Choosing to compromise: women studying childcare

Reporting on a study of mature women training to work in childcare, this article demonstrates how some women choose to be part-time mothers, workers and students, wanting ‘the best of both worlds’. It presents a theory of integrated lives that contrasts with customary deficit models and shows how a series of reciprocal links bind the women's different roles together, introducing an adaptation of Coser's theory of greedy institutions to demonstrate how this is an inherently stable position. Whilst the theory can stand alone, it is usefully recast as a localised example of a capability set as it frames the co-realisable choices open to the women. Making further links with Amartya Sen's capability approach, it is suggested that we should encourage governmental interventions that enable individual choice and support those women who want to integrate their lives alongside those who seek parity in the public sphere.     

Education of women with disabilities in Pakistan: enhanced agency,unfulfilled aspirations

This paper examines the extent to which the capability approach captures the complexity of the lives of young women with disabilities in Pakistan, particularly in relation to their education. Focusing on their educational experiences and outcomes, we examine the ways in which education shaped what these young women were able to achieve – what they wanted to do and be. In undertaking this research, we adopted a collaborative, qualitative approach involving in-depth interviews with six young women with disabilities. All these women were interesting and exemplary cases, given their very high levels of education. Our findings suggest that the capability approach provides a framework that is able to capture the educational experiences–outcomes journey of the young women. However, also interesting to note is how the expansion of their capabilities is bounded, primarily because their freedoms are intrinsically linked to their sociocultural positioning and largely negative perceptions of disability in the wider society.     

Context and history: Using a capabilities-based social justice perspective to explore three generations of western Turkish female teachers’ lives

The purpose of this paper is to understand historically and contextually the well-being and agency of selected female teachers in Turkey. The paper develops a justice model based on the capability approach to build on the relation between freedom and equality, and to take gender and cultural diversity as a key element. The research draws on results from in-depth biographical narratives of 15 participants from west Turkey, examining the real freedoms and opportunities of three different generations of female teachers through constructing a gendered look into women's lives. The study begins by developing a framework linking women's opportunities and freedoms drawing its normative compass from Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach. It explores how female teachers’ well-being can be understood in relation to key capabilities that individuals, communities and society have reason to value and how these capabilities and functionings can be expanded or constrained. The paper argues for the significance of thinking about capabilities in the professional lives of teachers who work for social change. Through a historical and generational sequence, it captures the egalitarian aspects of the capability approach, and strengthens its emphasis on freedoms of women. The findings of this enquiry indicate that there are persistent economic, cultural, ethnical, structural and gendered inequalities in women's lives, but that women also have agency to bring changes in their lives and through their teaching.     

Career development of English female head-teachers: influences,decisions and perceptions

This paper presents findings from a study examining the career development experiences of female head-teachers in the south of England. Adapting a three-stage career model, the study examined different stages of the women’s lives and careers in order to understand what encouraged and influenced them to become educational leaders and how their experiences shaped their perceptions of headship. The study used semi-structured life story interviews to generate rich accounts of women’s lives from childhood. Findings suggest that parents exerted significant influence on the participants’ values and ambitions, while teachers influenced their career choices. Their perceptions of headship developed and changed over time, transforming from feelings of shock at the reality and the complexity of headship to control and confidence that increased over first, second and third headships.     

Enabling international student families: new empiricisms and posthumanist entanglements in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of ‘intra-active becoming in movement’. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.     

Partners for success? Undergraduate women’s post-feminist constructions of intimate relationships

Past research suggests that undergraduate women have faced educational cultures in which their college experience is defined through romantic experiences. This study expands this literature by investigating how heightened achievement expectations for undergraduate women inform their broader conceptions of intimate relationships, by asking the following research question: how do high-achieving undergraduate women conceptualise intimate relationships? Through qualitative analysis of 76 semi-structured interviews, I find that study participants reject gendered narratives of romance and instead preserve their achievement by constructing two ideal relationship logics: independent and companionate logics. I suggest that participants’ conceptions of relationships have undergone a notable inversion: students’ constructions of positive intimate relationships centre on the maintenance of academic achievement and autonomy, and show the long reach of neoliberal, ‘post-feminist’ ideologies into women’s everyday lives.     

The lure of hegemonic masculinity: investigating the dynamics of gender relations in two male elementary school teachers’ lives 1

This paper is based on an investigation into the dynamics of masculinity in two male elementary school teachers’ lives. It draws on a poststructuralist approach to empirical analysis that is informed by Sondergaard who argues for the need to attend to the ‘constitution of social practices and cultural patterns’ through which subjects make sense of their lived experiences. This approach, it is argued, is supported by Convery who stresses the need to ‘sensitively confront’ the identity claims that are inscribed through teacher narratives. In this sense, the author provides an account of the dynamics of masculinity in two male elementary school teachers’ lives, which attend to issues of sexuality and social class in examining how gendered identity management impacts on pedagogical practices and philosophical approaches to teaching. This poststructuralist analytic inquiry, with its emphasis on interrogating essentialized notions of fixed identity, illuminates the contradictory practices of hegemonic masculinity in male elementary school teachers’ lives. Such empirical inquiry, it is further argued, is necessary given the failure of educational policy, in its insistence on the need for more male role models in elementary schools, to deal adequately with the complexities and significance of male teachers’ masculinities.     

The role of Women's/Gender Studies in the changing lives of British women

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.     

Contested womanhood: women’s education and (re)production of gendered norms in rural Pakistani Muslim communities

In a world marred by the fears of religious extremism, Muslim women have become subjects of various global projects that aim to modernize ‘traditional’ Muslim societies through women’s education and empowerment. Embedded in these discourses is an assumption that all educated Muslim women will empower themselves through challenging the ‘oppressive’ structures of their families and communities. This paper challenges these homogeneous narratives of education and empowerment through highlighting the complexities of educated women’s daily lives in rural Pakistan. We situate the lived experiences of rural educated Pakistani women in global mainstream as well as in local historical narratives regarding the role and purpose of education for women. Our analysis reveals how the educated women participants’ lives were shaped by a complex gendered hierarchy that facilitated educated women to take on new roles while simultaneously requiring them to maintain harmonious relationships with family and community members.     

Reproduction and transformation of students’ technology practice: The tale of two distinctive secondary student cases

Disparities in the technology practices, skills and knowledge of school students still exist, despite widespread investment, and use in schools. In order to understand why inequalities remain, we first need a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology practice, including understanding how their backgrounds, circumstances and experiences shape their perceptions of and engagement with technology. This paper proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing in order to highlight how and why students use technology at school and in their everyday lives. The paper reports on a qualitative embedded case study of 13–16-year-old students in two Australian secondary schools. In-depth case studies of two selected students illustrate the complex nature of students’ technology practice. Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital are used as a lens through which to view and understand inequalities in students’ technology practice. The findings demonstrate the utility of sociological theory in educational technology research by highlighting systems and structures of reproduction and transformation. Furthermore, the findings can inform an approach to teaching and learning that considers students’ varied experiences, knowledge, perspectives and backgrounds relating to technology.     

The perception,management and performance of risk amongst Forest School educators

This article investigates how risk perception amongst teachers within an outdoor educational initiative, Forest School, both shape and are shaped by their understandings of childhood, pedagogy and their own professional identity. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective in theorising risk and childhood, the article argues that contemporary, hyper-sensitised concerns regarding children’s vulnerability emanate from both fears of the modern world, and the proclivity towards over-protection which these fears precipitate. Rather than treating this hyper-sensitivity as irrational or paranoid, the paper draws on socio-cultural theories and qualitative methods to interrogate how risk is perceived, managed and performed by teachers within an initiative which aims to reintroduce risk into children’s lives. The research found that while these teachers’ motivations to participate in Forest School were derived from a desire to expose children to formative risk-taking in the outdoors, the hegemonic cultural and institutional risk aversion which they were attempting to counter, aligned with their contested occupational identity, created tensions in how they managed and performed risk which militated against the full realisation of a Forest School pedagogy.     

Empowerment of women students through educational achievement: A narrative enquiry

Abstract

Education is the basic tool for empowering women, and this is particularly striking among women from deprived economic and social backgrounds. Narratives of women's lives indicate different statuses of self-development, which are further complicated by issues of race, class and socioeconomic position. This paper presents the stories of four black midlife women with a view to examining how women from a background of extreme deprivation construct and give meaning to the story of their educational history and its contribution to their self-identity. Data was collected through written life histories and interviews and analysed according to two narrative models. The findings illustrate how the women made sense of trauma and difficult life transitions, describe their ultimate empowerment through educational and professional achievement, and illustrate the use and value of narrative enquiry in research in education.     

Bibliotherapy and Teaching Jewish Texts: “Medicine for the Mind”

Bibliotherapy is an educational approach that attempts to engage learners in meaningful discussions about relevant, compelling, and complex issues that they confront in their lives. Bibliotherapy begins with reading and reflecting on stories that can draw participants into a process of reflection, in ways that are user friendly and non-threatening. This study examines the unique educational features of bibliotherapy, and then proposes a model for implementing this approach in teaching Jewish texts. In the study's final section, we describe a teaching unit that demonstrates how to introduce bibliotherapy into the teaching about death and mourning in Jewish schools.     

‘If you write poems,it’s like a crime there’: an intersectional perspective on migration,literacy practices,and identity curation

ABSTRACT

This article offers an alternative point of view on the perspectives that large-scale literacy surveys provide on refugee women by presenting the case of Darya, a young Afghan woman who moved to Canada as a refugee in 2009. It also presents how a community-based organisation for young people addressed Darya’s literacy and identity curation practices, and life situation in their everyday activities. The original study this paper is based on adopted an ethnographic and participatory approach. For the purpose of this paper, only the data relating to Darya was retained and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings illustrate how exploring the intersections between gender, race, and religion is a fruitful lens to adopt in order to understand young refugee and migrant women’s literacy learning and practices. The data suggest that the community-based organisation provided a positive space not just for literacy learning but also for important identity work. It did so by 1) grounding its activities in young people’s lives and practices, 2) aiming to foster confidence building and autonomy, 3) being open to multilingualism and multimodality, and 4) focusing on young people’s futures. The findings also illuminate the need to train youth workers about cultural responsiveness.     

‘They call me headmaster’: Malawian and Australian women leaders

This article explores commonalities in the lives and work of women head teachers in Malawian secondary schools and women principals in Australian Lutheran schools. In both Australia and Malawi women are under-represented in school leadership and often appointed to complex schools and communities. We commence with a brief discussion of Malawi and Australia’s political and educational histories which have much in common, before outlining current selection policies for school leadership. The second part of the article explores women leaders’ initial and ongoing challenges in relation to their school systems, daily work and domestic lives. The final section focuses on their perspectives of current strategies to address women’s under-representation as leaders in their respective school systems. Notwithstanding the stark contrast in socio-economic contexts, we highlight enduring transnational inequalities in women leaders’ lives and work in Malawian secondary and Australian Lutheran schools.     

Who decides? Tanzanian women's narratives on educational advancement and agency

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.     

Understanding temporality and future orientation for young women in the senior year

This article considers how time is imagined, lived, and desired in young women’s lives as they undertake their final year of secondary school studies in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that economic and competitive imperatives have intensified for many young people in recent times, manifesting in an educational apparatus that increasingly defines the parameters of success and achievement in terms of self-regulation and personal responsibility, and that this is particularly pronounced for young people as they prepare for, and aspire towards tertiary pathways. This article draws upon interviews and a-synchronous ‘blog’ posts from two young women who participated in a year-long study of young people enrolled in their final year of secondary school studies. It suggests that the intensification, compression, and control of time in educational discourse around the senior year plays a powerful role in self-making for young women in particular.     

Gipsy Hill Training College graduates: once,always and everywhere a modern woman teacher in the interwar years

This article examines the ways in which Gipsy Hill Training College’s (GHTC) graduates represented their lives and work in the college magazine, the Gipsy Trail. The so-called ‘Wraggle Taggle News’ featured snippets from married and single women teachers at every stage of their lives and work in Britain and overseas by the late 1930s. It will be shown that graduates integrated discourses of the modern woman and Gipsy Hill’s modernist ideals of individual autonomy, and educational and social progressivism into their paid work and domestic situations, leisure and propaganda work across their life course. Indeed, it was a case of ‘once a teacher, always a teacher’ and everywhere a modern woman teacher in the interwar years.     

Revising Amartya Sen’s capability approach to education for ethical development

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Amartya Sen's capability approach can suggest an appropriate theory of education for ethical development. Many advocates of Sen's capability approach insist that his approach is superior to rival theories of education, including the human capital theory. This is because Sen emphasizes the purpose and various roles of education for achieving substantial freedom while rival theories focus on the instrumental aspects of education. A focus on rival educational theories often results in the negative effects seen occurring in colonial education. In principle, we agree with the advocates of Sen’s capability approach. However, we doubt that Sen’s emphasis is sufficient for guaranteeing that his capability approach is the appropriate theory of education for application in the context of ethical development. It does not have theoretical completion, and it gives no guidance as to conflict resolution concerning the roles, or value, of education. Nor does it give guidance as to how to implement pedagogical strategies. This incompletion allows economically instrumental values to dominate intrinsic values and non-economically instrumental values, as seen with the educational Millennium Development Goals. This prioritization is what has occurred in colonial education through the application of human capital theory. We suggest that in Sen’s capability approach, firstly, the meaning of the intrinsic value of education should be clarified; secondly, the non-economically instrumental roles of education should be explicated in the context of development; and finally, the priority of the intrinsic and the non-economically instrumental roles of education value should be taken over the economically instrumental values. In this revised theory, people’s substantive freedom is achievable through education, people’s aboriginal identities and values remain intact, and developing countries take seriously pedagogical strategies.