratively on
  written tasks
• to stimulate imagination and lead into
  descriptive writing
• to enable children to link writing activities to
  real life scenarios
• drama as a source for writing

11
SocioCultural Interventions

• to reframe students view of school and generate
  greater involvement
• to reduce barriers to learning
• to address images of laddish masculinity
• to create higher self-esteem as learners
• to generate an ethos of possibility / higher
  aspirations / a sense of valuing

12
Socio-cultural initiatives

• Playtime buddy scheme
• Paired Reading
• Creative Arts Programmes
• Key Leaders

13
Removing barriers to learning

• In the steel band you learn to concentrate and
  to have commitment, and you learn to listen to
  what the pans are doing and think about other
  people.
• Sometimes I get a bit angry at school, and that
  stops me doing well, but I dont get angry doing
  music it helps me to feel calm.

• Lack of concentration
• Lack of self-control

14

• Low self-esteem
• Lack of engagement with school

• I didnt think Id be chosen because Im not
  very good. I thought my teacher had made a
  mistake, but when I got in the play I just wanted
  to jump up and burst out laughing.
• When we do things like that, and I come back to
  the classroom, I think, that was done with the
  school, and Ive started to think I really like
  school because if our teacher can organise really
  fun things like that, she knows what children are
  like, and I think, thats good.

15

• Inability to express feelings
• Difficult home circumstances

• I remember the kind of emotion when I was at the
  Globe theatre. It taught me that it does really
  really good to really express my emotion.
  Afterwards I felt like Id revealed everything
  and had expressed myself in front of everyone.
• I feel happy when I dance. It just makes me
  forget everything - I just put my mind straight
  into the dancing. Its kind of relaxing.

16
Socio-cultural approaches gains

• Greater engagement in learning
• Higher levels of achievement
• Increased levels of concentration and
  self-control
• More patience and self-confidence
• Greater self-esteem and ability to express
  themselves
• More positive attitudes towards school and
  learning

17
Key Leaders

• Identify Key leaders who establish peer group
  expectation / tone rebels, clowns, stars
• Link with key befriender who offers support /
  creates rapport / shows interest / is persuasive
• To entice followers on-board
• Attitudinal change improved attendance reduced
  exclusion data higher achievement
• Interviews school wanted them to do well
  was really rooting for them the headteacher
  was a fantastic woman who was right on!

18
Target-setting / mentoring

• Collaborative / supportive of students, based
  around realistic targets but offering new
  possibilities and raising students aspirations
• Mentors negotiate with subject teachers on behalf
  of students go-between / increases credibility
  of mentors
• Assertive mentoring, demanding / challenging of
  students
• Preservation of self-image

19
Assertive mentoring

• This confrontational challenging aspect of
  mentoring tackles the issue of laddishness and
  macho image the mentor provides some boys (and
  some girls) with a way not to opt out. the
  school is offering them a face-saving device to
  enable them to work without undermining their own
  sense of being a lad or a ladette.

20
Single-sex teaching

• Fewer distractions
• More able to participate in questioning
• More able to participate without peer pressure /
  without embarrassment or ridicule
• Impact on achievement in English, Maths,
• Modern Foreign Langauges

21
Single-sex teaching Pre-conditions

• Nature of most effective lessons similar for
  boys and for girls classes characterised by
  pace / purpose, by humour, by variety /
  structure, by strong teacher presence and high
  expectations interactive assertive
• No case for a gendered pedagogy, with teaching
  styles which differ for girls / boys
• Not differentiated curriculum

22
But what about the girls ?

• What exactly does it mean that women and men
  have virtually closed the gender gap in
  educational attainment? Do they obtain
  equivalent jobs in the paid labour force? Are
  women able to negotiate equal labour in the home
  and family sphere? Are womens lives free from
  the haunting physical abuse that surrounds us
  now? It is important that we do not assume that
  this closing alone will translate into broader
  egalitarian outcomes (Weiss, 2001 120).

23
Girls as Invisible or Shadowy figures?

• Persistence of discourses of caring and
  nurturing, where girls take on role of
  servicing needs of males in the classroom.
• Hidden under-achievement of girls, often white
  working-class girls less disruptive / off-task
  behaviour more subtle / less intolerant of poor
  teaching.
• Teachers are predisposed to see boys rather than
  girls as underachievers, despite the existence of
  an increasing number of disengaged girls in high
  school.
• Ladette culture hedonistic, binge drinking,
  drugs-orientated culture which transgresses
  normative femininity and represent a threat to
  the prevailing gender order

24
What is a boy?

• Need to take account of ethnicity and class,
  sexual inclination, differing images of
  masculinity and femininity
• Teachers expectations of boys
• Some boys devise coping strategies to achieve
  academically within a legitimised local culture

25
Myth-busters 1

• MYTH Boys are naturally different to girls,
  and learn in different ways.
• REALITY There is little evidence to suggest
  that neurological (brainsex) differences result
  in boys having different abilities / ways of
  learning to girls.
• EVIDENCE Baron-Cohen (2004), Slavin (1994)

26
Myth-busters 2

• MYTH Boys and girls have different learning
  styles, which teaching needs to match.
• REALITY Learning styles as a concept are highly
  contested. There is no evidence that learning
  styles can be clearly distinguished one from
  another, or that these learning styles are gender
  specific.
• EVIDENCE Coffield et al (2004), Warrington et
  al (2006).

27
Myth-busters 3

• MYTH Boys benefit from a competitive learning
  environment.
• REALITY Competitive learning practices may
  actively disengage those boys who do not
  immediately succeed.
• EVIDENCE Jackson (2002 2006),
• Elkjaer (1992)

28
Myth-busters 4

• MYTH Boys prefer non-fiction reading matter
• REALITY Boys who prefer to read non fiction are
  a minority. It is safer to assert that boys who
  read, read fiction
• EVIDENCE Hall and Coles (1999), Whitehead
  (1977), Moss and McDonald (2004)

29
Myth-busters 5

• MYTH Changing or designing thecurriculum to be
  boy-friendly will increase boys motivation and
  aid their achievement.
• REALITY Designing a boy-friendly curriculum
  has not been shown to improve boys achievement.
• EVIDENCE . Pickering (1997), Lingard et al
  (2002 2003), Keddie and Mills (2008), Younger
  and Warrington et al (2005)

30

• Warrington, M. and Younger, M., with Bearne, E
  (2006)
• Raising Boys Achievements in Primary
  Schools towards a holistic approach (Open
  University Press)
• Younger, M. and Warrington, M., with McLellan, R
  (2005)
• Raising Boys Achievement in Secondary
  Schools issues, dilemmas and opportunities
  (Open University Press)
• The DfES research report, Research Report 636,
  is published as
• Younger, M et al (2005) Raising Boys
  Achievement. DfES London
• DCSF (2009) Gender and Education Mythbusters
  Addressing Gender and Achievement Myths and
  Realities www.teachernet.gov.uk/publications