Constructions of Malawian boys and girls on gender and achievement

Gender differences in achievement have been widely documented and a number of feminists, particularly from the West, have used the concept of identity to explain them. This paper draws on constructions on gender and achievement generated through surveying 59 boys and 103 girls from four secondary schools, as well as interviewing 40 of the girls in order to contribute to our understanding of identity construction in an African context. The data show that the majority of boys and girls support dominant gender norms, but there is some indication of fluidity. Thus, the notion of identity formation is crucial to the analysis and interpretation of the findings, as it highlights the possibility for agency and change, since gender identities are not stable.     

Technical boys and creative girls: the career aspirations of digitally skilled youths

Digital technology is increasingly central to our lives, particularly among young people. However, there remains a concern from government and businesses of a digital skills gap because many youths, especially girls, tend to be consumers rather than creators of technology. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with digitally skilled teenagers (aged 13–19), this article investigates their digital career aspirations and examines how identities and discourses of gender can interact with the type of digital careers that are of interest to these youths. While it was found that digitally skilled young people still articulate traditional gendered discourses of digital competence, especially around technical abilities, the growing importance of creativity as a career pathway into digital technology is highlighted. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the new computing curriculum in England, which prioritises technical computing skills, and the discontinuation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), which facilitates a broader usage of software and digital productivity.     

What digital games and literacy have in common: a heuristic for understanding pupils' gaming literacy

This article argues that digital games and school‐based literacy practices have much more in common than is reported in the research literature. We describe the role digital game paratexts – ancillary print and multimodal texts about digital games – can play in connecting pupils’ gaming literacy practices to ‘traditional’ school‐based literacies still needed for academic success. By including the reading, writing and design of digital game paratexts in the literacy curriculum, teachers can actively and legitimately include digital games in their literacy instruction. To help teachers understand pupils’ gaming literacy practices in relation to other forms of literacy practices, we present a heuristic for understanding gaming (HUG) literacy. We argue our heuristic can be used for effective teacher professional development because it assists teachers in identifying the elements of gameplay that would be appropriate for the demands of the literacy curriculum. The heuristic traces gaming literacy across the quadrants of actions, designs, situations and systems to provide teachers and practitioners with a knowledge of gameplay and a metalanguage for talking about digital games. We argue this knowledge will assist them in capitalising on pupils’ existing gaming literacy by connecting their out‐of‐school gaming literacy practices to the literacy and English curriculum.     

The administration of feminism in education: revisiting and remembering narratives of gender equity and identity

This article examines challenges in writing histories of feminist reforms in schooling and educational administration. The focus is gender equity reforms in Australian schools since the 1970s, looking at how those earlier interventions are now remembered, represented and forgotten, in policy memory and collective narratives. Such feminist endeavours were part of the policy landscape and the administration of schools during the 1970s and 80s. I argue that feminist agendas can also be examined as themselves sites for managing the conduct of teachers and students and for regulating new forms of identity and social relations. These paradoxical aspects of feminist reform are analysed through a Foucauldian lens. The discussion identifies contextual themes in JEAH before considering debates within gender and feminist history. A revisiting mood has initiated a stocktake of the stories told not only about feminism but also the accounts feminism gives of itself. Extending this, I propose that critical attention to memory and the movement of received and revised historical narratives is vital for analysing the legacies of feminist reforms and how they might be (re)animated in the present. More broadly, it is suggested that attention to policy memory offers fruitful directions for historical studies of educational administration.     

Identity politics,justice and the schooling of Muslim girls: navigating the tensions between multiculturalism,group rights and feminism

This article focuses on the concerns expressed by three female Muslim educators who are support staff at an English comprehensive school. Consistent with the debates associated with multiculturalism, group rights and feminism, the article illuminates spaces of gender constraint and possibility within the discourses shaping these women’s lives and the lives of the Muslim girls they educate. With reference to an initiative at the school designed to support these girls’ greater self-determination – an Islamic discussion group – the article highlights the significance of a justice politics that begins with overcoming relations of status subordination rather than on differentiated group identity.     

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.     

Buzzwords at play: gender,education, and political participation in Kenya

The discourse around development is full of buzzwords, including gender and a myriad of variants that underscore the importance of development policies addressing gender imbalances. Despite their prevalence in development policy and research, terminology related to gender is often used broadly, inappropriately, and without nuance. For international education policy in particular, discussions related to gender equality and equity in education are engaged in such a way that assumes shared meanings between policy designers and policy recipients. Using Kenya as a site of analysis, and in the spirit of a vertical case study for data collection, this study explores how the abstractness of a buzzword functions in the microcosm of the school classroom. In comparing gendered representations in textbooks with students' perceptions of those representations to explore how development discourse plays out in Kenyan schools, findings here demonstrate that there is minimal impact due to textbooks' mixed messages, reinforcing women's marginal position in community and political engagement and demonstrating that broad-based understandings of gender empowerment are not always translated in application.     

Communication and gender identity: A retrospective analysis

Gender identity constancy and change must be traversed over the life span. The participants in this study, age 67 to 97 years, described their femininity and masculinity and provided examples of same‐sexed and opposite‐sexed behaviors. Their narratives suggest that their interactions with others, circumstances, and life stage all affect their gender identity constancy and change. Gender identity constancy and change appear to result from multiple factors.     

New trans* visibilities: working the limits and possibilities of gender at school

Abstract

In many contexts, there has been a rapid increase in the visibility of trans* lives in the public sphere. Much educational research has focused on how to make life better for trans* children and young people in schools. This paper moves sideways from this concern to explore how public discourses around trans* lives and the individual labour of bodies are changing the shape of gender in schools and society. Ireland offers an insightful site for this inquiry because, following the Gender Recognition Act (2015) and the Marriage Equality Act (2015), trans* lives have become more visible in the public sphere and there has been a heightened concern for trans* children and young people in schools. This paper draws on an analysis of how trans* people are represented in the media as well as in a selection of accounts from the primary school community of a trans* child. Framed by debates about gender intelligibility, normativity and transgression, the paper elucidates how, as trans* visibility increases, the disciplinary terms of gender are reproduced with ambivalent effects. It argues against individualised and simplistic approaches to trans* identities in schools and raises questions about new gender possibilities in schooling contexts.     

A gaming frame of mind: digital contexts and academic implications

When considering the interdisciplinary nature of education, researchers need to acknowledge students' traditional and multimodal literacies and learning environments. Technological changes have brought about new learning spaces and what students learn through their video gaming experiences seems to have important academic implications and applications. This article presents data from three case studies of academically struggling 11th‐grade male video gamers, revealing the academic affordances of the participants' video game playing; the students developed a schema for academic material from their video game playing, fostering meaningful connections to classroom material. Overall, this paper reveals how the virtual gaming environment enabled three gamers to contextualize academic information, thereby making the material personally relevant.

Ein Glücksspielrahmen für den Verstand: Digitale Kontexte und akademische Auswirkungen

Wenn man die Bereichs überschreitende Natur der Bildung bedenkt, müssen Forscher die traditionellen und multimodalen Fähigkeiten der Studenten und auch ihre Lernumgebungen anerkennen. Technologische Änderungen haben neue Lernräume für die Studenten geschaffen, und was Studenten durch ihre Videospiel Erfahrungen lernen, scheint wichtige Auswirkungen im akademischen Bereich und den Anforderungen zu haben. Dieser Artikel zeigt Daten von drei Fallstudien über wissenschaftlich sich bemühende männliche Oberstufen‐Schüler und ‐ Video‐Gamer, bei der akademischen Anforderung die Videopartie der Teilnehmer zu spielen. Die Studenten entwickelten spielend ein Schema für akademisches Material aus ihrer Videopartie und förderten bedeutsame Verbindungen zu Klassenzimmermaterial. Insgesamt zeigt dieses Papier, wie die virtuelle Spielumgebung drei Spielern ermöglichte, akademische Information in einen Zusammenhang zu setzen und dadurch das Material persönlich für sich relevant zu machen.

Penser en joueur: les contexts numériques et leurs implications scolaires

Lorsqu'ils considèrent le caractère interdisciplinaire de l'éducation, les chercheurs doivent prendre en compte à la fois les savoirs traditionnels, les savoirs multimodaux ainsi que les environnements d'apprentissage. Les changements technologiques ont donné naissance à de nouveaux espaces d'apprentissage et, ce que les élèves apprennent de leur pratique des jeux vidéo, semble avoir des conséquences et des applications importantes sur le plan scolaire. Cet article présente les résultats de trois études de cas portant sur des élèves masculins de fin de secondaire en difficulté, par ailleurs adeptes des jeux vidéo, qui montrent les possibilités scolaires de leur pratique des jeux vidéo; ces élèves ont développé à partir de leurs pratiques des jeux un mode d'approche des documents scolaires qui a fait naître des liens significatifs avec les documents de classe. Plus généralement cet article montre comment l'environnement des jeux virtuels a permis à trois joueurs de contextualiser l'information scolaire donnant ainsi aux documents une pertinence personnelle.

Un estado de animo de. Los contextos digitales y sus implicaciones académicas

Cuando los investigadores estudian el carácter interdisciplinario de la educación, tienen que tomar en cuenta tanto los saberes tradicionales como los saberes multimodales y los entornos de aprendizaje. Los cambios tecnológicos han conllevado nuevos espacios de aprendizaje y lo que los alumnos aprenden a través de sus experiencias con los juegos de video acarrea aparentemente importantes aplicaciones y implicaciones para la escolaridad. Este artículo presenta los datos de tres estudios de casos sobre alumnos varones de fín de la enseñanza secundaria aficionados a los juegos de video con dificultades escolares, revelando el potencial académico de su actuación en esos juegos; los alumnos han adquirido un esquema para el material escolar a partir de su práctica de los juegos de video y desarrollado vínculos significativos con el material de aula. En general este artículo revela como el entorno de los juegos de video ha permitido a tres jugadores de contextualizar la información académica, transformando así el material en algo personal y pertinente.     

Feminist tales of teaching and resistance: reimagining gender in early childhood education (Reggio Emilia,Italy)

ABSTRACT

This article investigates whether the memories of women’s movements that grew out of the Italian Resistance to the Nazi-Fascist Regime during the Second World War have left any legacy to women teachers in early childhood education. The article focuses on the case of internationally renowned and high-quality schools for young children, the municipal schools of a northern Italian town called Reggio Emilia. In contrast to much of the literature on gender and early childhood education, this paper reveals that many women teachers in these schools think of themselves as agents of social change, and that this is tied to their memories of the Italian Resistance.     

Narrating experiences of sexism in higher education: a critical feminist autoethnography to make meaning of the past,challenge the status quo and consider the future

Increasingly, the third-level sector across the world has acknowledged a hopeless track record of promoting and retaining competent women in leadership roles. However, change, in terms of women’s contribution and participation, has been minimal at least, or gradual at the most optimistic. In this paper, a woman with more than two decades experience as a full-time academic in the field of higher education relates her sense of loss and purposelessness when attempts to reach for a higher level position were consistently unsuccessful. Using autoethnography she relates her experiences of sexism in higher education, and the ways in which sexism turns into oppression through silencing. She proposes how her experiences point to the need for change, and she indicates that training to reduce gender bias has been proven to improve feelings of workplace fit for participants who collaborate with people who have addressed their gender bias.     

Teachers performing gender and belonging: a case study of how SENCOs narrate inclusion identities

This paper investigates how the narratives Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs) tell can be framed as social, discursive practices and performances of identity by analysing accounts offered in focus groups and life history interviews. I explore how the narratives deployed demonstrate an engagement with a rhetoric about who works in inclusive education. I argue that this rhetoric informs the materialisation of what Butler terms an ‘intelligible identity’ (1993, 2004), one which might be identified as a SENCO identity because it is gendered as feminine and caring. However, I explore how some of these narratives simultaneously negotiate and refigure rhetorical constructions of intelligible identities by invoking a child-centred warrior persona to alternatively iterate belonging to the special educational needs community. Thus my analysis considers the potential for personal narratives to decouple gender from a rhetoric of caring and identifies potential alternatives for claiming a SENCO identity.     

A survey of video game players in a public,urban research university

A survey was conducted in a public, research university located in a large and diverse metropolitan area in the southeastern part of the USA. The purpose of the survey was to determine both the positive and negative personal, educational, social, and work related consequences of playing video games. Nearly two‐thirds of the 203 participants in this study were of Hispanic heritage. A majority of the sample of participants was derived using a school intercept, as opposed to mall intercept, strategy. The remaining participants were obtained using snowball, and convenience sampling techniques. Statistically significant differences between males and females were found in the areas of communication, decision making in daily lives, leadership skills, collaborating, functioning in a team, and giving directions to others. These differences were favorable to males.     

Playing the game: critical literacy,gender justice and issues of masculinity

This paper explores issues of critical literacy, gender justice and masculinity through ‘Mr A’s’ story. Mr A is head of English at ‘Grange College’ – an all boys’ school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). The paper highlights how the privileging of rationality, control and ‘the masculine’ within Mr A’s ‘teaching‐as‐usual’ discourse constrains his efforts to pursue gender justice through critical literacy. While Mr A scaffolds his students’ critical analysis of gender and power in texts, his investments in teacher/student binary relations draw rigid boundaries between himself and his students in ways that delegitimise the terrain beyond the rational and ignore a theorising of the self. Drawing on Mr A’s story within Davies’ theorising about the possibilities of critical literacy, this paper adds to key work in arguing the importance of teachers’ interrogating their classrooms as lived texts where the relations of domination and power that derail the social justice possibilities of critical literacy can be made both recognisable and revisable. Such interrogation is foregrounded here as particularly urgent within the current moment where rationalist discourses within and beyond schools are increasingly working to circumscribe and constrain teacher practice in ways that stifle transformative social agendas.     

The interrelation of twenty-first-century education and work from a gender perspective

This paper analyses the interrelation of twenty-first-century education and work from a gender perspective. The analysis is carried out theoretically by asking whether human capital theory and Bourdieu’s reproduction theory are adequate instruments for such an endeavour. It is argued that the explanatory power of the human capital concept of the interrelation between education and work is extremely weak, because the human capital concept conceals costs necessary to create human capital. In contrast, reproduction theory comprehends investments in education through reproductive work. But, reproduction theory fails short to explain ongoing gender hierarchies within employment. Therefore, analysis of social and societal structure needs to go beyond the focus on education and work to explain the maintenance of gender hierarchies.     

汉日隐性性别词语对比研究——从女性主义视角出发

与显性性别词语相比,揭示隐性性别词语背后所隐藏的性别意识问题,或许更能深刻地描画一个民族的性别文化观。本文从女性主义视角出发,将汉日隐性性别词语作为一个独立的考察对象加以探讨。旨在从文化史学角度揭示男权意识和妇女歧视问题如何通过隐性方式潜入词语之中,并以潜移默化的方式影响汉日两种文化的审美价值取向,同时对其差异和成因进行理论分析和研究。     

Immigrant girls as caregivers to younger siblings: a transnational feminist analysis

This article employs a transnational feminist lens to examine the experiences of racialised immigrant girls who provide care for their younger siblings. The article draws on findings from a participatory action research study in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to examine the role that immigrant girls’ caregiving practices play in transnational families’ social, economic, and cultural survival. It argues that greater attention should be given to the diverse and complex contexts, consequences, costs, and contributions of immigrant girls’ caregiving labour.     

Gender inclusion and horizontal gender segregation: stakeholders' strategies and dilemmas in Swedish teachers' education

This paper contributes to our knowledge of teacher educators' strategies for, and dilemmas with, working with gender inclusion in teachers' education. It illustrates how gender is constructed and reconstructed in teachers' education. The study revealed that teachers' education is not only – as earlier described – a highly feminised field, it is also a discipline that is permeated by horizontal and vertical segregation typical of higher education. The study analyses how university teacher educators experience and handle consequences of this horizontal segregation, building on interviews with subject representatives at a Swedish university. The results exemplify how university teachers reflect on gender policies and their own roles when working with teacher students. Heteronormative patterns also become visible in strategies meant to facilitate gender equality and desegregation. The author argues for the need to include university teachers' perspectives in future strategies for developing gender inclusion in university education.