Author: genderanded

Following on from our recent blog “Sexual harassment at school: What can young people’s gender-based activism tell us?” In this discussion Hanna Retallack, Jessica Ringrose and Tabitha Millett outline IOE UCL led activities designed to support gender and sexual diversity and equity in UK secondary schools.

On Saturday March 10, to celebrate International Women’s Day 2018, UCL IOE doctoral student and feminist teacher Hanna Retallack hosted a Feminism in Schools: #pressforprogress conference at Blackheath High School.  Over 100 young people from schools across London and beyond (including independent, comprehensive and academy schools) joined together with scholars, teachers, activists and NGO groups to discuss how we press for progress around issues of gender and sexuality in our secondary schools.

This event brought together a range of UCL IOE staff and students including Jessica Ringrose (Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education) and Paul Dunkley (doctoral student researching Black LGB young people) who discussed the need to tackle gender and sexuality together as well as the possibilities of digital feminist activism; Linett Kamala (IOE / UCL Coordinator for National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) who talked about her art work and the need to diversify the art curriculum. We also heard from representatives of organisations dealing with gender and sexuality in schools including David Brockway of Great Men Project who spoke about teaching positive masculinities with boys and young men, Natalie Bennett of Teaching Individuals Gender Equality and Respect who discussed gender diversity in schools and Amelia Jenkinson from Sexplain who described the work of her inclusive and sex positive sexuality education programme. We also heard from university activist  Sainabou Hydara of University of Kent who talked about the importance of intersectional feminism and secondary school teachers including Charlotte Carson of Feminism in Schools Network who explained how be a feminist activist in school; for schools and Holly McGuire of Teaching Feminists who facilitated the afternoon discussion.

 

The adult speakers contributed alongside a group of feminist school students from a range of schools around London including Deptford Green, City of London, Oaklands School and Haberdasher Askes. This group of enterprising young activists, all between the ages of 15 and 18, talked about their own feminist activism in schools; an idea for a brand new compulsory subject for 11-15 year olds that teaches them about social justice issues; the need for their curriculums to be diversified across all subjects; the importance of connecting up LGBTQ and Feminist societies in schools;  creating inclusive and safe environments for marginalized students in schools; over-hauling sex education to include all forms of sexuality (and with much more focus on agency and pleasure); their hope that teachers encourage and support their activism and for feminist school students and schools across the UK to join together and lobby for government action.

 

The afternoon session was devoted to creating feminist art practices for social change. Tabitha Millett delivered the ‘Plait for Progress’ session which wove together feminist concepts, materiality and craft into one participatory artwork. As she explained to the students, throughout the course of art history, domestic handicrafts such as weaving, embroidery and quilt making have all been considered women’s work, due to their associations with and location within the domestic sphere, a stereotypical feminine space. Consequently, these artistic mediums were deemed as inferior to other art works such as painting or sculpture, typically associated with men, as historically women’s work is devalued based on gendered connotations. In the 1970’s, during the Women’s Liberation Movement, feminist artists such as Miriam Schapiro, Sandra Ogel and Judy Chicago challenged this aesthetic hierarchy and pushed to reclaim women’s work and craft as worthy art forms that embodied the female experience and thus seeing it’s transgressive and political potential. Plait for Progress’ methodology is inspired by this reclamation of weaving.

During the art workshop, the participants discussed and shared their ideas from the morning about how they would like to see feminist progress in their schools and wrote down their ideas on strips of material. Each individual group of several students created one plait; then all plaits in each break-out room were plaited together to create five 50 feet feet plaits. These were then brought together in the auditorium to create a five stranded plait that stretched up through the audience, weaving amongst us as we discussed our ideas for change (pictured above).  The collaboratively woven plait then filled the space, weaving in and around the participants. How the plait occupied the space is significant. Plait for Progress takes craft associated with the private and domestic space and makes it public. The deconstruction of the public/private binary isessential for women’s liberation therefore Plait for Progress aimed to reclaim public space through its material agency. Moreover, the plait is comprised of materials carefully selected based on texture and colour.  Here we aim to read masculine, feminine and fluid identities into the materials as a way of escaping the body and representing who is present. Ultimately, Plait for Progress aims to weave ideas together to create something new.

It was a powerful day described by attendees as ‘truly intersectional’, honest’, ‘inspirational’ and as a call to ‘fight for more inclusive schools’. The event is part of the impact agenda for universities, partnering with schools and young people to work together for more fair and just educational environments. This ongoing work is transforming school cultures from the bottom up through grassroots movement. Watch this space for further student and teacher blogging about this event with ideas for how to press for change in your own schools and for an accessible toolkit coming soon with key principles for supporting gender and sexual equity and diversity in schools everywhere.

 

Written by Michele Paule, Oxford Brookes University

Back in the 90s when I was working in a secondary school, a creative young RE teacher painted a mural of heroes onto the wall of a corridor. The only two women on it were a suffragette and Marilyn Monroe. I suggested to him that there should be more women, and that there should be more areas of influence represented than those suggested by suffragettes and sex symbols. “I see your point” he said, ‘’but what’s the use if the girls don’t recognise them?”

In 2008 the artist Jann Haworth created the comic strip, ‘Mannequin Defectors’ in which mannequins march past a street mural depicting prominent women in the arts and sciences. It was prompted by Haworth’s realisation that she could ‘barely cite thirty’ such women herself.

I remembered both of these as I began to look at the data for my pilot study that looks into girls’ ideas about leadership and women leaders. ‘Mannequin Defectors’ remains a favourite work, and I hope the RE teacher grew up to create more representative school art, but as a feminist media educator I know that the relationship between representation and audiences is a complex one that goes beyond offering media ‘mirrors’ and assuming effects.  The study explores the kinds of ideas about leadership made possible and/or meaningful to girls. It seeks to understand how girls engage with these ideas via figures chosen by themselves, the discourses that surround these figures, and the media and everyday contexts and practices in which such engagements take place.

An absence of visible role models in girlhood is a popularly-cited as a root cause for the  shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood; initiatives such as Edwina Dunn’s The Female Lead, or the Biographical Dictionary of Swedish Women  seek to address this shortage.  However valid in themselves though, concerns about the proportion and visibility of women leaders too often translate into ‘role model’ solutions for girls that are based on simplistic ideas of gender-matching. In such solutions the complexities of relationships that young people may have with media figures, and with more locally available role-models, are reduced to a matter of inspiration = imitation; few consider the cultural contexts in which girls encounter these figures, the meanings girls attach to them,  and how encounters and meanings are embedded in girls’ everyday lives and media practices.

In this post I focus on two leadership figures cited by participants in school interviews and whose images feature frequently as memes in the Facebook group collages created for the project: these are Michelle Obama and Beyoncé.

Global and hyper-local role models

Beyoncé’s had so many like different situations in her life. So from when she was younger she had a lot of horrible experiences. She’s such a public figure that everything that happens in her life, people know about.  Participant

….

I’d have like my Aunty because like she’s like been through a lot…I look up to her Participant

One of the first things I ask participants to do is to describe a woman leader they admire. Michelle Obama and Beyoncé are the most popular in each group. After these two there is no clear winner, and no British women leaders/politicians are named at this stage. After global figures, girls are as likely to cite women they know, especially their mothers and their teachers, as they are women in the public domain. As they discuss their nominations themes emerge of hardships overcome and personal qualities admired. Participants seem as familiar with the obstacles that Beyoncé has faced as they are with the life stories of their own adult women relations; they quote the aspirational aphorisms of Michelle Obama as they do those of their teachers. This merging of the global celebrity and the hyper-local figure can be understood when one considers ways in which global celebrities have become enmeshed with everyday life, especially through social media. This study will, I hope, contribute to understanding of the role celebrities occupy in the lives of everyday youth, and of what ‘role models’ mean to girls who are neither members of celebrity fandoms nor the subjects of targeted leadership programmes

Merit and influence: leaders and celebrities

Most leaders have like worked hard to become what they are now and a lot of celebrities, a lot of them have also worked hard, but also a lot of them have been born into celebrity. Participant

….

A celebrity they like have more influence on younger people like our age group whereas a leader, like you think politics it would be for like older people and for that generation, not ours. Participant

The girls’ nomination of Michelle Obama and Beyoncé as their favourite leadership figures illustrates the blurring of boundaries between celebrity and politics. This blurring is seen not only in the increasing involvement of celebrities in political movements and processes, but in the ways in which politicians construct celebrity identities with what Marshall  describes as  an ‘affective function’, attracting support around personality and interests rather than policy.  This ‘celebritisation’ of politics, with its associations with the ephemeral and the low-brow, was a matter of concern well before the election of Trump, with commentators fearing that

If we don’t take back the celebrity politician system, citizens might well face a political contest between a basket-ball player versus a football player, or a comedian versus rock star, or a movie star versus a television situation comedy star (West and Orman 2002, p.119).

At first glance, the girls’ selections may seem to play into these anxieties. However, to read them in this way is to indulge in simplistic cultural hierarchisation, in which celebrity, and especially the tastes and opinions of the teenaged girl, will always occupy the lowest positions. And while Michelle Obama and Beyoncé could be seen to represent Street’s (2004) distinction between the celebrity politician and the activist celebrity, this divide is not meaningful for the girls. Their discussion focuses instead on the idea of influence – who has it, how they got it, and whether they deserve it.  Their distinction between the celebrity and the leader is framed in terms of merit, with the hard-working celebrity earning the status of leader.

The other distinction between the celebrity and the leader is made in terms of generational appeal.  Michelle Obama and Beyoncé, the girls feel, do more than ‘sit in a room with a giant bunch of people and argue about taxes and stuff’ and instead are constructed as highly accessible figures who model hard work and the material successes it can bring. InMichelle Obama, participants see qualities of accessibility and everydayness that both sit alongside and are the source of her influence. Her accessibility is partly framed through her status as a Black woman – this is central to their perception of her as a good leader; one participant describes her as ‘someone who came from a background or was born as a minority, can have that opportunity…I think that makes her be a leader’.

Michelle Obama and Beyoncé can also be seen as occupying the same taxonomic category of ‘leader’ for girls when considered within contexts of digital consumption and reproduction.  With the shift away from more traditional forms of news consumption and civic engagement to new forms of online participation, both are figures that girls encounter and share in their social media activities, especially via memes. Rather than providing evidence either that popular culture has the potential to energize the public sphere, or the contrary that those who engage with celebrity cultures are unlikely to engage with politics, the ways in which girls talk about their favourite leaders suggests that they offer a nexus around which ideas about power, influence and gender coalesce and are made accessible for interrogation  as well as reproduction.  Like Haworth’s ‘Mannequin Defectors’, encounters with the role-model images provoke a consideration of what they stand for.

This project is supported by funding from the Gender and Education Association

 

With recent global activism for gender equality fuelled by #MeToo, #TimesUp and more – there is growing momentum behind campaigns for gender parity. Mass public engagement with these hashtags has fuelled unprecedented media attention to sexual harassment and assault. However, for many of those working in the field of gender and education these stories of pervasive rape culture are unsurprising. The question remains: How can we challenge these issues in and through education? And what can we learn from what educators and students are already doing?

From Women’s History Month to International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8th and International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31st, this month presents a number of unique opportunities to address sexual and gender equality in schools, colleges, universities and beyond. In the spirit of this year’s IWD campaign theme #PressforProgress, GEA will be spotlighting the work of our members in challenging gender and sexual inequities. First up is a guide to utilising AGENDA as a teaching and learning resource for schools.

Utilising AGENDA as a teaching and learning resource

AGENDA: A young people’s guide to making positive relationships matter is a free online guide developed with young people, for young people. It has been designed so that 11-18 year olds can explore the issues they are interested in at their own pace.

Produced collaboratively between Professor Emma Renold from Cardiff University, the Children’s Commissioner of Wales, NSPCC Cymru and Welsh Women’s Aid, AGENDA has played a significant role in informing the Welsh Government’s report on the Future of the Sex and Relationships Education in Wales. Additionally, Professor Emma Renold recently joined First Minister Carwyn Jones at the United Nations in New York to discuss how Wales is advancing gender equality through resources such as AGENDA, the SRE report and Welsh government legislation on violence against women.

AGENDA showcases the different ways in which young people in Wales and across the world have raised awareness of a wide range of issues, including: gender equalities and discrimination, consent, LGBQ & T+ rights, bullying and sexual harassment, street harassment, female genital mutilation, sexual exploitation and relationship abuse.

The AGENDA working group have developed a variety of lesson starters and activities that draw on the AGENDA resource. Originally devised for the Welsh Baccalaureate Qualification, but adaptable to any classroom, these lesson activities create a range of student-led learning opportunities around healthy relationships.

Community Challenge

This lesson activity invites students to:

• Explore international awareness raising days on a wide range of issues (e.g International Women’s Day), and the non-governmental organisations (NGO) that support them
• Consider the issues that these awareness-raising days and NGO’s address and why
• Assess different modes of change (e.g online petition, school assembly) and their strengths or weaknesses
• Develop their own ideas for campaigns addressing their chosen issue

Accompanying this lesson activity are a series of community challenges for student-led projects. These challenges come with a brief and key resources that help develop learners’ skills, whilst encouraging them to identify, develop and participate in opportunities that will benefit the community. Community challenges include:
• Championing Gender Diversity
• Supporting LGBTQ+ Rights
• Campaigning for Healthy Relationships

Case Study One: Relationship Matters

The Relationship Matters project tells the story of one youth-led school-based group who used a range of creative media, from poems and films to wearable visual art, to raise awareness of girls’ experiences of sexual harassment online, at school and in their community. In a series of listening assemblies they collected comments from over 300 students to influence and shape their own school’s whole-school SRE provision and future SRE policy and practice across Wales. Watch their film here: “Words Won’t Pin Me Down”.

This case study was recently submitted to the Women and Equalities Committee’s public inquiry into the sexual harassment of women and girls in public places.

Case Study Two: The Rotifer Project – Educating staff about gender diversity

The Rotifer Project was initiated from a staff and student concern that the school needed to do more to raise awareness of gender diversity in the context of gender equity to better support the increasing number of transgender identifying students, and sexism, homophobia and transphobia. From a clear aim to make the school a safer and more inclusive space, a small group of students from the LGBT and feminist school-based youth groups set about creating a resource, sparked from their own experiences, and their own research into the issues. The groups were fully supported by the PSE and safe-guarding lead, inclusion officer and gender and sexuality academic experts.

Global Challenge

This lesson activity follows the same pattern as the above, but focuses on change-makers around the world. It also features a global activist crossword puzzle and answer sheet.

Accompanying this lesson activity is a Global Challenge supporting students to acquire knowledge and understanding of how creative activisms on social justice issues are using art to support projects across the world.

Individual Research

This lesson activity invites students to:
• Explore case studies from young people making a difference around gender inequalities
• Develop their own ideas for a research project exploring their chosen issue

Accompanying this lesson activity are a series of Individual Proposals for student-led projects. Each proposal includes links to a wide range of resources to support students in developing their research ideas including: useful websites; primary data sources; blogs and vlogs; key researchers in the field with links to their research papers. Individual Proposal topics include:
• Selfie Culture
• Youth Feminist Activism
• Intimacy and Friendships
• Digital Gaming

Case Study Three – Friends? A drama and resource on the gendered pressures of young relationships

The following case study provides an example of children and young people from the youth group DIGON actively and creatively engaging with research findings on issues that are often normalised and consequently remain invisible in many SRE programmes.

 

 

 

Gender, Post-truth Populism and Pedagogies: Challenges and Strategies in a Shifting Political Landscape

#GEAconf2018 Organising Committee: Professor Penny Jane Burke; Professor Lisa Adkins; Professor Rosalind Gill; and Associate Professor Ros Smith; Dr Julia Coffey and Dr Akane Kanai, along with the broader CEEHE administrative team.

We are delighted to announce that the Call for Papers for #GEAconf2018 is now live.

The conference theme is intended to provide a platform to critically engage with and interrogate the current political landscape in which debates about knowledge, authority, truth, power and harm are resurfacing and require feminist intervention. A central question underpinning this conference theme is: what does it mean to be pedagogical in a post-truth landscape? And how might feminist scholars work to intervene in this environment? The GEA 2018 conference will provide a forum to critically engage with and interrogate the current political landscape in which debates about knowledge, authority, truth, power and harm are resurfacing and require feminist intervention.

The conference features a stellar line-up of keynote speakers, including: Professor Raewyn Connell; Professor Sondra Hales; Professor Susan Page; and Professor Jane Kenway.

#GEAConf2018 welcomes 400-word abstracts for individual papers, roundtable discussions and symposia, along with other formats that share ideas and generate discussions in innovative ways.

The deadline for abstracts has been extended to Friday 23rd February 2018. Further information about the CfP and how to submit can be found via the conference website.

Wondering what to expect at GEA Conference? Check out the tweets from 2017 in this #GEAConf2017 tweet story and watch highlights from the 2017 conference.