Search

This paper focuses on the perspectives of adolescents attending a private Christian single-sex secondary school. The research literature into the impact of single-sex schooling upon learners, while plentiful, is equivocal and few scholars have delved into the views of adolescents in such contexts. To demonstrate their perspectives of single-sex schooling, the findings are represented as poetry clusters, grouped together to highlight the ways in which the adolescents teetered amongst competing views. Better understanding the related formative presence of societal messages and gendered expectations shaping single-sex learning environments offers possibilities for teachers to disrupt these norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, ecofeminist thought has moved into a 'fourth stage critical ecofeminism' (Gaard 2017, xvi), based on an understanding that humans are unavoidably part of a multifaceted and interconnected global ecosystem. This paper suggests that ecofeminist theory and practice can now grow further into a fifth stage: an era of expanded intersectionality that moves beyond the dualisms and hegemonies of neo-liberal patriarchal and colonial capitalist structures that can limit ecofeminist theorizing and material practice. This fifth stage must be based on an amalgamation of engaged theory, education, and activism, grounded in ancient wisdom and with the understanding that all material-discursive phenomena are interconnected. For this next era of ecofeminism, the terms intraconnectivism and intraconnective education (Siegel 2022) are proposed. Intraconnectivism offers a bridge that connects past theoretical frameworks with ecofeminist presents. It can build a helpful theoretical pathway through and amongst the non-dualistic educational pedagogies that are needed at this time, as well as expand understanding of the role that gender and other identities can play in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these accounts, as there are also female teachers in the study who appear to successfully circumnavigate these issues. However, this apparent wherewithal of some female teachers speaks to the internalisations of gender oppression as much as it does to the teachers' agency. This paper illuminates these gender oppressions, which are made possible because they remain hidden and unchallenged. The findings of this study raise thorny issues for school-based leadership, but also for educational policy-makers, because gender oppression is seemingly inextricable from the social practices that elite private boys' schools both advocate and rely on for positional advantage in schooling markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the possibilities of sound and sonic thinking as feminist pedagogical tools for self-reflexivity, reimagining, and communal awareness. The collaborative reflections of the facilitators of and two participants in the Gender and Sound course that took place within the body of Bilimler Köyü – an alternative educational initiative with a focus on transdisciplinary, collaborative, and ecologic learning – theoretically argue that sonic thinking opens space for the questioning of dominant cultural narratives, identities and structures, and for thinking about possible subject positions beyond those which are already established. Therefore sound, as an umbrella term for the auditory, constitutes technologies of the self that might have the ability to reconceptualize the self, agency and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, 3% of the early year's education workforce is male, a figure that has remained stubbornly resistant to change over the last four decades. Research has shown that support is key to increasing the number of male employees in this sector. In recent years, there has been an increase in the demand for male-only support activities, such as men-only training courses, or support groups. Whilst these methods are popular in order to establish gender-diverse workforces, an inherent danger is that single-sex support can exacerbate binary thinking and entrench gender differences. This paper explores the role of single-sex support in gender diversifying the early year's workforce and asks when, and for whom, such spaces may be effective or valuable. The discussion is based on data collected during the GenderEYE project, which aimed to look at strategies for, and understandings about, the recruitment and support of male early childhood education professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the work of three researchers in a self-study on researcher positionality using the reflective practice and pedagogy of correspondence as preparation for future work with mapuche women in Chile. We start from the assumption that research with and on indigenous groups has a historical debt to consider given the ways in which it has historically perpetuated and been complicit in violence against indigenous people. With this is mind we ask: what can a focus on researcher's positionality and epistemologies bring to future work on mapuche women's educational experience? What does it contribute to work that refuses the violence that academia perpetuates on indigenous knowledges and communities? This paper is an invitation to reflect on how we can decolonize our methodologies as a way to work through the historical debt that academia has with and to indigenous groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the critical issues deliberated amongst researchers on gender and education is that of choosing and decision-making. Often, the focus of analysis is framed through the concept of agency. In this paper, the analytical focus is on educational advancement and agency. The paper is based on narratives of 10 highly educated Tanzanian women. Employing the human development and capabilities approach, the paper aims to elaborate to what extent the women had the freedom to exercise educational agency, in what ways their beings and doings were in accordance with ‘the idea of Tanzanian woman’, including the hegemonic idea of adequate and appropriate education for girls and women, and how they aimed to become something else. By listening to the women's narratives and analysing their choices and decision-making processes, four kinds of agency freedoms were identified. In the paper, these agency notions are re-presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws together [Hochschild's (1979) Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.”American Journal of Sociology85: 551–575; (1983)The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press] concepts ofemotional labourandfeeling ruleswith Ahmed'saffectiveeconomies[(2004a)The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge; (2004b) “Affective Economies.”Social Text22 (2): 117–139; (2008) “Sociable Happiness.”Emotion, Space and Society1: 10–13; (2010)The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press] andqueer phenomenology[(2006a)Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press; (2006b) “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology.”GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies12 (4): 543–574] as a way to address wider questions about sexuality and schooling. It highlights the value of the everyday politics of emotion for elucidating and clarifying the specificities, pertinence and complementarities of Hochschild's and Ahmed's work for reimagining the relationship between sexualities and schooling. The combination of their approaches allows for a focus on the individual, bodily management of emotions while demonstrating the connectedness of bodies and spaces. It enables disruption of ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ educational approaches that leave heterosexuality uninterrupted and provides insight into how power works in and across the bodies, discourses, practices, relations and spaces of schools to maintain a collective orientation towards heterosexuality. It also counters linear narratives of progressive change, elucidating how change is a hopeful but messy process of simultaneous constraint, transgression and transformation. Key moments from a three-year study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers entering into civil partnerships in Ireland serve as exploratory examples of the theoretical ideas put forward in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines Canadian federal and cross-provincial higher education policy from 1960 to 1990, a critical time when provisions for vocational and adult training came under the auspices of governmental concern, justified under both an economic rationale and as a way to address persistent forms of inequality. The problematisation of skill during this period had particular gendered implications, as addressing inequality through education subsidies intersected with the perceived training needs of employers and the market. Employing Nancy Fraser's theory of a ‘triple movement’, the following paper ‘takes stock’ of how the three political forces of social movements, marketisation, and social protection have shaped gendered discourses of education and training, the implications for which are of continued relevance to those trying to understand the education and training within the contemporary neo-liberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the educational and migrational pathways which a number of middle-class women from Bangladesh took as they grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. It draws on qualitative research, conducted between July and November 2011, with highly educated Bangladeshi women who migrated to Britain in the early 2000s. French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's critique of education, as a means of middle-class social reproduction [Bourdieu, P., and Jean-C. Passeron. ([1977] 1990).Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Sage], and his notion of ‘academic capital’ [Bourdieu, P. 1984.Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Routledge; Bourdieu, P. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” InHandbook of Theory and Research For the Sociology of Education, edited by J. G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood] are applied to this empirical data. While the participants’ experiences of early education confirms Bourdieu's arguments, in terms of the centrality of the family's educational and cultural capital in making a qualitative difference to their children's academic achievements, the analysis of the participants’ higher education complicates this picture. Here, the paper calls Bourdieu's umbrella term ‘academic capital’ into question. The author suggests that three categories of academic capital were needed to explain the different and unequal ‘value’ of the participants’ academic qualifications before and after migration. These are – elite, standard and general. Through this exploration of these women's educational and migrational pathways, and the classed and gendered nature which many of them took, this paper seeks to further the feminist project of making Bourdieu's theories ‘useful’ in understanding contemporary issues which affect women's lives (Adkins, L. 2004. “Introduction.” InFeminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs, 110–128. Oxford: Blackwell, 3). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the construction of dominant models of gender among students in the Vocational–Technical. In the backdrop of dominant narratives that structure gender policies and practices in schooling in Zimbabwe, the paper elaborates upon how students’ daily experiences in workrooms perpetuate the feminisation and masculinisation of fields of study such as DT and HESs in ways that inhibit the learning and achievement of boys and girls in these subjects. The argument in this paper is that in order to understand gender inequality in the Voc-Tech curriculum, educators need to understand how sociocultural perceptions of gender are constructed and embodied at the level of classroom interaction among students and teachers. Such insights provide a deeper understanding for addressing gender inequality in Voc-Tech subjects that moves beyond current structural and institutional barriers within a rural African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I discuss how professional identities in early childhood education in Chile are performatively constituted within the interplay between a religious discourse of vocation and gender. 'Having the vocation' has become a regime of truth that regulates and governs educators' behaviours, motivations and relationships in their workplace. By deconstructing the concept of vocation through a poststructuralist and feminist theory, I show the arising tensions in this discourse, emphasising that it positions female early childhood educators as a subject of both exploitation and admiration. Vocation shapes early years practitioners not only as nurturing and caring, but deeply altruist, devoted and self-sacrificed women seeking (eternal) salvation. Exposing the contradictory nature of this discourse, the article highlights its tensions with the professionalization of the early years workforce. Whilst vocation situates practitioners as good educators and morally good women, it allows for workforce exploitation, trapping them in hazardous working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines attempts by a joint Dutch-Afghan capacity development project to bring more gender-responsive elements into the Agricultural High School (AHS) curriculum in the fragile context of Afghanistan. It reviews the gender-specific results of semester-long piloting (including classroom observation and interviews) of the redesigned textbooks and accompanying teachers' instructions at ten AHSs. It also examines experiences of teaching on gender themes. The findings show that it is possible to introduce more gender-responsiveness in the Afghan curriculum, but because it is used nationwide, great limitations on terminology and the kinds of female representation are imposed determined by the most conservative regions where schools are also located. These limitations and how to get around them are analysed in the article, through concrete examples showing the complex interactions with different layers involved when initiating change in such a 'fragile context'. This article can be useful to those designing and teaching courses with elements of gender, illustrating how particular contexts demand a flexible and creative approach when delving into inclusivity issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to address the reproduction of inequalities vis a vis gender and education as a multi-dimensional problem. Its objective is to show that the intersection between gender, social position of origin and asymmetric university spaces, attests to the inequalities in Higher Education System. Based on intersectionality perspective constructed on those three dimensions of analysis, gender inequalities are observed at the global, regional and national levels, based on comparable databases. Also, it centres on the results of an empirical investigation in Mexico that highlights the perspective of intersectionality in relation to the roles played by asymmetric university spaces in the reproduction and continuity of social and gender inequalities. The paper introduces and tests the category asymmetric university spaces as mechanism for the reproduction of inequalities, and concludes with his significance, emphasizing interlaced inequalities in Mexico City's university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to scrutinise the latest education reform and education policies in Turkey from a capabilities-based gender equality perspective. The data draws on interviews with stakeholders and practitioners to understand how gender equality is conceptualised in policy-making and to what extent reforms have fostered gender equality in girls' education. From a policy-making perspective, the data shows that reform has been successful in terms of a tangible, measurable outcome of an increase in enrolment rates. This can be attributed to a boost in the number of religious schools and the introduction of single-sex education featuring a limited conceptual understanding of gender equality, with a focus on closing the gender gap. However, from the practitioners' perspective, little concern has been given to gender equality and constrained girls' capabilities. The paper fleshes out the tensions between policy-makers and practitioners by highlighting the need for a comprehensive and inclusive understanding of gender equality in educational policy-making and developing a capabilities-based gender equality policy that is able to dismantle conservative and gendered structures and accommodate boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on women's vocational education in Turkey as a gendered and gendering process. Cultural norms about women's role in society, a vocational curriculum that echoes these norms, and a labour market with gender inequalities constitute the background against which women formulate their vocational preferences and seek pathways into the labour market. We use the literatures on gender and vocational education, school-to-work transitions, and gender bargains to analyse data from qualitative fieldwork with students and graduates of girls' vocational high schools. First, we scrutinize how students choose vocational tracks. Our findings point to the presence of a gendered bounded agency by students and graduates, according to which their choices echo traditional gender norms. Secondly, we discuss the transition from school to work, during which they are faced with gender prejudice in the labour market. Finally, we show how that process turns into a 'school-to-home' transition whereby graduates become homemakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male 'role models' in schools has an adverse effect on boys' academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined 'teaching' as institutional talk, men's linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young boys' ‘underachievement’ and their disaffection with learning continue to dominate education agendas [Francis, B. 2006. “Stop That Sex Drive.”Times Educational Supplement30; Peeters, J. 2007. “Including Men in Early Childhood Education: Insights from the European Experience.”NZ Research in Early Childhood Education, 10. Accessed February 4, 2013.http://stop4-7.be/files/janpeeters10.pdf; Lloyd, T. 2009. Boys’ Underachievement: What Schools Think and Do. A University of Ulster Research Project Funded by the Department of Education and Northern Ireland Office. November. Accessed January 10, 2014.http://www.socsci.ulster.ac.uk/sociology/research/y%20publications/Boys%20underachievement.pdf; Lloyd, T. 2011. Boys’ Underachievement in Schools: Literature Review. Boys Development Project. Belfast: Centre for Young Men's Studies, Ulster University. Accessed February 4, 2013.http://www.boysdevelopmentproject.org.uk/downloads/reports/Boys%20and%20underachievement%20literature%20review%20edited%20in%20pdf.pdf]. In recent years, there has been an eruption of government policy making and public discourse in England [Moran, L. 2011. Quarter of All Primary Schools Have No Male Teachers Despite More Men Entering Profession.Daily Mail, September 2. Accessed February 4, 2013.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032970/Quarter-primary-schools-NO-male-teachers-despite-men-entering-profession.html#ixzz2JwpQjSL8; DfE (Department for Education). 2012b. Poor White Boys ‘Lagging Behind Classmates at Age Five’. The Telegraph, November 21. Accessed January 10, 2014.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9693409/Poor-white-boys-lagging-behind-classmates-at-age-five.html; PARITY. 2013. Is Action Overdue on Boys’ Academic Underachievement? Briefing Paper, March. Accessed January 10, 2014.http://www.parity-uk.org/Briefing/BoysEducPaperRev1b.pdf] calling for more men to transform young lives by working in the 0–8 sector and acting as male role models in an attempt to narrow the ‘attainment gap’. This paper critically explores the perceived qualities/characteristics of men who seemingly serve as ‘male role models’ by reporting on select doctoral research findings which sought to investigate the ambiguities of the male role model from the perspective of men who work in the 0–8 sector. Research participants were asked to identify the qualities/characteristics that they felt ‘male role models’ should exhibit for young boys in the early years (0–8). The qualities/characteristics identified were categorised by research participants as being ‘masculine’ (e.g. diplomatic), ‘feminine’ (e.g. caring) or ‘natural’ (meaning authentic). Whilst research evidence suggests that male role models will present a diverse range of personal and professional qualities/characteristics, it is argued that these are likely to be shaped by not only the needs and circumstances of the children that the ‘male role model’ comes into contact with, but also the expectations of others, e.g. parents/carers and staff. This paper argues that there is a real tension between those qualities/characteristics of the male role model that are created as a result of their personality/individual beliefs and those which are anticipated or enforced by others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on rural and indigenous girls and their mothers in Peru, examining how they position schooling and education in their current life and future aspirations, in order to better understand girls' increasing participation in education. It is argued here that the high educational aspirations girls and their families have are not only related to the desire to overcome poverty and marginalisation but also to oppressive gender relations. The widening of female roles available to young rural women is impacting on their identities and life projects. The paper shows that these processes are not purely individual but intertwined with intergenerational agreements, family projects, and shared understandings of the changes needed to improve the life of young women, revealing important transformations in rural and indigenous families. The paper analyses qualitative data from boys and girls in three settings and focuses in more detail on three in-depth case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper develops a new analysis of homework by building on feminist scholarship which documents the invisible labour done by women in support of their children's education. While numerous studies have examined the relationship between homework and achievement, little attention has been paid to the largely gendered and potentially stressful nature of ‘parental involvement’. The analytic focus in this paper is on the complex emotional and pedagogical dimensions of homework and the ways it is shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Videotaped homework interactions between one working-class and two middle-class mothers and their children are examined using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital. The analysis distinguishes between productive pedagogical relationships and those that promote extensive anxiety and are counterproductive to learning. The paper argues that the reserves of cultural and emotional capital required for homework completion are significant and that class position does not necessarily guarantee the ways in which these capitals are mobilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a study titled ‘Enacting Feminisms in Academia’, which engaged five feminist lecturers teaching English at five different multilingual universities in Southern Africa. The study explored: (1) the complexity of sociolinguistic and feminist identity construction in multilingual seascapes, and by extension (2) how feminist educators' interpretation and enactment of their personal world-view informs their language teaching in terms of what they teach, how they teach, and why they teach what they do. The participants who hail from a diverse range of ideological landscapes were identified either by themselves or others as feminist teachers. Through a suite of data sources which comprised autobiographical essays, interviews and lecture observations, this paper explores how the female teacher's educative and pedagogic expertise and interactions are framed in relation to her race, gender, and age. Accepting the fluidity and complexity of identity positionalities, the paper explores the identity constructions of the feminist teachers in their communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life skills have become the foci of many girls' education initiatives because they are assumed to empower girls to negotiate oppressive gender norms constraining their lives. Often these programmes give a singular attention to gender norms, despite other interlocking oppressive structures and norms. Although postcolonial feminist perspectives in education have often stressed on intersectional analyses, little attention has been given to caste in such scholarship in India. In this paper, we draw on data from a three-year qualitative study of a girls' life skills programme in Rajasthan, India, employing a postcolonial feminist framework. We engage with Dalitbahujan feminist perspectives in education (Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. London: Routledge.) to decolonize our frameworks and illustrate how the life skills programme produced contradictory outcomes to address gender oppression, such as ensuring girls' bodily integrity, while re-inscribing caste norms. This intersectional analysis of caste, gender, and modernity expands on a postcolonial feminist critique of life skills [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Catholic girlhood, womanhood and the mother–daughter relationship, and its socio-historical construction within a range of disparate discourses. The aim of the paper is to deconstruct dominant patriarchal constructions and images of femininity, particularly those embedded within the doctrine of Catholicism. Moreover, the paper intends to reveal traces of maternal connections and relations which are often hidden by more dominant discourses. Rather than providing a historical account of Catholic girlhood, the object is to tell a perspectived story of the local and contextual experiences of growing up and being educated to be a ‘good Catholic woman’ in suburban Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s and 1960s. In telling the story it is hoped that other women can momentarily engage with this narrative of Catholic girlhood and the mother–daughter relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that whilst equitable educational pathways are integrated into educational policy discourses in Australia, there are significant gendered barriers to educational participation among members of the Sudanese refugee groups. The specific conditions of forced migration reinforce disadvantage and further limit opportunities. Cultural factors play a key role in this, as the data from this study demonstrate. Participants in this study are Sudanese refugees who arrived in Australia as part of the humanitarian programme. The paper draws upon interviews and focus group data that were collected for a larger study on the broader issue of resettlement of Sudanese refugees in Australia. This paper argues that women from refugee backgrounds are particularly at risk and face cultural and linguistic barriers in accessing educational opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent of gender differences, and discusses the role of gender in musical instrument learning. It focuses on the collective instrumental experiences of 1493 Chinese students (774 boys and 719 girls attending grades 7-13) within Western and non-Western musical traditions in Hong Kong. The discussion draws attention to gender differences in the learning of Chinese and Western musical instruments, in musical interest and instrumental learning, and in the reasons why students learn or do not learn musical instruments. The paper argues that, while female and male students exhibit different attitudes towards the types of instruments learnt, significant correlations exist between their interest in music and parental support for their instrumental learning. Gender is brought to the fore by the pedagogical actions of the teacher, the mass media and by parental efforts to reduce gender bias and stereotypes through school, public and family education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of voice in relation to a research project, now in its developing stages, in which I examine how rural youth imagine their futures in the context of a career-based learning programme called The Real Game. The paper enters into conversation with feminist post-structural scholars of education in order to situate the problematic of voice within broader epistemological and ethical questions regarding representation and responsibility in research. Exploring the limits and possibilities of the proposed study, and of critical feminist ethnographies more broadly, the paper is divided into three sections: speech, representation, and ethics. Questions of voice serve as an entry point into a larger interrogation of the interrelations of theory, epistemology, and ethics in research practice. The study's specific focus on imagined futures provokes questions about how relations of time shape the production of youth subjectivities and feminist scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gender and education is somewhat limited in Scotland, and research that explores the further education sector from a gender perspective is particularly lacking. This paper argues for such work, and underlines its importance given the prominence of FE in the Scottish policy context as a key contributor to the knowledge economy and lifelong learning agendas of the Scottish parliament. The argument is also made that research on gender - including masculinities - may have particular salience in Scotland because of specific cultural assumptions and practices that inhibit the recognition of women in management. The paper reports on a small pilot study of senior women managers in the further education sector in Scotland, and draws on their experiences to advocate further research that is attentive to the gendered nature of organizations and the interrelationship of masculinities and managerialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the factors that are at present reconstructing teacher education in Sweden and in other European countries, including professionalization, inherited traditions, feminization and globalization. The authors use as a basis for the paper: documentary analysis and nearly 60 qualitative semi-structured interviews with management and teaching staff from teacher education at one Swedish higher education institution, Umeå University. Five overall themes emerged from the study: gender; teacher education cultures; organizational changes; collaboration; and research. It is argued that women and men in teacher education are positioned differently with regard to change. Women teacher educators identify more with research and accountability imperatives while their male colleagues tend to focus more on classroom knowledge and skills. The paper considers possible explanations and makes tentative extrapolations to other European sites in varying political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few men choose to become primary school teachers. Those who do move into a world often thought of as feminized and contend with a publicly-voiced rhetoric which simultaneously idealizes and demonizes them. This paper turns a spotlight on one student's stories of being a man and a student primary school teacher. It considers how he negotiates the assumptions made about him as a gendered individual challenged by the task of learning to be a teacher. It has not been the norm for women to research men. The author sets out from a different place as a woman writing about a man. The paper argues that the emotional investment and paradox in this man's narratives cannot be understood without recourse to developing understandings of masculinity and difference, learnt through language which maintains or challenges inequalities and which interrelates with social and cultural contexts which have histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines young South African school children's understanding of HIV/AIDS. Based on ethnographic work in two schools in Greater Durban, it explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated against the backdrop of race and class specific contexts. The first part of the paper examines the children's discourses of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. We show that young children's meanings of sex, sexuality and are not straightforward and are actively produced and defined through a range of social processes. These processes shape the extent to which young children experience sexuality within discourses of fear and pleasure. Young children's meanings of HIV/AIDS are explored in the second part of the paper. Here we show how their knowledge of HIV/AIDS is socially structured through class/race and gender and these forms of social relations provide the framing and reference points for children's constructions of meanings around HIV/AIDS. We finish the paper by raising some theoretical and practical/political questions about the implications of what we have found for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A glass ceiling for women still exists in academia after two decades of equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation in Australia. There are complex factors that when combined make gender inequity in the higher education sector highly resistant to change. Using personal histories as a reflexive device, the paper makes explicit the embedded male patterns of behaviour in academia that operate beneath the façade of policies and rules put into place to counter inequity. In particular, the paper focuses on the cognitive dissonance individuals experience due to the disparity between formal organizational policies promoting equity, such as workload allocations, and perceptions of the unequal opportunities for women and men. Using social identity theory and the leader member exchange (LMX) framework, the daily experiences of three academic women are interpreted, the impediments to equality identified, and suggestions made for more fundamental change to gendered organizational structures within academia. The analysis of such behaviours shows that the traditional emphasis of EEO legislation on formal policies and procedures to bring about gender equity in academia needs to be accompanied by cultural change programs that make explicit and challenge behaviours that reproduce and reinforce male hegemony in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on aspects of an ESRC project, 'The impact of Performance Threshold Assessment on teachers' work' (ESRC R000239286). The paper begins by explaining the nature and technology of Threshold Assessment , and its location nationally within the performance management system recently introduced into schools in England. We review the monitoring procedures adopted for Round 1 of Threshold and draw attention to the limitations of such statistical data as are available. We locate Threshold within recent international developments characterised by managerialism and the culture of performativity that have increasingly come to dominate both the nature of policy-making and definitions of 'professionalism'. Drawing on interview material gained from thirteen case studies carried out in primary and secondary schools and in Local Education Authorities, we analyse the ways in which Threshold Assessment carries different significance for women and men teachers, heads and threshold assessors. We conclude that the new policies represent a further step towards the masculinization of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the experiences of boys who choose not to cultivate their masculinities through hegemonic discourses and practices, this paper seeks to empirically explore and theorize the extent to which it is possible to live out the category 'boy' in non-hegemonic ways in the primary school setting. Drawing upon a year-long ethnography of children's constructions of their gender and sexual identities in two primary schools, it examines how a minority of 10- and 11-year-old white working and middle-class boys create and seek out spaces from which they can resist, subvert and actively challenge prevailing hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinities within a peer group pupil culture which thrives on the daily policing and shaming of Other 1 masculinities. The paper attempts to theorize more fully the inter-relationship of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities and argues that the ways in which boys inhabit and construct non-hegemonic masculinities both subverts and reinforces hegemonic gender/sexual relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working specifically from the authors location in a working class urban teacher education program in the United States, this paper argues for the examination and problematization of one foundational archetype of a teacher in North America: the (white) Lady Bountiful. Incorporating discussions of the historical colonial contexts that produced this archetype and the ideologies she represents, this paper argues that the persistence of this image in popular culture, in teacher education programs, and beyond, contributes to a climate that makes it difficult to address white supremacy, heteronormativity and social class issues in teacher education programs. In addition, the endurance of this archetype can 'prohibit' certain bodies from entering the teaching profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to investigate how children make sense of and negotiate non-traditional gender discourses promoted through the feminist version of the fairytale of Snow White. The research was based on work with 120 pupils aged 9-11 years old in 2 Athenian primary schools. The data were collected through semi-structured group interviews. The findings suggested that schoolchildren gave conflicting accounts in relation to gender discourses and identities. There is a strong indication that girls of this age are more prepared than boys to challenge traditional gender discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essentialist, 'traditional', Maasai gender ideology that poorly reflects the day-to-day gender realities of residents is being reproduced and dominating in the modern schooling setting of a Maasai community in Southern Kenya. Through an ethnographic analysis based on long-term fieldwork and mixed-method approaches, this paper explores the construction of this gender ideology as reflected in schooling aspirations of parents, teachers, and students, in students' own constructions of masculinity and femininity, and in school culture. This ideology functions to promote education as a means of cultural preservation and livelihood protection by drawing schooling into the Maasai's unique age-set system and warrior tradition, which is heavily imbued with particular gender constructions. While, arguably, maintaining this traditional ideology may conflict with broader goals of empowerment and social equity for Maasai women, it may serve to facilitate schooling for young girls, off-set increasing and burdensome responsibilities, and provide them with an attainable femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of youth sociology has been challenged to reconsider the role of parenting in the lives of young adults. This paper presents a multiple-case study investigation into young men’s transitions from school into further education in an Australian context. We will argue that relationships with parents are materially, socially and emotionally salient throughout the period during which young men move out of adolescence and into young adulthood during their final year of senior schooling and beyond. In considering how the young men constituted their identities in the context of family relationships, we will highlight the dynamic interplay between three relational identities: dependent, independent and interdependent. We show that a main locus of tension was the negotiation of power and agency in the representation of self in relation to parents, specifically in the context of a period in which educational achievement was highly emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper arises from my work as a teacher of courses in feminist educational theory in a New Zealand university. Students usually encounter educational theories as disembodied abstractions scattered in fragments in various, often seemingly unrelated, courses. In a crowded curriculum there is little space for them to create their own educational theories or to reflect on the processes of educational theorising. In this paper I speak with two voices as a means of modelling - for students and teachers of feminist courses - a process of doing educational theory. It is written in two columns. In the left-hand column I speak with an academic voice. I begin by reviewing some theoretical writings of post-modernist theorists who have drawn attention to the ways our educational and social theories are generated by our circumstances - biographical, historical, cultural, generational, and geographical. I then argue that post-modernists have seldom practised what they preach - their abstract, and often inaccessible, writings remain severed from the lived realities at their base. In the right-hand column I speak with a more personal voice. I introduce some everyday experiences which are usually rendered invisible in academic writing in order to demonstrate how a few moments of 'lived reality' can be generative of feminist educational theory. The paper also contains ideas about how its unorthodox form can be used to trigger multiple and idiosyncratic readings and as a trigger for students' writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I share data from a year-long study investigating the manifestations of neo-liberalism in the working lives of five women elementary school teachers in the United States. I discuss how gendered discourses of neo-liberalism construct what is understood as possible in the material-discursive production of the women’s subjectivities concerning a surprising market created by teachers for teachers that is largely promoted through the social media site, Pinterest©: Teachers Pay Teachers©. Utilising new materialist feminist theory [Braidotti, R. 2000. “Teratologies.” InDeleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan, and C. Colebrook, 156–172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin. 2012.New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press], I analyse how the teachers intra-act [Barad, K. 2007.Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] with curricular material actants [Bennett, J. 2010.Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that have the capacity to alter the course of events in women’s work and lives. I argue that these material actants further entangle the material-discursive, virtual-real production of subjectivity and influence women teachers in variegated but particularly gendered ways that ultimately reinforce emerging theories around the gendered nature of neo-liberal subjectivity [Gill, R. 2008. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.”Subjectivity25 (1): 432–445. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.28; Walkerdine, V. 2003. “Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-liberal Subject.”Gender and Education15: 237–248. doi:10.1080/09540250303864]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses how educational and cultural contexts incorporate lessons around sexuality, particularly sexual and gender identity, and how these contexts impact on identity construction of gay men in Mexico City. We analyse the experiences of 15 gay men reported through semi-structured in-depth interviews and how they incorporate sexuality through socialisation with primary social institutions in Mexico's contemporary educational political context. The sample was divided into three generations, and was selected through maximum variability. Results show that men incorporate negative meanings around same-sex sexuality, and themselves from institutions such as school and family. Men are able to deconstruct these meanings through interactions with educational tools such as the Internet and interactions with gay friends. These results are discussed using post-structuralist perspectives to understand how identity is fluid and changing constantly, as well as the need to incorporate stigma-free curricular content in educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sexuality education and preventative sexual abuse education are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper extends the argument against this separation by highlighting flaws in the logic that manifests this separation. Diffracting critical sexuality education theory with the monist logic of new materialism, I rethink sexuality as an array of intra-acting1bodies that are always in a process of becoming anew. Realising the belonging together of dualist terms [Bergson, Henri. 1896 [1911].Matter and Memory. Translated and edited by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.] and how the reductive structure of dualist logic affirms an original ‘One’, I argue that the feminist push for pleasure-based, sex-positive education affirms sex-negative attitudes. Embracing Barad's [Barad, Karen. 2007.Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.] notion of ethics as inescapable entanglement woven through all matter(ing), I suggest that rather than any particular ‘aspect’ of sexuality being emphasised in sexuality education it would be more useful to centre classroom discussions on ethics, as inescapable entanglement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational spaces have long provided opportunities for politicisation and activism. However, research into the processes through which students become politicised can often focus on participation in recognised forms of political action, thereby ignoring the multiple factors active in developing a political consciousness. This paper draws on narrative interviews with feminist women to consider the importance of education to their experience of becoming feminist. It considers how, for a particular group of women who were all students or recent graduates of non-STEM disciplines, academic feminism formed an important part of their narrative of becoming feminist. Each of the women referred to having a long-standing feminist inclination, instinct or feeling and indicated that studying academic feminism offered them the tools for reflecting on and articulating this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys' education that eclipsed the more complex strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Framework. This paper takes up the Gender Equity Framework (1997) as a case of policy emergence, mutation and dissipation. In particular, it attends to feminist temporality, and its affective force, to begin to trouble conventional accounts of these policy shifts. Close readings of sections of the policy document and of interviews with policy actors working at that time are analysed through the notion of kairos – timeliness, or political actions that open opportunities, breaks and ruptures – in order to provide new insights into the policy moment of gender equity in Australian schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2015 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, with a goal to contribute to gender equality globally. As scholars continue in their quest to ‘take stock’ of the ways in which gender and education work in tandem to achieve greater gender equality, we observe a revival in interest regarding conversations on gender and education. These conversations cover a gamut of related issues, including teaching and achievement as well as a number of intersecting issues such as gender-based violence. Within the conversation has been a continued focus on the role of equity primarily defined as access and opportunity. This paper explores the context of quality as it relates to equity in education and addresses the problems that are still left on the margins. Our goal is to take stock and assess the strength of evidence and to provide directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the role played by part-time Women's/Gender Studies (WGS) courses in women's lives in the UK through interviews with 35 women who were among 8000 students who studied one of the UK Open University's undergraduate interdisciplinary WGS courses between 1983 and 1999. A thematic analysis of these interviews shows how these mainly working and lower middle-class, mature women were living through a time of great social change for women. The WGS course they studied helped them understand these changes and grasp the educational, social and employment opportunities that opened for UK women after 1980. The authors reflect on these social and educational changes and using Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach (2011) analyse the capabilities these women developed through their study of these courses, which helped them to change their own lives and the lives of others around them. Looking forward, the authors argue that WGS courses have the potential to develop these capabilities in a time of economic recession and reduced opportunities for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores certain possible reasons behind the uneasy relationship between women and technology. The cultural identification of technology with masculinity has been well documented through previous research. However, we feel it is useful to revisit this complex relationship through the scope of a more subtle distinction between ‘users’ and ‘connoisseurs’, and the struggle over power, which revolves around a specific form of hegemonic masculinity. We draw on interviews that examine students’ experiences, emotions, and statements about gender, technology, mathematics, and education, and we try to offer an understanding of the ways women negotiate their position within the dominant discourse about computing and mathematics. Our analysis employs post-structuralist discourse theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reconsiders urban–rural and modern–traditional dichotomies by exploring the multiple and contested gendered issues that secondary school girls face in rural Kisii, Western Kenya. Findings are drawn from a qualitative case study and explore the ways that gendered norms interact with new ideas of gender equity in and out of the classroom. It is argued that this rural setting offers a highly complex environment for girls in local day secondary schools who often face multiple challenges; many of which are at risk of being overlooked by assumptions that the rural context, where the girls live and are educated, is timeless, static and isolated. Implications are considered for the reconceptualisation of ideas of gender equity in education to go beyond quantitative measures such as enrolment and parity of attention in class to account for out-of-school challenges and the ways in which girls are treated while in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the characteristics of women discipline supervisors in the Arab education system in Israel, through their professional development to their attainment of senior supervisory posts. It examines how they attain supervision posts and perform various managerial functions in what is considered a male role, in a patriarchal society, highlighting changes they introduce. In-depth interviews elucidated the life stories of four women supervisors in the Arab education system in Israel. Findings point up the need for a policy of gender equality in role appointments, and the need for mentoring and support to encourage women to undertake senior roles in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the celebratory uptake of human rights education (HRE) in postcolonial contexts by making visible the ideological and political entanglements of the discourse with neoliberal assumptions of citizenship. I draw evidence from, and critically reflect on, a specific HRE programme – a series of summer camps for girls entitled, Women Leaders of Tomorrow (WLT) – that a colleague and I implemented in Pakistan. Using narrative inquiry methodology, I examine the kinds of citizens imagined in and through its curriculum, and the norms of leadership and community promoted by it, to argue that the programme can be interpreted as a technology of neoliberalism in that it was productive of neoliberal rationalities. Individuals, however, are not simply objects of knowledges; they co-opt, resist, negotiate, and compromise. I, thus, disturb my own linear reading of the unfolding of WLT by reflecting on moments of resistances where participants not only interrogated its assumptions but also engaged in self-stylisations that produced new mutations of HRE. This unfolding of a globalist discourse in a local setting directs me to call for a re-conceptualisation of HRE in postcolonial contexts that is multiple, contingent, and fluid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore how learning strategies based on competition and zero-sum thinking are inscribed into the dynamics of classroom interaction shaping relations between high-achieving pupils, and link elements of these practices to market trends in British education policy discourse. A detour through the politico-historical negotiations shaping relations between neo-liberal governance and education is initially sketched out, bringing into focus how the proliferation of policy discourses of consumerism and marketisation aim to facilitate and shape the conduct of persons in classroom settings. Drawing on ethnographic observation data taken from a study of two London comprehensive secondary schools, I then outline how pupils are incited to behave as competitive strategists in the classroom and reflect on the gender constructions underpinning these performances and their slippery dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]