Boys and Literacy: Lessons from Australia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complexity of the issues associated with boys and literacy. It initially reviews Australian research documenting gender differences in literacy performance, highlighting the interplay between gender, class and ethnicity within this research. It then develops a framework for considering the interconnectedness between literacy, various masculinities, and schooling. The paper argues that literacy, as it is constructed in the school, becomes a domain of knowledge and a set of technologies that run counter to various dominant constructions of masculinity. As a result, school literacy is often in contrast to other electronic and visually-based 'literacy skills' that boys have access to. The paper suggests an approach which works with social constructions of masculinity, and discourses on 'critical literacy', to provide strategies for boys' literacy education that will not be in conflict with the education of girls reform agenda of the past 20 years.     

Constructing dominant masculinity and negotiating the 'male gaze'

One of the suggested strategies for tackling boys' underachievement is for primary schools to recruit more men teachers to provide boys with positive male role models. However, little is known of how those men teachers already working in primary schools contribute towards the construction of dominant modes of masculinity in schools or how girls engage with those dominant forms. This paper sets out to explore the ways in which two male teachers of one primary class contributed towards the development and maintenance of a particular mode of masculinity. It will be shown that male teachers'attitudes and behaviours were crucial to the construction of a mode of masculinity framed around white, middle-class values (‘intelligence’ and ‘proficiency’) and contextualized within an environment reminiscent of an exclusive men's sports club. It will further be shown how, during the course of the year, the girls devised strategies that challenged the heterosexualized behaviours of one of their male teachers by reversing the ‘male gaze’.     

Back to the future on gender and anti‐school boys: a response to Jeffrey Smith

This article examines recent claims by Jeffrey Smith that: (1) ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is an expression of working class counter‐school culture; (2) some teachers are ‘cultural accomplices’ in constructing ‘hegemonic masculinities’ of anti‐school working class boys, thereby contributing to their underachievement; and (3) these ‘cultural accomplices’ are an emerging response to recent moral panics and neo‐liberal managerialism concerned with ‘failing boys’ at school. It is suggested that ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is not necessarily associated with anti‐school values in working class culture. Many working class boys might subscribe to ‘hegemonic masculinity’ without rejecting learning. Contrary to Smith’s emphasis on how working class culture generates anti‐school ‘hegemonic masculinity’, there is the possibility that ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is fused with anti‐school values produced by organisational differentiation. The continuing commonalities between working class anti‐school boys and the ‘gender regime’ of some secondary schools for over 20 years implies something more enduring at work than recent moral panics.     

Lifelong Learning and the 'Breadwinner Ideology': Addressing the problems of lack of participation by adult,working-class males in higher education on Merseyside

This paper considers the cultural and economic positions of working-class men in the specific context of Merseyside, their attitudes towards education (taking into account, amongst other things their assumed 'breadwinner' role and its pertinence within the prevalent regional context of 'living off one's wits') and the effects on their levels of participation in higher education. Drawing upon recent research into mature students in British universities, the paper suggests that universities themselves need to change if they are to offer an image and environment that will appeal to the adult working class, and in particular the adult workingclass male (who on paper have the most to benefit from lifelong learning) and, significantly, the universities must reassess their 'community' role, and begin to think of themselves in terms of their 'local' remit.     

Multiculturalism in the University: Consultation,Advocacy, and the Politics of Culture

An increasing number of scholars, especially those whose work has focused on ethnic studies, curriculum reform, and multicultural education, will be called on to share their observations and recommendations with colleagues whose universities are engaged in the formative stages of expanding the cultural boundaries of their curriculum. The work they will be called on to do as 'cultural consultants' will place them at the center of an ideological and pedagogical debate that has now transcended the educational arena. The political nature of this debate will necessarily cast the consultant in the role of advocate in a struggle that dates back to the controversial beginnings of ethnic studies in the American university. I examine the current discourse-its pedagogical, political, and cultural aspects-and link these to considerations for the consultant who enters into a collaborative relationship with change agents (consultees) in the university of the 1990s. I examine the persistent issues and challenges encountered in my visits to a variety of campuses where the spoken agenda may have been multiculturalism but where an implied strategy may be heralding a more profound level of structural change in the culture of American higher education. The intent is to chart a kind of 'topographical road map' for those who plan to embark on similar journeys. I speak from experience as a consultant, guest speaker, lecturer, evaluator, and observer.     

Gender,reputation and regret: the ontological politics of Australian drug education

This study explores the role of gender in the constitution youth alcohol and other drug consumption in Australian drug education curriculum. Drawn from an analysis of contemporary classroom drug education documents, it is argued that current drug education reproduces unethical and harmful accounts of femininity and masculinity. These enactments of gender primarily arise in three ways. First, drug education currently positions young women's consumption practices as intrinsically more problematic than those of young men. Second, drug education works to position young women's consumption practices as a problem of spoiled reputation and regret. Third, drug education works to responsibilise young women for potential danger and harm they experience while intoxicated without any consideration of the illegal actions of young men. Working with Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics, this article argues that Australian drug education enacts gendered realities of youth consumption that work to reproduce, rather than reduce, a range of social harms, ‘drug-related’ or otherwise.     

Male Teachers in Feminised Teaching Areas: Marching to the beat of the men's movement drums?

Calls for more male teachers are prevalent in current gender debates in education. A dominant argument in this debate is that boys are often alienated from school because of a lack of male role models in feminised areas of the school curriculum and in primary schools. Little research has investigated male teachers' accounts of their work within feminised environments. Drawing on data collected in two research studies in music education, this paper focuses on accounts given by male teachers about (a) practices adopted specifically to work with boys and (b) the role of the male music teacher. Analysis of these data suggests that some male teachers working in feminised areas of the school curriculum adopt practices which, rather than challenging dominant constructions of masculinity, sometimes reinforce gender stereotypical behaviours in boys. We argue that calls for increasing the number of male teachers in feminised areas of schooling need also to be informed by open discussion of the underlying assumptions about masculinity which teachers themselves bring to their work.     

The Revolution in Rural Education Must be Dependent Upon the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants

It is worthwhile that we pay a great deal of attention to the experience the Shuiyuan Commune in Yingkow County had in carrying out the revolution in education. Chairman Mao points out: "In the countryside, poor and lower-middle peasants should manage our schools, because they are the most reliable ally of the working class." In action, the comrades at the Shuiyuan Commune in Yingkow County have already implemented this great instruction of Chairman Mao, by having poor and lower-middle peasants, as leaders, work with the revolutionary teachers and students to run the schools and to reform the educational system. There are some people who look at the revolution in education as something quite difficult to accomplish. The truth is, all we need do is follow Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line — firmly and unwaveringly, seriously but not perfunctorily — as well as to be good in summarizing experiences and lessons. Before too long, there will be noticeable results. Hasn't the outlook of the Shuiyuan Commune, which irrevocably carried out Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary thinking on education, changed completely in just a little over six months' time?     

“双性同体”视角下的儿童文学翻译研究——以The Wizard of Oz为例

一些研究表明,表现出"双性化"人格的个体具备男女两性都具有的优秀气质特征,如自信、独立、沉稳、成熟等。文章从"双性同体"角度探讨儿童文学翻译中的性别气质,并通过对《绿野仙踪》两个译本的对比分析,说明儿童文学译者应充分合理地展现原作所体现的女性和男性气质,以便对儿童的"双性化"气质培养产生积极的影响。     

Cool Guys,Swots and Wimps: the interplay of masculinity and education

Most educational work concerned with changes in gender relations has been addressed to girls, justified on ‘equal opportunity’ principles, and governed by ‘sex‐role’ theories. This framework is not very relevant to educational work with boys, yet gender issues arise here too. The paper presents retrospective data on schooling from the life‐histories of two groups of men, drawn from a larger study of contemporary changes in masculinity. Unemployed working‐class men recall ‘getting into trouble’, a process of constructing masculinity through conflict with the institutional authority of the school. Here, the school, as part of the state represents a power they cannot participate in. However, the school is also a site of the differentiation of masculinities. Some working‐class boys embrace a project of mobility in which they construct a masculinity organised around themes of rationality and responsibility. This is closely connected with the ‘certification’ function of the upper levels of the educational system and to a key form of masculinity among professionals. Some young men from this background, however, reject the connection with abstracted knowledge and bureaucratic authority, among them men interviewed who are in the environmental movement. A number of these men had encountered feminism first‐hand, for instance through feminist texts. Where there are low levels of literacy, especially political literacy, feminist influence on men is slight. On the other hand, a common reaction among men who do study feminist writing is a demobilising guilt. A major opportunity for educational action exists, but there are difficulties in designing it. Broadly, the strongest effects of schooling on the construction of masculinity are the indirect effects of streaming and failure, authority pattern, the academic curriculum and definitions of knowledge—rather than the direct effects of equity programmes or courses dealing with gender. This is a major strategic problem for reform. Two criteria for action can be suggested: curricula need to be designed to broaden boys’ sources of information about sexuality and gender; programmes need to be designed that allow for practical accomplishment on these issues, not open‐ended problem identification alone.     

Effectiveness,Difference and Sociological Research

This article addresses Making the Difference (Connell et al., 1982) as a research project, in the specific context of Australian education and Australian sociology. It argues that the form of its research and writing have been as influential as the argument itself, and illustrates these themes by comparing that project of the early 1980s with two more recent Australian projects of the late 1990s. It is suggested that Making the Difference was successful in illustrating class and culturally based inequalities in the form of Australian schooling, and in illuminating some gendered processes of that schooling, but that its proposal for an 'organic working class curriculum' was difficult and utopian in conception, and quickly overtaken by broader interests in school 'effectiveness', and political moves to 'third way' policies rather than class war. It is argued that the Queensland New Basics project illustrates some of the lessons of engagement and communication offered by Making the Difference , and also the pragmatism of this new political context; and that the longitudinal 12 to 18 Project attempted to build on insights about class and gender of the earlier work, but with attention to some of the limitations of the type of focus on class of that work.     

The Colonisation of Social Class in Education

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dilemmas posed by the analysis of working class issues in education by professional sociologists. There are two central themes in the paper. First it suggests that the inequalities experienced in the education system by working class people has been colonised by middle class academics for their own professional purposes. This colonisation has been greatly facilitated by the nature of the scholastic context itself. To globalise one's point of view in academic writing requires both freedom from the urgency and necessity of survival, and intellectual legitimacy. Working class people lack both. The paper also suggests that working class people occupy a struturally contradictory role in relation to education: on the one hand, social mobility generally requires that they be well educated. Yet if they are to succeed in the education system they have to abandon certain features of their class background. They cease to be working class at least to some degree. Other oppressed or marginalised groups in education, do not lose their defining minority identity or status by being educated: an educated woman never ceases to be a woman, an educated black person never ceases to be black, and a physically disabled person who is educated never ceases to be disabled. The structural relationship between social class and education, is fundamentally different therefore to that of gender, race and ethnicity and this issue needs to be re‐assessed in educational analysis. Finally, the paper suggests that the failure to incorporate a working class perspective on educational inequalities leads to the impoverishment of academic analysis as the interests of professional academics rather than working class people dominate the agenda.     

Conflict and contentment: Case study of the social mobility of working‐class students in Canada

This article offers a tentative exploration of how working‐class students' mobility is affected by the push to enter middle‐class careers and lifestyles, and the pull of their working‐class origins. Based on a nine‐year qualitative longitudinal study of working‐class students at a Canadian university, I will show that few study participants experienced mobility as an uncontested or linear trajectory. Two key storylines can be identified: (a) a story of adjustment, modification and contentment; and (b) a story of conflict, loss, and struggle. For most, educational mobility was tempered by revisions of occupational ambitions, by returns to their home communities and by lifestyle choices that do not fit simple narratives of status mobility. And yet, all expressed a growing sense of self‐confidence, appreciated their education as an experience of personal growth, and achieved on their own terms, in post‐graduate education and newly discovered careers.     

Class‐Room Discipline: power,resistance and gender. A look at teacher perspectives

Class‐room discipline, an issue of ‘power’ and ‘control’ for many teachers and students, is investigated in relation to teachers' attitudes towards stereotyped models of masculinity and femininity. Two important issues are considered; firstly, that what is generally regarded as appropriate gender behaviour by teachers plays a major role in determining their approaches and responses to the behaviour of boys and girls in the classroom. This paper focuses on the experiences of girls and teachers' traditional perceptions of femininity and it is believed that the stereotyped, often middle‐class assumptions made by many teachers, which make up an overall view of how girls ‘should’ behave, have serious effects on girls' motivation, self‐esteem, reputations, their ability to fulfil their educational potentials and their futures. It will also seriously affect their class‐room behaviour. Secondly, stereotyped beliefs around women, men and power in our society, can influence the discipline measures of teachers, particularly male teachers, so that ‘controlling’ students in the class‐room becomes paramount, at any cost. The predominantly authoritarian regimes that were incorporated in the structure of the schools that were part of this research, were perpetuated through the ideology of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that dominates within most levels of the schooling system.     

Book reviews

Whilst there is now clearly an expectation upon parents to become more involved in schools and to take a greater part in their children's education, there is still little attempt to address the constraints upon achieving such aims. These constraints have been shown to include social class factors, gender relations, ethnicity and power relationships. This paper will take the analysis of some of these constraints further and, in particular, will focus on the views of working‐class parents on their relationships with, and role in relation to, their children's secondary school. The paper will explore the reasons for the orientation by working‐class parents which would seem to differ markedly from that of middle‐class parents. It will be shown that working‐class parents are committed to their children achieving educational success, and that they perceive their own role as supportive in a variety of ways. However, their position in relation to schools is to view the school as separate from their everyday social and cultural world and that the parent‐teacher role comprises a division of labour. It will be argued that teachers tend to adopt the same strategies for promoting parental involvement irrespective of class, parental needs, individual circumstances, and so on. Hence, because they take no account of differences, and because their strategies are constructed essentially from a logocentric position, then they serve to reinforce the parents’ perception of teachers as the professional ‘who knows best’: as the powerful knower which thus reinforces working‐class parents’ fatalistic view of schooling and their role as passive. The paper draws on data from a three‐year research project into the parents’ relationship with their children's secondary school. The data set which formed the basis of the analysis presented here comprises interviews with 58 parents from one of the case‐study schools which will be known as Acre Lane, and 15 of the school's teachers.     

De Coubertin's Olympism and the Laugh of Michel Foucault: Crisis Discourse and the Olympic Games

De Coubertin developed the sport philosophy of Olympism and the Olympic Games as a response to social and political crisis to promote peace, fair play, and the development of Christian masculinity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how crisis discourse functions as an important shaper of contemporary understandings of Olympism and how conflicting discourses have mobilized crisis discourse to produce competing ‘truths’ in which to rationalize and understand the Olympic Games. In drawing from Foucault's work and de Certeau's text, Heterologies: Discourse on the other, I argue that ‘crisis’ as the rationalization for Olympism and the Olympic Games has proven an unsuccessful venture for de Coubertin; as the Olympic Games have produced conservative outcomes based on a neoliberal agenda focused on elitism, professionalism, nationalism, and commercialism. This historical case raises important questions about the role of Olympism and its power to act as a catalyst for change.     

Empowering the Powerful: a discussion of the interrelation of government policies and consumerism with social class factors and the impact of this upon parent interventions in their children's schooling

This paper focuses on parents’ involvement with their child's schooling and the possible influences upon this. At a time when parental involvement is regarded as being highly important to a child's school achievement and given the Government's promotion of the role of parents in education, the conditions should be particularly conducive to involving all parents in this significant role. It will be argued, however, that in spite of increased statutory rights and a changing attitude towards parents by teachers and schools, parents’ social class location continues to have a direct impact upon their ability to intervene in their child's schooling. The paper concludes that increased parental involvement is probably desirable but the nature of this and its operationalisation needs to be carefully thought out.     

Within the New Moment--An Interview with Judith Halberstam

In April 2002 Judith Halberstam, academic, cultural critic and author of Female Masculinity, toured Australia giving public and academic lectures about her recent work on sub-cultures, the Brandon Teena archive, representations of the transgender body and her notion of female masculinity. The interview is introduced through a brief sketch of her argument for female masculinity. The interview pursues three elements of her work. First, Halberstam's reflections on the implications that female masculinity and transgender have for teaching and pedagogy; second, the issue of humanism and post humanism as a site of concerted challenge and intervention; and finally, the interview turns to Halberstam's thoughts on an often overlooked area of sexualities--the relationship between queer theory and postcoloniality. Halberstam's responses are located amid what she sees as an era of new experimentalism. This era of experimentalism is perhaps an era where transgenderism acts as some kind of reorganizing of gender norms in which gender differences instantiate themselves as the baseline from which gender-sex-sexualities are understood and experienced. It is an argument positioned beyond binaries where multiple bodily aesthetics and practices collude and collide in the practice of displacing of singularity and authenticity.     

Consolidate the Leadership of the Working Class Over the Revolution in Education

This article discusses the way in which to build a leading body. In places where the intellectuals and the worker-peasant-soldier students form the principal objects of work, how to raise the leading body's consciousness in line, enforce the mass line and carry out the Party policy so as to consolidate further the political leadership of the working class is a key question bearing on carrying the revolution in education through to the end along Chairman Mao's revolutionary line.     

Pulling Back the Curtain: Relearning the History of the Philosophy of Education 1

Women have played an undeniable part in shaping the history of philosophy and philosophy of education for at least 1,000 years. Yet, current anthologies, encyclopedias, and textbooks in the field rarely recognize large numbers of women's works as consequential to our understanding of the development of educational topics and debates. This article, using the work of Herrad of Hohenbourg (1100s), Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1429), Christine de Pisan (c.1364-c.1430), and Mary Astell (1666-1731) traces women's early philosophical arguments concerning their own nature and the purposes of education. The author argue that having access to this tradition will help to remediate false perceptions of women's thought and serve as an empowering legacy for all teachers and students.