Faculty peer networks: role and relevance in advancing agency and gender equity

Organisational efforts to alter gender asymmetries are relatively rare, yet they are taking place in a number of universities. In the USA, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, ADVANCE programmes implement a number of interventions to improve the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty. This study focused on one common intervention, faculty peer networks, and the role they play in gender equity reform. Longitudinal and cross-sectional qualitative data indicate that such peer networks function as catalysts for women's career agency, and challenge gendered organisational practices. Two key features of the peer networks, their structure and internal dynamics, facilitate these outcomes. At the same time, peer networks are limited by design in promoting structural change and must be implemented in concert with other forms of policy and structural change to be effective mechanisms for gender equity reform.     

Sex and gender in transition in US schools: ways forward

Abstract

This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people’s frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.     

Opening schools to all (women): efforts to overcome gender violence in Spain

This article shows how the dialogic approach adopted by some schools in Spain generates a shift in approaches to gender violence, an issue still not explored in the literature. The shift is from an approach determined mainly by female experts to a dialogic one in which all women, including teachers, mothers, students, sisters, stepsisters, friends, and volunteers, are involved in designing and implementing programmes to prevent gender violence. An analysis of data obtained from six primary schools in Spain shows how the voices of all women are relevant to identify situations of gender violence that girl pupils are experiencing, as well as in the design of school‐based processes to prevent violence that affects these girls.     

Becoming economic subjects: agency,consumption and popular culture in early childhood

This paper considers how young children in early childhood education draw on popular texts and consumer goods in their constitution of subjectivities and social relations. The paper draws on poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, agency, consumption and power, to explore how performative practices of consumption figure in the constitution of economically oriented subjectivities. Drawing on data generated in research undertaken in early childhood centres in the culturally diverse outer metropolitan region of Greater Western Sydney, Australia, the paper considers how economic discourse informs children's cultural knowledges, shaping the ‘techniques of the self’ through their engagement with commercially available images and products. The argument is made that children make strategic use of their knowledge of popular culture and its potential to locate them advantageously in material and symbolic economies, and that the deployment of symbolic and material goods that shapes children's dress, play, and conversation is an important means of rendering oneself intelligible within normative discourses of economic participation.     

Teacher agency and professional learning in cross-cultural teaching contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from international schools in Hong Kong

This study examined how teacher agency shaped professional learning in cross-cultural teaching contexts. Interviews with 14 Chinese language teachers showed that teacher agency varied in different dimensions of professional learning. Social suggestions, power relations, teachers' professional and social positioning and the imposed identity and social roles in the school contexts interacted to shape teacher agency. The findings suggest both creating school cultures and structures that value and share diverse discursive and pedagogical practices and managing teachers' professional identity and self-positioning to enhance teachers' agency to engage in mutual learning and remaking of their work practices.     

Reading gender: a feminist,queer approach to children's literature and children's discursive agency

Children's literature helps young people make sense of gender. However, while books offer children the imaginative ability to create their own worlds, normative gender can manifest in characters and stories. The study described in this article draws upon ‘disruptive’ storytimes with 114 preschool children, interviews with 20 parents and staff, and observations at 20 preschools. Employing a feminist, queer approach, I develop two derivative books that switch a boy-hero for a girl and vice versa. These books are read to children in educational settings. This method interrogates gendered characters and stories’ attachments to such concepts as love, acceptance, bodily agency, and adventure. Results show how children interact with these characters and stories and how they use categorisation and narrative construction to make sense of gender. I focus on the gender discourses at play and moments of childhood discursive agency. Themes include literature, doing and being, positioning, bodies, and feminist tales.     

Diverse experiences of women leading in higher education: locating networks and agency for leadership within a university context in Papua New Guinea

The ways in which women deliberately press back against practices of oppression and demonstrate agency in higher education institutions are highly contextual and culturally bound. The formal and informal networks that women develop and maintain are important elements of generating agency and enhancing women's access to and opportunities for leadership. This article presents a case study from research that explored women's leadership experiences in a higher education context in the Pacific Islands – Papua New Guinea. Situated within a feminist poststructural methodology, the research examined women's experiences of leadership and considered aspects that influenced women's access to formal leadership roles. The findings illustrated that the women faced numerous barriers to formal leadership opportunities. A range of culturally and contextually located approaches supported women to demonstrate agency with regard to their own leadership development and practice. This research highlighted the importance of considering the relationship between networks and agency and the impact of associated cultural and contextual practices within organisations, providing insights into the culturally located complexities of women's leadership in higher education contexts.     

Plagiarism in UK law schools: is there a postcode lottery?

The discussion of issues relating to academic dishonesty in the UK higher education sector has become increasingly intense in recent years and has often been subject to the media spotlight. This study examines the policies, procedures and penalties at law schools across the UK when dealing with allegations of plagiarism. Data were obtained in two stages via questionnaires and structured interviews with members of staff. The considerable degree of diversity which emerges is discussed and the possible implications of such diversity are examined.     

Adapting to the test: performing algorithmic adaptivity in Danish schools

ABSTRACT

Algorithmic practices are becoming increasingly more central within educational governance. By focusing on the mechanisms of a particular algorithmic testing system in Denmark, this paper highlights how such practices are implicated in the emergence of new accountability infrastructures. It adopts an STS approach drawing specifically upon Michel Callon’s concepts framing, overflowing, and re-framing. The paper examines how algorithmic adaptivity has become central in the framing of the Danish national test and traces the ways in which students, teachers, and schools respond to such proceduralized interactions. While algorithmic adaptivity was introduced as a way of providing students with an equal test experience, it also inscribes student adaptability into test practices, generating new student affectivities and teacher responsibilities in the process. The paper argues that this is a matter of adapting to the test and highlights how the mundane practices of testing situations also become a subject of governance.     

Forging appealing identities in complex environments: a case study of American law schools

Competition has intensified substantially within the American law school sector in recent decades. Scholars note that this has augmented pressures to engage in institutional self-promotion, as law schools attempt to distinguish themselves within a severely over-crowded marketplace. To date, however, few have ventured to empirically examine the promotional behavior of law schools. This study takes a first step towards correcting this oversight within the existing literature, by analyzing the web page content of 204 law schools approved by the American Bar Association. It finds that these actors engage in varied promotional techniques that align with the interests of several distinct stakeholders within their environments. These trends are conceptualized through the lens of contemporary theorizing within the field of organization studies.     

Voluntary organizations and the contribution to social justice in schools: learning from a case study

Partnerships are seen as vital to the functioning of many social institutions and the contribution that the private and voluntary not‐for‐profit sector organizations can make to the provision of statutory services is particularly valued. The Church of England Children’s Society Genesis project worked for nearly 5 years in one urban, secondary school with a remit to promote inclusion. Despite much recorded good work, Genesis was not continued after its contract ended. The school had a series of head teachers and was in special measures for part of the period, but key problems centred around the extent of the project’s contribution to the school’s core business and the absence of a positive management of the multi‐professional project by the school. The evaluation examines ways of proceeding which are of relevance to more complex projects. The paper also reviews the place of voluntary and non‐profit making organizations in meeting current challenges to collaborative, multi‐agency working and proposes a more robust, directive, and managerialist approach to make the most efficient and effective use of the resources and expertise of voluntary and statutory agencies (Inter‐agency Czar and Stalinist environment!). Genesis has gone on to work more successfully in six further schools having absorbed the messages of the evaluation of this first enterprise.     

Boys as writers: perspectives on the learning and teaching of writing in three primary schools

Boys' attitude to writing is widely perceived as an issue in English primary and secondary schools. Prior research has identified a link between negative attitudes to writing and lower achievement and raised the issue of the stereotyping of boys as underachievers in literacy. The study reported here suggests that if we are to understand the problems associated with the underachievement of boys, we should take into account boys' perspectives on their experiences as literacy learners. In this study, boys aged 8–11 drawn from three London schools in the UK, were interviewed in small groups annually over 3 years of their primary schooling. The boys' teachers were also interviewed separately. These interviews generated insights into the teachers' views of the boys and the boys' views of themselves as literacy learners, especially as writers. The data indicated the boys were highly sensitive to the social situation in the classroom. The boys responded best to their literacy learning when their teachers treated them as individuals, valued their ideas and incorporated strategies for developing learner agency into their daily classroom practice. This article concludes that a teaching approach that includes consulting children about what helps or hinders their learning and a fresh teacher focus on gender issues would increase gender awareness.     

Sexuality education in South African schools: deconstructing the dominant response to young people’s sexualities in contemporary schooling contexts

ABSTRACT

South African schools are tasked with providing sexuality education through the Life Orientation curriculum as a means of challenging continued high rates of HIV, unwanted pregnancy and gender-based violence. While in theory schools are well positioned to provide appropriate knowledge for reproductive health and navigating sexual challenges within a gender justice framework, research on sexuality education in South African schools indicates that this is not the reality in practice. This paper draws on a growing body of qualitative studies, with both educators and learners in South African schools, to understand the issues undermining the goal of a critical and social justice pedagogy of sexuality in Life Orientation classrooms. We argue that sexuality education has been deployed to regulate and discipline young sexualities, reinforce and perpetuate gender binarisms and heteronormativity, re-establish global northern family values of the nuclear family within a pro-family discourse, and represent continued assumptions of adult authority in a civilising mission over young people. We suggest that the failure to make critical use of Life Orientation is linked to the dominance of ‘expert’-based didactic pedagogy, and argue the possibilities of sexuality education as a productive space for young people’s active participation and agency in making meaning of gender and sexualities.     

Sex does not matter: gender bias and gender differences in peer assessments of contributions to group work

This paper considers the possibility of gender bias in peer ratings for contributions to team assignments, as measured by an online self-and-peer assessment tool. The research was conducted to determine whether peer assessment led to reliable and fair marking outcomes. The methodology of Falchikov and Magin was followed in order to test their finding that gender has no discernable impact on peer ratings. Data from over 1500 participants at two universities enrolled in four different degree programmes were analysed. The research indicates an absence of gender bias in six case studies. The research also found that women received significantly higher ratings than men.     

Identity in science learning: exploring the attention given to agency and structure in studies of identity

This paper explores the ways in which the concept of identity has been conceptualised and studied within science education. The Personality and Social Structure Perspective is used to examine the attention paid by researchers to three levels of identity analysis: personality, interaction and social structure. Tracing the development of science identity studies and the resulting body of literature reveals that most authors have focused their attention on aspects of identity related to individual agency to the exclusion of issues of social structure. This paper argues that this attention is related to the position of communities of practice as the dominant theoretical framework for identity studies and argues that researchers need to consider broader frameworks that encourage the integration of ideas at all three levels of analysis. Broadened methodological approaches, including mixed methods, are also advocated as a way to increase consideration of the level of social structure.     

Explaining a reverse gender gap in advanced physics and computer science course-taking: An exploratory case study comparing Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking high schools in Israel

In the past three decades in high-income countries, female students have outperformed male students in most indicators of educational attainment. However, the underrepresentation of girls and women in science courses and careers, especially in physics, computer sciences, and engineering, remains persistent. What is often neglected by the vast existing literature is the role that schools, as social institutions, play in maintaining or eliminating such gender gaps. This explorative case study research compares two high schools in Israel: one Hebrew-speaking state school that serves mostly middleclass students and exhibits a typical gender gap in physics and computer science; the other, an Arabic-speaking state school located in a Bedouin town that serves mostly students from a lower socioeconomic background. In the Arabic-speaking school over 50% of the students in the advanced physics and computer science classes are females. The study aims to explain this seemingly counterintuitive gender pattern with respect to participation in physics and computer science. A comparison of school policies regarding sorting and choice reveals that the two schools employ very different policies that might explain the different patterns of participation. The Hebrew-speaking school prioritizes self-fulfillment and “free-choice,” while in the Arabic-speaking school, staff are much more active in sorting and assigning students to different curricular programs. The qualitative analysis suggests that in the case of the Arabic-speaking school the intersection between traditional and collectivist society and neoliberal pressures in the form of raising achievement benchmarks contributes to the reversal of the gender gap in physics and computer science courses.     

Learner contribution to English language learning: Chinese research students' agency and their transitional experiences in Australia

This article examines the role of agency for the English language development of three Chinese research students with high English proficiency sojourning in Australia. The focus is on the various approaches the learners employed to strengthen their sense of confidence in their language use in Australia. The data were obtained through in-depth interviews and organized into case-study reports. The findings demonstrate that in transitioning into the Australian linguistic and cultural community, all the learners actively sought different English-mediated activities and experiences in order to build the confidence necessary for a successful transition. The differences in their choices of activities were intimately linked with what they historically saw and established as significant achievement goals in and through English. In maintaining that the students' agency was an extension of their fundamental desires and goals for learning, this article provides insights into how second-language (L2) learners gain participation in the target community and the salience of their historical learning goals for L2 use and overall L2 development.