Author: genderanded

Is a new wave of feminism developing in schools? Hanna Retallack discusses how students are responding to issues of gender and sexuality to challenge the status quo.

In April this year, the Women and Equalities Committee launched the first parliamentary inquiry into an issue that feminist academics and campaigners have been researching for some time: sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools.

Prior to this inquiry, research had already found that the scale of sexism in schools was disproportionally affecting the well-being and mental health of teenage girls. In 2015 Girl Guiding UK [PDF] reported that 75% of girls and young women experienced anxiety over potential sexual harassment and a 2010 YouGov poll of 16-18 year olds found 29% of girls experienced unwanted sexual touching at school with a further 71% stating that they heard sexual name-calling (such as ‘slag’ or ‘slut’)  towards girls at school either daily or a few times per week. Perhaps most shockingly,data published by the BBC in September 2015 showed that 5,500 sexual offences were recorded in UK schools over a three year period, including 600 rapes.

“75% of girls and young women experienced anxiety over potential sexual harassment.”

Without any compulsory and regulated Personal, Social and Health Education in the UK, the teaching of sexuality in schools seems dangerously outmoded and fails to address issues related to gender, social media, sexualised bullying, pornography, consent and female sexual pleasure.

While this government inquiry is gathering evidence to establish the scale and effect of sexual violence and harassment in schools, it is the work that teenagers in schools are already doing to shake up school systems that concerns my on-going PhD research at the UCL Institute of Education into school-based feminist groups.

This research is conducted in the light of theories that we are witnessing a ‘fourth wave’ of feminism in which there is a resurgence in young people’s engagement with issues related to gender and sexuality. Despite previous research pointing towards a de-politicization of feminist projects in favour of individualized projects of the self, there is increasing evidence that a renewed and collectivised feminism has re-entered political and civic life.

“We are witnessing a ‘fourth wave’ of feminism in which there is a resurgence in young people’s engagement with issues of gender and sexuality.”

Neoliberal narratives tend to equate exam results with gender equality and so posit schoolgirls as ‘successful’ and as no longer needing feminism. However, we are seeing girls actively transgressing these post-feminist assumptions of equality by forming a new wave of feminist collectives within their schools.

Feminist groups meet up on the school grounds outside of lesson time and are made up of teenagers who want to discuss the issues denied to them by the curriculum, including the intersectional inequalities that lie at the root of sexual violence and harassment, as well as the structural injustices affecting them both personally and politically.

While different groups in different schools all identify as feminist, this does not mean they have the same agenda. I took part in the UK wide project Feminism in Schools: Mapping impact in practice, co-ordinated by Professor Jessica Ringrose (UCL Institute of Education) and Professor Emma Renold(Cardiff University). We researched feminist clubs in seven highly diverse secondary schools across England and Wales, including mixed, single sex and fee-paying institutions and with young people from a range of religious, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.

“Neoliberal narratives tend to equate exam results with gender equality and so posit schoolgirls as ‘successful’ and as no longer needing feminism.”

What this project made clear was that the primary focus of these feminist groups varies hugely. It was often the context in which the school was situated that accounted for this difference. What connects the groups, however, is that they all provide spaces for young people to discuss and campaign about issues relating to feminism – from LGBTQ rights to #sayhername to everyday sexism to body positivity. They also all work to spread awareness of the topic throughout the school through peer-to-peer support or through whole-school assemblies.

 

Groups like these are situated within a history of consciousness-raising groups that originated partly in the second wave feminist movement in the US. Through meeting together and talking, women discovered their shared oppression. With a space to give what Adrienne Rich terms “definition and form” to what had previously been experienced as personal problems, they began to address patriarchal political institutions.

“Teenagers are engaging in collective consciousness-raising practices in their schools.”

A 2013 report by #FemFuture reported that while small consciousness-raising groups were the backbone of second wave feminism, online feminist blogs and forums are the consciousness-raising groups of the 21st century. What I would argue, however, is that we are also witnessing more direct versions of the second wave approach being taken on within schools, in which teenagers are engaging in collective consciousness-raising practices within the institutional context of their schools.

Being a secondary school teacher as well as a researcher, I am also interested in helping schools become more gender equal and supporting school students with their feminist activism. I co-foundedGELS (Gender Equality Leadership in Schools) which aims to assist with developing and running school-based activities such as student-led feminist clubs that provide young people with spaces to discuss and campaign around gender inequalities. GELS also helps connect up schools with non-governmental organisations who are working to promote gender equalities in education across England and Wales including The Great Men Project, Fearless Futures, UK Feminista and The Advocacy Academy, who in a range of ways, expertly open up discussion around power, privilege, gender, sexuality, social justice and the possibilities of advocating for change.

Ultimately, it is feminist work in schools that can enable a wider social movement toward gender equality for all. Teenagers are at the forefront of the fourth wave movement.

Hanna Retallack is a PhD student at the UCL Institute of Education where she is researching feminist groups in schools. Alongside her academic work, Hanna teaches secondary school English Literature and a feminist course in a London school as well as delivering feminist workshops in schools and community spaces.

Toby Greany and Melanie Ehren.

 

The schools white paper brings together recent announcements from the budget and thefunding consultation as well as the provisions in the Education and Adoption Act to set out the next phase of school reform. The strategy is undoubtedly ambitious – in particular the aim to make all schools into academies by 2022 and the move to a National Funding Formula by 2019-20 – but is broadly consistent with the direction of travel towards a ‘self-improving’ systemsince 2010.

Given that direction of travel, many of the specific proposals in the white paper are focused on trying to address some of the acknowledged weaknesses of the existing system: for example through a concerted focus on building capacity in areas where school-led approaches are currently weak, to clarify a very different but still meaningful oversight role for Local Authorities, and to remove some of the perverse incentives in the accountability system.

What is the evidence that making every school an academy will make a positive difference to children’s outcomes? The changes since 2010 have been so rapid that it’s hard to say anything conclusive in relation to academies specifically; for example, NfER’s recent review highlights the complexity of comparing outcomes across the different academy types and phases, and while there is some evidence of improvement in sponsored academies and those in chains it is far from consistent or compelling so far. Looking at the wider evidence base, there is strongcorrelational evidence that school autonomy coupled with accountability can make a positive difference in school systems where school leadership and capacity are well developed.

The great weakness of policies premised on autonomous schools competing with each other for students and resources is that they make it harder to develop the high quality teachers and leaders that are key to effective schools. If schools compete with each other then teachers are not encouraged to share practice or spend time learning from their peers in other schools. To be fair, policy since 2010 seems to have recognised this weakness and encouraged schools to collaborate, primarily through the voluntary Teaching School Alliances and the hard governance Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). Thirty-two per cent of all schools were part of a Teaching School Alliance by October 2014, while around 1 in 4 schools is now an academy and around 58% of all academies are in a MAT.

So the focus on building lateral networks to enable school to school support and collaborative professional development has potential, even if the current evidence of impact remains thin. The challenge is that while many confident schools seem to thrive on the school-led approach, others are at risk of becoming isolated, potentially leading to a two-tier system. For example, relatively few of England’s 5700 primaries with fewer than 200 pupils appear to have had the time or capacity to engage with the Teaching Schools so far and there are very few examples of such schools coming together to form viable MATs; so the white paper’s requirement that all small schools academise as part of a MAT may remain wishful thinking.

What can we learn from other school systems that have adopted England’s approach? Interestingly, the one OECD school system that has higher rates of school autonomy than England is the Netherlands, which is also relatively high performing in PISA international comparisons. Dutch schools face a similar accountability framework to England: for example with national tests and external inspections. What is particularly interesting is that School Boards, or federations, have developed to oversee groups of primary schools in Holland. These Boards have strong similarities to MATs: they are legally responsible for their constituent schools, overseeing areas such as pedagogy, curriculum, HR, budgets and school improvement (Education policy outlook 2014: Netherlands, OECD). School leaders are appointed by and accountable to the Board while larger federations employ a CEO or Superintendent to oversee strategic and operational development. There has been a gradual increase in the size and scale of the Boards over time, with 1,138 operating in total by 2013, many governing twenty or more schools (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, 2013).

It is always important to avoid simplistic cross-cultural comparisons between education systems, but Holland’s School Boards do indicate two particular issues to consider as we develop a MAT-led system in England:

• Weak financial management is associated with weak performance in Dutch Boards: The2012-13 Chief Inspector’s report notes that “the number of school boards that have been placed under special financial supervision has risen slightly” and that “risks in the financial sphere are often an indication of quality problems”. It seems that these Boards had often not predicted their pupil numbers accurately, an issue that could become increasingly difficult for MATs that straddle different Local Authority areas. Given the DfE’s recent difficulties in processing academy accounts and the growing number of MATs being given a Financial Notice to Improve, this seems something to watch.

• School boards have not sustained their legitimacy in the eyes of staff and wider society. The2013-14 annual report makes a remarkably trenchant point here, almost worthy of Sir Michael Wilshaw! It quotes the Education Council, an official advisory body, which stated that ‘the local anchors of the education boards had been weighed’. The Dutch Chief Inspector herself concludes that ‘anchoring is exactly what is needed for.. legitimacy. This requires an active dialogue with the parties most closely involved, starting with the staff’.Waslander (2010) explores the issue of Dutch School Board legitimacy in more depth and finds that they have essentially had too few governance mechanisms for engaging the views of staff and parents in decision making.

Legitimacy for publicly funded schools has traditionally stemmed from the government’s democratic mandate but, as Dan Gibton has observed, this becomes increasingly confusing once England’s academies are run by MATs that are independent charitable companies commissioned by the Secretary of State via a funding agreement. Imagine a future scenario in which a significant group of parents in an area come to feel that their local academies are not meeting their needs: they will not be able to turn to the Local Authority or the school’s Local Governing Body for meaningful action, while the Regional Schools Commissioner may feel distant in both geographical and relational terms. Let’s imagine that the staff in one of these academies come to feel equally dissatisfied: they too may feel too far removed from the Board and CEO of their MAT to feel able to influence change. Meanwhile, the very current issues of fast rising CEO salaries and significant conflicts of interest are already raising concerns and a level of cynicism. The removal of the need for consultations with parents when a coasting school is moved into a MAT via the new Education and Adoption Act just seems likely to increase such legitimacy concerns.

The white paper does recognise these legitimacy concerns, particularly given that it will also remove the requirement for parent governors. It states that MATs will be required to ‘listen to the views and needs of all parents’ (para 4.55) but this feels a somewhat thin response when boards are equally trying to manage so many other competing priorities, not least a tightening budget situation for most schools.

Policy in England since the 1988 Education Reform Act has been largely focused on ensuring that individual schools succeed, founded on a quasi-market model of parental choice and competition between schools. The unit of analysis now needs to move from the individual school to the school group, represented by the Multi-Academy Trust. If the government’s ambitions come to fruition, the school system in the 2020s might resemble the retail sector today: national and regional chains offering standardised quality and choice, but with smaller boutique providers still continuing to offer something more unique. Of course, choosing where to buy your groceries is significantly less high risk than choosing a school for your child: let’s hope that the quasi-supermarket education system works out.

*originally posted on the UCL IOE blog 

*this is a guest post written by Sara Adkisson and originally posted on the UCL IOE blog 

GEA are thrilled to have Lucy Rycroft-Smith write this exclusive post on sexism in education for our site.

Lucy Rycroft-Smith is a freelance writer and ex-teacher of ten years. She writes for the Guardian, the TES and various other publications on education, parenting and feminism. She blogs at www.introvertedteacher.co.uk and tweets at @honeypisquared

 

Author; William Locke. 

The growing pressures faced by universities have had an impact on academic careers. Changes to academic roles, contracts and career paths, along with increasing workloads, have created new challenges. Yet in today’s competitive global environment, academic career opportunities are key to universities’ future success.

A report for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) by Celia Whitchurch, Holly Smith, Anna Mazenod and me investigates these challenges and proposes a number of solutions.

The total number of academic staff in the UK grew by nearly 4.5 per cent between 2012/13 and 2013/14 according to Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data. This is a huge jump compared to previous years, particularly given the economic crisis and the reduction of government funding for higher education.

However, the picture is more complicated than it seems. ‘Traditional’ academic roles involving both teaching and research actually slightly declined in number and, for the first time, constituted a minority. Instead it was the rise of teaching-only and research-only contracts that accounted for the growth.

Teaching-only and research-only contracts may seem attractive to universities for a number of reasons. Universities face increasing pressure to achieve high Research Excellence Framework (REF) rankings. There has also been a growing focus on teaching standards and the student experience, particularly with the imminent introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework. An ‘academic workforce’ divided into specialist roles might promise more focused results, and help meet demands for improved efficiency.

Yet such changes have implications for academic careers and the professional development of staff. There is a perception that career options and opportunities are less important for those not in traditional teaching and research roles.

Furthermore, the advance of remote working in higher education has affected work-life patterns, and academic workloads are perceived to have substantially increased in the last 10-15 years. The most significant barrier to engaging with professional development opportunities faced by academics is a lack of time, and this problem is more acute for those on specialist contracts.

Academic career paths are also changing, and are far less stable than in the past. Early career academics often struggle to find secure employment and so are forced to take on fixed-term or part-time contracts (usually in specialist roles). Opportunities for career progression vary across different disciplines and universities. As a result, academics are increasingly moving to new positions – often to new subject areas – during the course of their careers. They are also moving into and out of jobs outside academia.

It is important for universities to understand these challenges and to adopt a holistic approach. Academic promotion should be seen to be based on wider criteria (including, for example, education, knowledge exchange and academic citizenship) to counter perceptions that universities focus principally on research and REF outputs.

The opportunities available to academics must also reflect the increasing diversity of academic roles. Equal recognition and reward are key. A ‘universal’ academic contract accommodating a number of different roles would allow more freedom. Academics would no longer be forced to follow a specialised career path but would instead have the opportunity to gain new experience and change direction.

A broader conception of academic career development could include informal and peer learning. Universities should also focus on building trust between managers and their staff to encourage feedback and use this to inform policy and practice.

Policy makers and sector bodies should consider how policies and funding arrangements will affect the career opportunities of academics. Will academia continue to be regarded as an attractive or viable career? The creation of a Concordat for teaching roles, such as the existing Concordat for researchers, could create more parity between teaching and research.

The Higher Education Academy is the national body at the centre of professional development for academics who teach. It will continue to review the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF), the nationally recognised framework for benchmarking success within higher education teaching and learning support, to ensure it reflects the diversity of academic roles and complements other professional frameworks. The report also recommends that the HEA should continue to develop its engagement with university HR departments and Universities Human Resources (UHR). It is currently running a strategic enhancement programme with a group of HEIs looking at career progression and staff transitions.

Academics themselves need to recognise that a linear career progression is no longer the norm. They should make the most of career development opportunities when they are available. Early career academics should consider whether a teaching-only or research-only role will provide the opportunities they seek to develop their research activity or gain teaching experience.

Meeting these challenges is at the core of universities’ ability to survive and flourish, not just in a national system but, increasingly, in a global environment, where pressures and demands are even more complex.

*This post was originally posted on January 13th 2016 on The UCL IOE Blog 

 

 

Compulsory Coupledom, Postfeminist Education and Imagined Futures

 

Dr. Kinneret Lahad, Tel-Aviv University

Respondent: Prof. Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde

 

Thursday 4th February 4pm & 6pm H229 Lord Hope Building, University of Strathclyde

See: http://www.strath.ac.uk/maps/

 

Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/compulsory-coupledom-postfeminist-education-and-imagined-futures-tickets-20011496926

Abstract: A prevalent proverb addressed to children in many societies is the consolation, “By your wedding day you will feel better.” This reassuring and comforting promise predicts a pre-determined and ostensibly desired plan of adult life which is organized around compulsory coupledom. This proverb also dictates a linear heteronormative orientation to time, signifying respectability and social correctness. Drawing upon a textual analysis of a variety of contemporary cultural sources, I will demonstrate how heteronormative models of time also play a crucial role in limiting the range of future subjectivities available to girls and young women today.  In this vein, I also challenge some of the post-feminist messages in which “Girl Power” (Gonick 2006) or the “Having it All” (Negra 2009) rhetoric comes to represent unlimited possibilities (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008).  I will present an alternative discourse of gendered futures through the case of long-term singlehood. Despite the growing rates of single persons worldwide long-term singlehood is rarely envisioned within the “happy ending” scripts (Ahmed 2010) and is consistently represented as a social failure and a tragedy.  In the last part of the presentation I will explore the ways in which certain feminist blogs and feminist web portals have become an important site through which the dominant scripts of the life directions women are expected to follow are continually challenged. The discussion of these issues aims to set a broader perspective and provide alternative ways of thinking about singlehood, gendered socialization and imagined futures.

Bio: Dr. Kinneret Lahad is an Assistant Professor, Tel Aviv University. She has written extensively on female singlehood and her book offers sociological and feminist readings of Singlehood and Social Time and has co-edited a book on mechanisms of denial and repression in Israeli society. Her current projects include independent and collaborative studies on women’s friendship practices, loneliness as an affect and social emotion, a discursive media analysis of old motherhood in Denmark and a comparative study on anti-ageing.

 

Sheffield University recently held a conference on feminist research methodologies – two members of GEA presented papers and the keynote was delivered by GEA chair, Professor Jessica Ringrose so the association was well represented. With that in mind, we have chosen to reblog this informative piece written by Rachel Handforth, a PhD student at Sheffield and organizer of the conference itself.

This one day conference was held on Friday, 30^th October and hosted by my department at Sheffield Hallam University- the Sheffield Institute of Education. It provided an opportunity for postgraduate researchers to share their experiences of doing feminist research, to generate discussions around feminist research across subject areas, and to build a national network of postgraduate students doing feminist research. It was was attended by 85 doctoral and masters students from across the  
UK.

After I did the welcome, Carol introduced the day by talking about why feminism continues to be important and relevant. She argued that feminism can be an incitement to combat social injustice, and that it has always been a means to confront the abuse of privilege and power in many different contexts. As a form of activism it connects the personal with the political, and is a ‘politics of hope’. She emphasised that feminism is about taking action, however small, to gain equality.

Carol then outlined the ongoing importance of feminist methodologies.  Feminist methodologies are about innovation and practices of experimentation, so that we can do research differently. They are about producing different sorts  of knowledge and ways of knowing in order to combat gendered forms of social injustices more effectively. Feminist methodologies are about the bridge between practice and research:  they open up spaces for thinking about profound questions about being, knowing and ethics.

The event highlighted some excellent examples of the innovative feminist research being done by postgraduate students. We’d like to talk about all of them but can’t so we focus here on two presentations! Alyssa Niccolini, an Education student from Colombia University, did a presentation on glitch methodologies. ‘Glitch’ is about using an app that can be downloaded which then ‘messes up’ or scrambles an image or text. As a methodological intervention, glitch is about introducing a gap, or an interruption, into the research process to try to capture affective moments. Glitching also highlights issues of researcher power and disrupts usual ways of doing research. Alyssa’s research into censorship moments in class illustrated how glitch methodology can open up questions about how data can be analysed and presented.

In the second parallel session of the day, Ben Vincentfrom the University of Leeds spoke about non-binary transfeminist methodological considerations. They highlighted that in doing research with this group, it was crucial to reflect on issues such as access, rapport and risk and to ensure that participants’ chosen pronouns were respected. They also discussed the ways in which transfeminist perspectives have been marginalised in the academy and argued that feminism must include all those who embrace non-binary identities.

Keynote speaker Professor Jessica Ringrose of the UCL Institute of Education spoke about the resurgence in feminist methodologies. Her presentation problematised the concept of ‘research impact’, and considered the different ways in which feminist researchers could interpret and re-imagine it. She argued that it is essential for feminist research to have an impact, in terms of having ‘making a difference at its heart’. However, she questioned the impact ‘agenda’ where demonstrating the impact of your research is vital to secure funding through the Research Excellence Framework, and critiqued this agenda as being part of the neo-liberal higher education system. Reflecting on her own practice in Education, she argued that feminist researchers should aim to generate interesting data but simultaneously to make changes in the world, and that researchers should ensure that they ‘lived their feminism’.

Professor Ringrose finished her speech by highlighting some key pieces of advice for newer feminist researchers, and reflected on Emma Renolds’ five top tips for research impact:

• Connection- having a good online and offline presence, and making and sustaining networks;
• Communication, in making research findings accessible;
• Conviction that our research matters;
• Compromise in ensuring that our research has ethical integrity;
• Collaboration with others

She also noted that doctoral researchers in particular should be making connections with key individuals to publicise their research, for example linking with journalists and university press officers. She highlighted the advantages of utilising social media to communicate research to other audiences, and recommended strategies such as blogging for targeted audiences.

The day ended  with a panel which I chaired, which featured Professor Ringrose, Dr Carol Taylor and Professor Julia Hirst, Reader and Principal Lecturer in Sociology from Sheffield Hallam University, and gave students the opportunity to ask questions about the challenges involved in doing feminist research. Professor Hirst commented on the need for both schools and universities to recognise continuing gender inequality and urged those of us doing feminist research to acknowledge the scope we have for effecting positive change.

It really was a fantastic and inspiring day and I’m so glad it was worth all the effort of organising it! It was so good to meet other postgraduate researchers doing feminist research, and I look forward to keeping in touch with those who came along.  To see a Storify of all the tweets from the day click here. Also thanks to attendees Emily Nunnand Devina Lister who also wrote blogs about the event.

This post was written by Chris Husbands and first appeared on the IOE blog; https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com on the 28/10/15

How much is too much? It’s a question we tend to ask when in the proximity of strawberry crèmes, or gin and tonics. One is fine, two could be great, but carry on and it all goes horribly wrong.   On Saturday 24 October, the Obama administration applied what we might call the strawberry crème principle to education testing. In the USA, education is the responsibility of each state, not the federal government – but over the past two decades, the federal government has developed programmes with aspirational titles such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Reach for the Sky (although I made the last one up).

Federal funding for education is tied to states’ agreement to accept accountability through testing. Tests developed rapidly, first in English and mathematics and then in formally non-tested subjects including PE and social studies – sometimes as a way of measuring pupil performance but also, and perhaps equally, as a way of managing teacher evaluation.

Opposition to testing was mounting. On the political right, conservatives argued that rapid development of testing – redoubled with the introduction of the ‘Common Core’ – was something like a federal takeover of education. This is anathema to most American conservatives who have believed in the importance of states’ right since before the Civil War. Towards the left, parent groups and teacher unions argued that the growth of testing was skewing the curriculum and, given the outsourcing of tests to large conglomerates, bringing commercialism into local traditions of American public schooling.

Tests tied to the Common Core led several states to abandon testing, and parents in some, largely suburban, areas (the fabled ‘middle America’) withdrew their children from tests. Faced with what appeared to be increasing bipartisan opposition to high-stakes testing, President Obama’s administration decided that things had gone too far. On Saturday, they encouraged school and school districts to make exams less burdensome and more meaningful. In a video on facebook, the President himself argued that “learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble [almost all American testing is multiple choice], so we’re going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing.”

The chosen tool for this was to propose a limit on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2% of classroom time taking tests. But is 2% too much, or not enough? As ever, no-one was quite satisfied. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a strong advocate of testing, argued that the cap was arbitrary. The indefatigable Diane Ravitch – once an enthusiast for testing as assistant secretary for education under the first President Bush – has become an energetic opponent of the testing regime. She drew on data to show that the 2% limit would represent anincrease in the time available for testing for most children in most classrooms.

It’s certainly the case that the 2% limit is clumsy, raising questions about what counts, the time spent on the test or time spent preparing for testing, and it avoids the powerful backwash effects that testing always has on the curriculum.

But for English readers there is an equally interesting question. Universally, by supporters and critics, the Obama move was seen as slamming the brakes on a federal policy which has seen strawberry crèmes, or testing, as a universal good: almost the only power the federal government has to whip public education into line. Policy developments, including charter schools (academies), performance related pay for teachers, and common core curricula have been swapped backwards and forwards across the Atlantic for a generation. The English government has seen test based accountability as perhaps its own principal lever for controlling what goes on in the classroom. It will be interesting to see whether the shift in Washington has implications for England.