The past in the present: historicising contemporary debates about gender and education

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits ‘historical sensibility’ as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working on current issues in gender and education. Four features of historical sensibility are mapped out and compared with established ways of approaching the relationship between the present and past. The utility of historical sensibility is demonstrated with reference to ongoing debates about the feminisation of schooling, the sexualisation of children and the leisure pursuits of young women.     

Diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries

ABSTRACT

We theorise an interdisciplinary arts practice university course and consider the forms of educational imaginary challenged by our curriculum. We argue for the disruptive and generative potential of what we call diffractive pedagogy as an example of the type of learning that can take place when materiality and entanglement are considered as vital constituents. Through self-expression and interweaving across disciplinary boundaries, the potential to produce, embody and theorise simultaneously can be realised. Student bodies do not exist in isolation from one another, or from the environment. It is indeed impossible to separate the dancer from the dance, the teacher from the student, and the bodies from the environments and objects to which they relate. This being true, our student body reproduced our teaching bodies as abject, as messy and peripheral to their imaginings of university education. Materially, student bodies remade the limits to which their consciousness was imaginatively drawn. Through our embodied work, unconscious change began the processes of affecting students’ imaginaries of university education.     

Challenging public perceptions of childcare teachers through Cixous’s écriture feminine

Cultural stories provide us with a repertoire of narratives through which we interpret and construct our understandings of the world, including our gendered understandings of the early childhood teacher. Through her notion of écriture feminine, Cixous [1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans K. Cohen and P. Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (4): 875–893] wrote of countering systems of cultural texts that inscribe women as ‘other’. In this paper, I conduct a critical analysis of Disney’s Maleficent (2014), a recent and often deemed feminist adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty tale, to inform our understanding of the challenges faced in rewriting public perceptions of the childcare teacher in Canada today. The early childhood teacher is often constrained within gendered expectations and attempts to revise the ways society values their professional status have yet to be achieved. The analysis suggests that Maleficent offers positive directions for change, however persistent constraints on feminine identities may be particularly difficult to retract in women whose work involves significant caring and other-directedness.     

Being a princess: young children's negotiation of femininities in a Kindergarten classroom in Indonesia

This paper attempts to explore young children’s construction of femininities in a kindergarten in Indonesia. Using a postdevelopmentalist and postcolonial approach, this paper seeks to understand how young children in the school develop, negotiate and resist existing gender construction. This paper is based on an ethnography research conducted in 2010 for eight months. Findings of this study reveal that discourse of femininities in the school is situated in the discourse of a princess. This paper argues that there are multiple meanings attached to the discourse of a princess. It does not only become a signifier for femininity, but it also acts as a signifier for social class. The findings also suggest that the discourse perpetuates the legacy of colonisation in the school. It is, then, recommended that, in order for kindergarten teachers to be able to disrupt the construction of femininities, they need to be able to understand multiple meaning of femininities as well as power relation embodied in the construction.     

Gender,popularity and notions of in/authenticity amongst 12‐year‐old to 13‐year‐old school girls

This paper draws on data from a research project investigating gendered identities and interactions of high‐achieving students in Year Eight in England (12–13 years old), particularly in relation to students’ ‘popularity’ amongst their peers. As part of this study 71 students were interviewed from nine different schools in urban, rural and small town locations. From an analysis of participants’ conceptions of the characteristics of ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ students, this paper looks in depth at notions of in/authenticity and how it is perceived and judged in relation to the self and others. In particular, the paper focuses on the genderedness of such discourses of in/authenticity as constructed by these students, and relates such concerns to theorizations of ‘impossible’ femininity.     

Catholic girls: the mother–daughter nexus

This paper examines Catholic girlhood, womanhood and the mother–daughter relationship, and its socio-historical construction within a range of disparate discourses. The aim of the paper is to deconstruct dominant patriarchal constructions and images of femininity, particularly those embedded within the doctrine of Catholicism. Moreover, the paper intends to reveal traces of maternal connections and relations which are often hidden by more dominant discourses. Rather than providing a historical account of Catholic girlhood, the object is to tell a perspectived story of the local and contextual experiences of growing up and being educated to be a ‘good Catholic woman’ in suburban Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s and 1960s. In telling the story it is hoped that other women can momentarily engage with this narrative of Catholic girlhood and the mother–daughter relationship.     

Gender,community and education: cultures of resistance in Socialist Sunday Schools and Black Supplementary Schools

This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children’s education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of practice assist to challenge dominant representations of inactive working-class and Black parents, and provide content and form to the complex cultural processes involved in the development of counter-education. Whilst responding to markedly distinct social circumstances, a comparison of the experiences of teachers and students in both of these historical cases reveal powerful uses of gender, class and ‘race’ narratives in which to build and defend their respective school movements. Drawing on oral-history interviews and textual accounts of practice I examine the ways in which normative constructions of femininity and masculinity were both challenged and confirmed in the development of these alternative educational practices. In particular, both of these school movements blur and redefine the public/private distinction through the interpellation of their educational practice into the political field and the relationships they established between children’s education and the challenge to social, educational and economic inequality.     

The bubble of privilege. Young,privately educated women talk about social class

Conceptualisations of the self in relation to others are examined among a group of young women attending a fee‐paying school in England. As part of a larger study exploring intimacy and agency among young women from relatively privileged class backgrounds, 54 young women participated in focus group discussions and interviews. Findings reveal that young women strongly positioned themselves in relation to ‘others’ – both those they saw as ‘chavs’ and young people attending state schools. Yet, just as often, these young women sought to distinguish themselves from other private school peers. Within the privileged bubble the young women inhabited, locations within the wider private school network, type and extent of parental wealth, and fame were all markers used to differentiate the self from others.     

Agency in action – young women and their sexual relationships in a private school

Agency among young women is often understood as fleeting in nature, and studies rarely offer insights into how agency could become a more sustained position. Using data from 54 young women discussing their sexual and intimate relationships, this paper suggests a new way of understanding agency beyond that found in work which stresses agentic practice as resistance or the challenging of dominant expectations and understandings. Instead, through the notion of ‘agency in action’ we begin with young women’s conceptualisations of power. In this study, power was viewed as a resource that is shared between partners, but also a capacity of the self. These conceptualisations offer two new ways of understanding agency in intimate relations – either through ‘reacting into action’ and taking power back; or by ‘starting from’ a powerful position. Central to an understanding of young women’s agency is the role of emotions and recognition of these as motivators for change.