‘Decidedly Different’: lesbian women and education

ABSTRACT

Lesbian women's experiences of education frequently occurs within a contradictory public relationship: their identity ‘woman’ is usually ‘visible’ whilst their identity ‘lesbian’ remains generally ‘invisible’ ‐ both in educational settings and within wider educational discourses. By drawing upon examples of self‐understanding of lesbian identity this paper discusses the meanings and connections between these two identities from the perspectives of lesbian women themselves. The inclusion of self‐understanding of lesbian identity as a central feature in exploring the relationship of lesbian women and education permits a discussion of both lesbian oppression and lesbian agency. I will discuss this with reference to my recent study of lesbian women and education. The inclusion of self‐understanding of lesbian identity illuminates the complex relationships which exist between individual identity meanings and those which are socially constructed and maintained within an educational system based upon the ideology of heterosexism.     

‘It's got to be about enjoying yourself’: young people,sexual pleasure,and sex and relationships education

Pleasure as a component of sexualities and relationships education (SRE) has been subject to much recent discussion. Arguably, academic debate has been more prominent than practitioner perspectives, with theoretical articulations and critique superseding pragmatic attention to integrating pleasure into learning about sexualities and relationships. Though there are exceptions, sexuality education that recognises pleasure and desire for young people remains absent in many contexts, despite calls for its inclusion for more than two decades. This paper offers a synthesis of expert opinion to outline the importance of pleasure and positive SRE to sexual health, rights, equality and safeguarding against coercion and harm. The paper acknowledges the often uneasy associations between sexuality, education and youth by identifying key political and academic debates, before offering a rationale on ways forward that may help persuade curriculum gatekeepers of its merits. Analysis focuses mainly on young women with reflections on current knowledge and the need for more empirically based research and theorising on boys and men. Policy developments relate to the UK, though issues raised have direct relevance for contexts where SRE is similarly contested.     

Untangling the conflation of ‘young adults’ and ‘young people’ in STI and sexual health policy and sex education

Young adults, aged 18–30 years, are disproportionally mentioned in sexually transmissible infection surveillance data both in Australia and internationally. This contributes to categorising young adults as an ‘at risk’ group in health policy. How young adults are framed in policy, and what informs this, have direct implications for policy priorities and responses, including the development of health promotion programmes. In this paper, we provide a case study of Australia’s National Strategies for Blood Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmissible Infections from 2005 to 2017. We identify how ‘young adults’ as a population are masked by, and subsumed within, the broader category of ‘young people’ within these strategies. As a result, young adults become framed by default as a ‘risk category’ that requires education to correct its deficits, regardless of personal experience. For health promotion to advocate, mediate and enable better sexual health outcomes, a policy environment is needed that reflects the changing social and cultural contexts and sexual independence that young adults experience. Sexual health policies should reflect the complexity and opportunities of young adulthood if we are to offer an enabling policy environment for innovative and nuanced health promotion strategies, including adult appropriate health education.     

Challenges in theorising ‘Black middle‐class’ women: education,experience and authenticity

This viewpoint draws on discussions at two seminars to consider ambivalent attitudes amongst a group of Black women towards considering themselves and/or other Black people as ‘middle class’. The first seminar highlighted the experiences of a group of Black ‘middle‐class’ parents and the second, which was organised as a result of the reaction the first seminar received, sought to explore attendees views as to whether they thought Black people could be Black and ‘middle class’. The viewpoint contends that the concept ‘Black middle class’ is incompatible with some Black women’s notions of self, and that their ambivalence about the ‘Black middle classes’ is partly rooted in an emotional need to remain connected to the wider Black community. Whilst these women’s understandings of the ‘Black middle classes’ are informed by their gendered and racialised experiences, there is also evidence of a denial of (class) privilege.     

‘Hot’, ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ information and higher education decision-making

This paper draws on the notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ knowledge in analysing the responses of students to the relevance of different information and sources of such information in university choice. Analysis of questionnaire and focus group data from prospective and first-year undergraduate students provides evidence that many students put most credence on ‘hot’ knowledge, from persons in their social grapevine. However, this is supplemented by ‘warm’ knowledge from fleeting acquaintances at university open days. University provided knowledge is often distrusted. We discuss the implications of this given the recent government emphasis in England on the role of information provision in helping students to make informed decisions, including the relevance to the ‘fair access’ agenda.     

Seeking inclusive education: disrupting boundaries of ‘special’ and ‘regular’ education

The present paper is part of a larger study carried out in North Queensland, Australia, between 1999 and 2001. The original study focused on the perceptions of 15 women who each have (or had) a child who was medically, educationally and socio‐culturally constituted as having a disability. Qualitative methods were used for research design and to gather data. Poststructural and feminist perspectives were added to provide additional methods of data analysis. The primary focus in this paper is the spatiality of inclusive education with/in the discursive site of (special) education. It also considers the binary of regular/special education in relation to the spaces of educational discourse through the perspectives of the mothers, covering a temporal frame of 40 years. The mothers’ perceptions provide a historical lens on the changes that occurred in special education in North Queensland over this time, while at the same time offer an insight into the spaces disability occupies in education discourse.     

Great expectations and post‐feminist accountability: young women living up to the ‘successful girls’ discourse

The prevalence of the discourse of ‘successful girls’ (and failing boys) in Australia and internationally has been widely documented. Against the much‐vaunted lifting of barriers to opportunity for girls and women, it might reasonably be expected that their educational experiences and career paths are expressive of wider opportunities, greater confidence and autonomy. This article draws on qualitative research with young women in regional Australia to argue that supposedly outmoded but evidently durable patterns of educational and occupational experience remain and are accompanied by new burdens and anxieties. Importantly, young women are now obliged to account for these unfashionable arrangements, using the ubiquitous belief in choice and the possibility of self‐actualisation to demonstrate the volition and agency deemed appropriate to a post‐feminist ethos. Thus, techniques of reflective selfhood and neoliberal accountability are mobilised to justify social reproduction, while at the same time showcasing invigorated notions of meritocracy and social mobility.     

‘Voice’, young people and action research

This article moves from an overview of what is meant by the term ‘voice’ to discussing the significance of its links with action research. It does this through using a simple typology of three types of voice: Authoritative, Critical and Therapeutic. Each type of voice represents a different process of articulation and intended outcome. It then moves on to consider ‘voice’ and the collaboration of young people in educational action research by unpicking a series of four assumptions which delineate major theoretical and practical possibilities and limitations. These assumptions provide a critique of the underpinning ideologies held by professionals when supporting and listening to young people     

Dutch children and their ‘God’: the development of the ‘God’ concept among indigenous and immigrant children in the Netherlands

In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non‐Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised in inter‐religious dialogue. Our research studied the religious development of pupils from two primary schools. One is the first and only inter‐religious primary school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg primary school. The other is a Christian school, the Prinses Margriet primary school that educates pupils exclusively in the Christian tradition. The research questions focussed on the development of the ‘God’ concept of children confronted with stories from different religious traditions. The ‘God’ concept is seen in our research as a concept that develops in an inductive way from the data. This way of conceptualising ‘development’ is coined as the prospective perspective on development. The results of this comparative research led to the tentative conclusion that pupils in our research population who were involved in inter‐religious learning, demonstrate explorative behaviour concerning their own religion and that of others. Their ‘God’ concept shows hybrid characteristics. These pupils are rooted in their own tradition, and at the same time they are ‘on the move’. This offers points of departure for the development of citizens articulating their commitments and turning imminent conflicts into inter‐religious encounters.     

Online education as ‘vanguard’ higher education: exploring masculinities,ideologies, and gerontology

Drawing inspiration from Clegg’s [2008. “Femininities/masculinities and a Sense Self – Thinking Gendered Academic Identities and the Intellectual Self.” Gender and Education 20 (3): 209–221, 241] statement that ‘less traditional universities and areas of course provision and research might be important sites to investigate in relation to academic identity’, I undertake a single strategic case study of an expert, older, male critical educator, employed as an instructor in two ‘less traditional’, for-profit settings: one online university and one brick and mortar university. The article departs from a theoretical consideration of ‘future directions’ of three subfields: masculinities and higher education (HE) from critical and feminist perspectives, masculinities (and other identities) online (through the Internet research subfield of gender and technology), and masculinities and aging from critical and feminist gerontological perspectives. It employs the methodological strategy of ‘sketches’, arguing that these settings, which appear to position critical and feminist pedagogues in the proverbial ‘belly of the beast’, are important spaces in which to explore how a critical pedagogue navigates ‘less traditional’ HE settings.     

Knowing feminism: the significance of higher education to women’s narratives of ‘becoming feminist’

ABSTRACT

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.     

Theorising policy and practice in refugee education: Conceptualising ‘safety’, ‘belonging’, ‘success’ and ‘participatory parity’ in England and Sweden

Across the world, children are forced to leave their homes for far-flung destinations. This global phenomenon has particular impact in Europe, where there are now more child refugees than since World War II. Education plays an important role for children with extraordinary experiences seeking to build meaningful lives in their new context. This article offers a new theoretical approach to underpin reforms to educational policy and practice for refugees in schools in resettlement contexts in Europe. The new conceptual framing is grounded in empirical work in England and Sweden, and brings two theories together: ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser) and ‘resumption of an ordinary life’ (Kohli). Kohli’s concepts of ‘safety’, ‘belonging’ and ‘success’ have resonance with practitioners from Sweden and England as they work to meet the needs of their new arrivals. Fraser’s conceptual lenses of redistribution, recognition and representation highlight the barriers to achieving the right to inclusive education for refugee children in each context. The interdependence of both theories shapes a new framework. The theoretical understandings offered in this article have been developed with practitioners and add to the field by offering a robust moral and operational approach to shaping pedagogical principles for policymakers and educators working in resettlement communities.     

‘Distance education’ and ‘e-learning’: Not the same thing

This article examines the distinct differences between ‘distance education’ and ‘e-learning’ in higher education settings. Since the emergence of the new information and communication technologies (ICT), many have related to them as the new generation of distance education, and some have referred to their implementation in academia as challenging the very existence of campus-based universities. Many policy makers, scholars and practitioners in higher education use these two terms interchangeably as synonyms. But the fact is that distance education in most higher education systems is not delivered through the new electronic media, and vice versa – e-learning in most universities and colleges all over the world is not used for distance education purposes. ‘Distance education’ and ‘e-learning’ do overlap in some cases, but are by no means identical. The lack of distinction between ‘e-learning’ and ‘distance education’ accounts for much of the misunderstanding of the ICT roles in higher education, and for the wide gap between the rhetoric in the literature describing the future sweeping effects of the ICT on educational environments and their actual implementation. The article examines the erroneous assumptions on which many exaggerated predictions as to the future impact of the ICT were based upon, and it concludes with highlighting the future trends of ‘distance education’ and ‘e-learning’ in academia.     

‘Empty signifiers’ and ‘dreamy ideals’: perceptions of the ‘international university’ among higher education students and staff at a British university

This paper reports on a mixed-methods case study investigating how higher education staff and students understand, experience and envision the ‘international university’. As it is becoming clear that international student mobility is not in itself a panacea for universities seeking to internationalise, ‘internationalisation at home’ and ‘global citizenship’ are increasingly permeating university policy documents and mission statements. However, little is known about how students and staff on the ground perceive and experience these concepts. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected at one British university through focus groups (N = 19) and through an online survey (n = 148). Findings revealed a conventional mobility-focused understanding of the international university among students and staff, and a great deal of cynicism as regards ‘internationalisation at home’ and ‘global citizenship’. We discuss implications for practice and a research agenda.     

‘Seeing’ into the past and ‘looking’ forward to the future: visual methods and gender and education research

A small number of attempts have been made to take stock of the field of gender and education, though very few have taken methodology as their explicit focus. We seek to stimulate such discussion in this article by taking stock of the use of visual methods in gender and education research (particularly participatory and image-based methods). We undertake this exercise by looking at the claims researchers have made about the ways in which visual methods have advanced gender and education research, and by examining how these methods have been employed in research. We argue that the visual has become somewhat invisible in accounts of gender and education research. We conclude by considering different ways in which we might develop image-based research in the future.