By Sara Turnbull – Doctoral Researcher at Lancaster University
“Fairy tales”. Scanning the curriculum for my first teaching job, those two words triggered immediate dread and despair. As a fierce feminist, my inner siren was screeching. Did I really abandon a career in economics to reinforce outdated, heteronormative gender roles? I did not want to teach stories where a woman’s sole talent is being beautiful, consent is non-existent, and young boys are taught that emotional suppression equals bravery.
However, as I was contractually bound to the curriculum, I had to find a way forward. That was over a decade ago. Today, I’ve come to the realisation that fairy tales aren’t a feminist educator’s worst nightmare but rather a tool for encouraging early activism.
When we give young learners permission to fully engage with these stories, they instinctively question what is fair and unfair. When I ask why the princess had no choice, twenty hands go up in the air. If you want to use a problematic curriculum to your advantage, here are three practical steps to bring traditional tales up to date.
1. Don’t ban the book, change the questions
Instead of banning traditional stories, we as educators can use them as a starting point for critical thinking. Young children love the magic behind fairy tales and that engagement serves as our hook. Once students are fully engaged introduce targeted questions that challenge societal norms. You can ask questions such as “Why does the prince get to make all the decisions?”, “Is beauty a requirement for being a good person?” or “What if the princess saves herself, or does the prince need rescuing?”. You will find that children are just as outraged as you are, often instantly spotting structural unfairness.
2. Validate Students’ Concerns
During a breakthrough moment in my classroom, I realised that children were naturally questioning these scenarios. We were reading Sleeping Beauty, and the moment the prince kissed her without asking, a little boy shouted out, “That’s a stranger! You’re not supposed to touch people when they are asleep!”. It completely stopped the reading. Whenever we read stories, they routinely asked questions such as “Why don’t they have jobs? Is she crazy marrying a man she doesn’t know?”. When students ask questions and voice concerns, don’t brush them off to finish the book or keep up with the timings of the curriculum. Instead, pause and let them lead the discussion. When we allow our students to steer the conversation, we show them that their instincts about justice are correct and they shift from passive listeners to agents of change.
In my own classroom, I have introduced further activities whereby students have a bell and when we are reading a traditional tale, they ring the bell whenever they notice something unjust. We pause throughout the story to unpack our thoughts, feelings, and the wider systems that make these situations seem normal. Overall, we can use their scepticism to initiate open discussions on real-world issues such as consent, racism and rigid gender conformity.
3. Introduce Counter-Narratives
Pair traditional tales with unconventional, modern adaptations to show students that narratives can be rewritten. Use classic feminist texts such as Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, where Princess Elizabeth rescues an ungrateful and judgmental prince and then promptly ditches him to flee with the dragon, to dismantle female submission. To support boys, introduce stories such as The Story of Ferdinand, the gentle bull who prefers to smell flowers rather than fighting, to explicitly validate that boys do not have to be aggressive or tough to be the hero.
Students can take a traditional story and rewrite the ending, giving them a chance to go from passive listeners to agents of change.
Thirteen years ago, I thought teaching fairy tales would be a professional life sentence. Today, I see them completely differently. They provide a safe space where young children can explore the vital skills of challenging societal norms. As feminist educators, we will always encounter lessons and materials that conflict with our personal morals, but this is where the real work begins. By being open and inviting our students to question, speak up, and flip the script, we can help ensure their own happily ever after is one of their own choice and making.
Some stories need sharing. And sometimes we must be our sisters’ keepers. As three women working in the same regional Australian university, our sisterhood and solidarity grew as we shared the vicissitudes of our lives, conversing in corridors, online, and occasionally, sharing meals. These interactions, interwoven with our passions, interests, and emotions offered an unusual academic freedom. We shared on parenting, life events, cultural responsibilities, and the emotional labour of being mothers in academia.
Working as collaborative autoethnographers, our conversations became a journal paper. Encouraged by reviewer responses to our now accepted paper and a faculty conference grant, we hosted a symposium based on solidarity, sisterhood, and allyship around academic motherhood. It was gratifying to be joined by enthusiastic scholars, on-campus and online, who proactively queried “what happens when we stop pretending these experiences sit outside academia and instead recognise them as central to it”? Instead of a single narrative of “academic motherhood,” all voices asserted that gender, care, and education are deeply entangled. And to be meaningful, solidarity must extend beyond tokenistic celebrations of diversity, perfunctory policy changes, or advocacy of endurance.
From the symposium’s presentations and collaborative discussions, strong themes emerged:
Stories beyond “work–life balance”
Women academics are conditioned that balancing academic work and care responsibilities is a personal responsibility. Our presenters (of all genders) resisted this idea, contending that the issue is not women, mothers, carers, or marginalised academics failing to manage competing demands. It stems from neoliberal academia’s fossilised academic stereotype of the heterosexual male, preferably single, or supported by the ubiquitous wife, ready to meet academic demands (Anderson et al., 2020). Overlooked narratives ranged from academics based in regional universities, struggling with travel, to the penalties paid by others who cannot relocate or attend conferences; illuminating that care responsibilities are not incidental. Given the institutional preference for rewarding staff visibility, research productivity, and traditionally linear careers, those encumbered with care responsibilities remain behind.
Whose motherhood counts?
Running like a silken ripple through the symposium was the refusal to treat academic motherhood as a single, universal experience. Indigenous, migrant, working class, adoptive motherhood, and first in family academics convivially intertwined different realities.
For Australian First Nations scholars, caregiving is interwoven with kinship, community, and Country (Minthorn et. al 2018). Motherhood is imbricated in their lives as a knowledge source rooted in accountability, not viewed as a distraction from intellectual life. Institutional systems mostly devalue these ways of being and knowing, designating care as an individual rather than a collective responsibility.
For migrant academics, motherhood comes layered with stresses of visa insecurity, fractured professional networks, and the task of caring across borders based on cultural expectations. Some navigate “third space” roles, straddling academic and professional spaces, as a flexible compromise, which raises questions around academic legitimacy, recognition, and authenticity. We heard from those struggling to achieve parenthood, for whom conversations centred on motherhood become exclusionary. Reflections on topics usually avoided in academia, including infertility and miscarriage were shared, highlighting the profound impact on wellbeing, identity, and participation. Solidarity based on preconceptions that everyone’s reproductive journey is similar risks silencing many.
Invisible labour and audible bias
With a smattering of international scholars, an emergent global theme was the lack of recognition and reward for that which academics deem as essential work (Reid 2021), encompassing emotional and individual labour including mentoring students, fostering collegiality, organising workloads, defusing conflicts, and professional and domestic care work, essentially ‘women’s work’, often racialised and ignored. Workplace microaggressions (Blithe & Elliott, 2020) were mentioned: being interrupted, spoken over, dubbed unproductive and excluded from decision-making spaces post motherhood.
The exhaustion from this marginalisation through motherhood was a palpable presence. The need to constantly prove credibility, mask grief, fatigue, or vulnerability to be perceived as professional, and the painful knowledge that stepping back, even briefly, has long-term consequences remains omnipresent.
We learned that:
Solidarity needs expanding beyond support in stressful times to be designated as genuine sisterhood; capturing elements of resistance, advocacy, and collective action. Several contributors argued for solidarity as a clearly developed collective practice. This includes challenging visible bias, advancing transparent workload models, planning meetings and events acknowledging care responsibilities, refuting longstanding narratives of inevitable, and recognising diverse allyship outside gender groups. A core feature of solidarity is listening, especially to those traditionally suppressed in universities, the ‘invisibles’, ranging from BIPOC scholars to those with disabilities.
Why gender and education matter right now!
We rethought Epictetus’s assertion that only the educated are truly free. Positioned as a pathway to equality, education systems can reproduce inequality if we don’t interrogate embedded intersectional inequalities and question whose knowledge counts. Universities are under pressure, leading to normalising burnout and stress. But gendered and intersecting inequalities are exacerbated by austerity. As redundancies become commonplace, losing experienced women, carers, and marginalised scholars narrows knowledge production, students support, and ultimately, creative futures.
Progressing Together
While no perfect solutions crystallised at the symposium, hope emerged that naming these realities together is a form of change (Sum et al. 2025). Connecting across institutions, disciplines, and borders transforms isolation into collective understanding. The presenters asserted that gender equity is intertwined with access, participation, knowledge, and care. These conversations reiterated that academia needs more institutional responsibility not individual resilience. We recognised that solidarity is not about struggling alone but about imagining, insisting upon, and progressing to something better, together.
References
Anderson, L., Gatwiri, K., & Townsend-Cross, M. (2020). Battling the “headwinds”: the experiences of minoritised academics in the neoliberal Australian university. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(9), 939–953. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1693068
Blithe, S. J., & Elliott, M. (2020). Gender inequality in the academy: microaggressions, work-life conflict, and academic rank. Journal of Gender Studies, 29(7), 751–764. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1657004
Minthorn, R. Z., Nelson, C. A., Shotton, H. J., Lee, T. S., Tsinnajinnie-Paquin, L., Faircloth, S., Reyes, N., Chow-Garcia, N., Johnson-Jennings, M., & Johnson-Jennings, A. (2022). Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy. Rutgers University Press. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fLx9EQAAQBAJ
Reid, R. A. (2021). Retaining Women Faculty: The Problem of Invisible Labor. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(3), 504–506. doi:10.1017/S1049096521000056
Lahiri-Roy, R., Daniel, R., & Hart, K. (2026, accepted, in press). Arduously reconciling the ‘good mother’ with the ‘academic worker’: A collaborative autoethnography on academic motherhood and sisterhood in Australian higher education. Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education.
Sum, N., Lahiri-Roy, R., & Belford, N. (2025). Hope theory as resistance: narratives of South Asian scholars in Australian academia. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44(1), 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-03-2023-0085
A digital event reflection on Two-Spirit Reconciliation with the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation Brent Saccucci, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge
This Indigenous-led event was a Two-Spirit Reconciliation dialogue held in June 2020, which is Indigenous People’s History month and Pride month. The dialogue was facilitated by Candy Palmater, an oratist and writer from Eel River Bar Mi’kmaw Nation in collaboration with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. Palmater facilitated the conversation with two Two-Spirit leaders: Intergenerational Survivor and Knowledge Keeper Dr. Albert McLeod from Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and the Metis community of Norway House in northern Manitoba, and Intergenerational Survivor Harlen Pruden who is First Nations Cree Nation/nēhiyo, whose mother is from the Beaver Lake Reservation and father from the Whitefish Lake Reservation, both located in Treaty 6 Territory (now known as northeastern “Alberta”). In Canada, June is not only Pride Month, it is Indigenous Peoples’ Month – and for me, that isn’t coincidence: Queer and trans liberation must be tethered to decolonization and Two-Spirit sovereignty. In fact, colonization brought homo/transphobia as a white Christian nationalist project that we still see pervading our schools today.
Admittedly, a lot of ground was covered in this discussion, so this reflection will focus on the panel’s themes between Indigenous Peoples and religion/spirituality in the context of Two-Spirit reconciliation. Below, I reflect on this relationship in two sections that overlap: “truth” and “reconciliation”. Truth outlines how residential schools operated a Christian imperial project enforcing Euro-Christian gender and sexual norms. This religious colonialism continues today where Two-Spirit Peoples continue to resist systemic erasure and ongoing homophobia/transphobia, notably in education and church institutions. Like Mcleod, I believe the church has not been held accountable for its role in perpetuating these harms, especially in curriculum when teaching Canada’s history (31:58).
Then, the reconciliation section will focus on how supporting Two-Spirit sovereignty and solidarity means anti-homophobia/transphobia education must adopt a decolonial approach. The section ends with the understanding Two-Spirit identity not only as “Indigenous + Queer” but as a spiritual re-orientation challenging colonial Christian binaries, fostering healing and relationality. As a settler myself, the aim of this reflection is to take seriously Pruden’s call to action: “For non-Native people, their charge is to learn our real history [truth], and then reconcile that history with today so they do not become today’s colonizer [reconciliation]” (21:57).
Residential schools were operated as a Christian-colonial projects (Truth)
The first point of critical analysis is the history (truth): The role of the church was fundamental in bringing not only colonial, but Euro–Christian norms of gender and sexuality as central teachings into the residential schools. Like many Queer and Trans folks, I was aware that gendered and sexual norms were part of colonial/British culture which influenced how the residential schools forcibly taught colonial gender and sexuality norms. But because Christian nationalism is often baked into culture as normalcy, I didn’t see the underlying (and yet central) Christianity within this colonial project. When host Palmater stated that “the very mention of sexuality, thanks to colonization, is seen as something dirty” (43:04, emphasis added), it became clear there was a religious element in this dialogue around truth. As a queer kid who grew up Catholic, the word “dirty” admittedly triggered me in a small way – it reminded me of the language a pastor used to describe gay people once in Catholic mass. This language of “dirty” comes from Christian purity culture and the idea of gender betrayal and homosexuality as a sin. After re-watching the video a second time, the messafe was becoming clearer that I had always known (and yet not explicitly named) – colonization was, and continues to be, an explicitly Christian project. Mcleod directly names that the colonizers used religiosity to justify the vilification and subjugation of Two-Spirit Peoples, explaining “we were not seen as spiritual people, we were seen as corrupt, we were seen as a work of the devil” (13:58, emphasis added). I wondered: Because Alberta has normalized white Christian nationalism – both historically and contemporarily – could I have normalized colonialism as secular, instead of an (obviously) Christian imperial project? With this lens, I rewatched the event a second time, now more attuned to Mcleod’s suggestion at the onset of the panel where he explicitly names the aim of “early contact” as directly aimed at “imposing a Euro-Christian ideal about binary gender” (10:05). And don’t we now see that imperial project still alive today in white Christian nationalism – not only in the US – but in Alberta as we face the prospect of separation from Canada?
Teaching truth must fracture the white Christian nationalist colonial project (Truth)
This truth matters to me as a teacher-educator in Alberta committed to decolonization, preparing our province’s future teachers in curricula such as our new Social Studies curriculum that states Alberta students must know the history of residential schools and their effects on Indigenous Peoples (Alberta Education, 2025). However, it’s important to note that in the new curriculum, the role of the church is barely mentioned once in describing the residential schools, and Two-Spirit Peoples are not mentioned once, keeping the white Christian nationalist image intact, void of any real responsibility for homo/transphobia or empire, while attempting to erase Two-Spirit sovereignty. We see similar erasure in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – another document that our new Social Studies curriculum is supposed to cover – but a document that does not name Two-Spirit Peoples at all. Speaking to this absence, Mcleod states offence the TRC didn’t acknowledge the residential schools as “a gendered structure and mechanism that still influences our communities today” (30:56). This ‘contemporary influence today’ is the modern white Christian nationalist church still at work attempting Two-Spirit erasure in our curriculum. Whether in curricula or in public discourse, Mcleod notes the church has absolved itself of responsibility, naming “we still haven’t even had these conversations about the inculcation of homophobia and transphobia against Indigenous and Two-Spirit Peoples for generations – they [the church] haven’t been held to account” (31:58). While this dialogue was in 2020, and the Pope ‘formally apologized’ to Indigenous Peoples in 2022, I would still argue the church has not been held to account when churches are only mentioned once, and Two-Spirit Peoples mentioned zero, in all of the Grade 7-9 curriculum that covers “Canadian history and human rights” (Alberta Education, 2025).
Any anti-homo/transphobia education must be decolonial education (Reconciliation)
Mcleod states urgently “we must have this dialogue with churches” noting that homo/transphobia brought by the church to Indigenous communities is still felt as ongoing colonization “through suicidality, poverty, and homelessness” (32:32). Palmeter adds that as an queer Indigenous youth raised Catholic, when she came out it was the church’s homo/transphobia that removed her from her kinship structure, further isolating her from her culture: “As a person who was raised Catholic, that was a really difficult time for me – that they saw me as a sinner, causing me to leave a religion I was raised in with all my family and extended relatives” (33:18).
Through telling the truth of the church in residential schools, we see that white Christian nationalism is the common denominator in our oppression both as 2SQT+ and Indigenous Peoples. This makes it clear that any pedagogical effort I make in resisting 2SQT+ erasure in curriculum must take a decolonial approach and be in solidarity with Two-Spirit and Indigenous Peoples.
Two-Spirit sovereignty is not only a reclamation of cultural and sexual orientation, but of spiritual re-orientation to relationality (Reconciliation)
It became clear throughout the dialogue that while some speakers also conceptualized Two-Spirit as noun ‘Indigenous + Queer/Trans’ (particularly Pruden), Two-Spirit was also understood a spiritual as a verb – one that undertakes an epistemic and ontological re-orienting outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism that pervades Christian colonial logics. Mcleod maintains that “the early colonizers saw and understood the power [of spirit] but because they were Christian, they couldn’t convert to that belief system – even though they understood its power – they would have rather destroyed it than collaborate and honour it” (1:12:32). Here, Two-Spirit sovereignty takes on a new understanding beyond just sexual liberation, but as Pruden says, “as a decolonizing and freeing of our minds, our soul, and our spirit” (52:57). This re-orientation reminded me of what Palmater rejoiced earlier in the dialogue, stating that “I love that Two-Spirit has the word spirit in it. Because so many of us LGBTQ+ people had to leave religion in order to be who we are … they can’t exist in both of those worlds” (15:04). In this way, Two-Spirit actually queers the dualistic binary of being either ‘religious/spiritual or queer’ — and instead demonstrates a new constellation of being that isn’t only an identity marker, but also an epistemic and ontological reorientation in the world that transcend Christian colonial logics and reignite spiritual ways of relating.
This relational way of being became clear at the end of the dialogue, where during the live Q&A a Trans Mohawk Inuk listener voiced that people in their community continue to be discriminating against them and they are lost at what to do next. Mcleod listens with deep care and replies by offering that every being is a “divine gift from Creator” and to “let spirit guide you” (1:12:10), even though that may feel hard to do. Pruden adds “I have to pray for them – because if I respond with hatred, I am no better than they are, and then colonization has won – because it has changed who I am ” (1:18:24). As a person who has confidently knocked faith down as purely harmful, I left this not only in deep reverence to the wisdom of the panelists, but also with more hope and faith than I’ve had in a long time.
In this short blog post based upon my recently published article in British Journal Sociology of Education (Rowell 2026) I cast light on the enduring role of economic capital and access to knowledge in shaping educational pathways and decision making. I reflect on the economic insecurity that class inequality casts over educational opportunities, even in the lives of those considered to have succeed in education. In doing so I argue for greater systematic support pertaining to inclusion of working-class students at the doctoral level if we are to diversify higher education knowledge production and to take seriously historical epistemological injustices with regards to the classed politics of knowledge production and inequalities of representation.
Reproduction in education thrives off of one’s (in)ability to access knowledge. Knowing what counts as valid and worthy, having a feel for the unwritten rules that open doors for some and lock out others. At the highest level of educational attainment then, one would be shocked and surprised perhaps then to learn that access to doctoral funding (and subsequent doctoral study per se, for working-class students) is seldom based on one’s academic accolades but rather who they happened to be taught by. Afterall, education is a meritocracy, right? It’s not who you know but what you know? Wrong, as my research illustrates. In the case of being working-class and accessing doctoral funding then, having access to a ‘significant academic other’ (Rowell 2026) opens the possibility and probability of doctoral study as I discuss below.
Within the UK, and elsewhere higher education has moved from an elite to mass system of enrolment, it nonetheless remains a deeply classed sphere. As Walkerdine reminds us, higher education continues to operate as a classed pathway and bastion of classed knowledge (Walkerdine 2021) especially so given academia’s classed ceiling (Friedman and Laurison 2019). Whilst there exists a plethora of research illuminating the experiences of working-class students at the undergraduate level and to a lesser extent the postgraduate researcher level, working-class access to, experiences of and outcomes pertaining to doctoral education remain largely absent. This was thus the imperative and motivating factor shaping my research exploring working-class women’s experience of navigating access to and through (and out of) doctoral study. Funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education (Rowell 2026) the research sought to explore the way(s) in which a working-class background shaped experiences of doctoral study, in doing so the research revealed the enduring nature of economic inequality upon access to higher education at the doctoral level.
Whilst unpacking the experiences of thirteen working-class cis women’s journeys to doctoral education within the discipline of Sociology it became apparent that access (or not) to economic and social capital deeply structured their progression to and entry into doctoral study. All of the working-class women I interviewed had received funding – and – without exception would not have been able to afford to pursue doctoral study otherwise. The working-class women’s arrival at securing funding was by no means seamless nor linear, but often the outcomes of starts, stops and circling back round as they attempted to navigate the unfamiliar journey of navigating doctoral fundings.
For many of the participants, the inability to pay straight up for doctoral study was exactly what precluded them from embarking on a seamless academic trajectory and not having access to economic capital resulted in fractured academic journeys. More profoundly however, access to economic capital through securing research funding (what I refer to as ‘accrued economic capital’) was foundational in equipping participants with the necessary economic capital allowing them to embark on doctoral study possible.
A common theme and thread throughout participants narratives was the role that academics, who were also from working-class background played in supporting students accessing doctoral funding. Such academics, I refer to as ‘significant academic others’, a conceptual tool to theorise a specific form of academic social capital that, within the field of UKHE, provides access to hot knowledge (Ball and Vincent 1998), in this case: doctoral funding opportunities. ‘Significant academic others’ were drawn upon as a source of capital facilitating working-class students’ entry to doctoral study; it is through their ‘significant academic others’ that the working-class women were equipped with the right knowledge (cultural capital) of how to navigate the postgraduate doctoral fundings landscape. Most of the working-class women (all but one) were made aware of doctoral funding opportunities through their ‘significant academic other’ as opposed to more systematic practices, such as university or funder information dissemination outlets. It demonstrates how, for the working-class participants of this research acquiring the economic capital required for doctoral study was not a straightforward process or the results of structural widening participation initiatives but the result of lucky encounters with their ‘significant academic others’ (often too from working-class backgrounds).
I call on universities and funders to deliver targeted and systematic support aimed at making known, to working-class student communities the opportunities for doctoral funding and to make clear the unwritten rules of game that enable some to secure such funding over others. If we are serious about the inclusion of working-class students at the doctoral level, then we must take seriously inequalities in access.
References:
Ball, S.J. and Vincent, C., 1998. ’I Heard It on the Grapevine’: ‘hot’ knowledge and school choice. British journal of Sociology of Education, 19(3), pp.377-400.
Friedman, S. and Laurison, D., 2019. The class ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged. Policy Press.
Rowell, C.R., 2025. Fighting for funding, working-class women’s transitions to sociology doctoral education: ‘Significant academic others’, economic and social capital. British Journal of Sociology of Education, pp.1-22.
Walkerdine, V., 2021. What’s class got to do with it? Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 42(1), pp.60-74.
The intersectionality of class and gender is at the forefront of my experience and research as a PhD student exploring curriculum justice. In this blog post, I reflect on my higher education journey as a white, working-class, British woman and I touch upon how structural inequalities are embedded in curriculum design and delivery. I explore how neoliberal ideologies commodify education, marginalise working-class women, and erase diverse ways of knowing. My experience and reflections have shaped my commitment to advocating for curriculum reform that promotes epistemological justice, which has the potential to lead to broader social transformation.
A Moment To Reflect
Very recently, I attended a conference where one of the presenters mentioned that personal social injustices they face motivate them to change things for others. This resonated deeply with me and prompted me to reflect on my own intellectual journey through higher education, particularly my undergraduate studies. I reflected on how my experiences as a working-class white British woman not only shaped my path but also my research into gender and curriculum justice.
I vividly remember the look in my dad’s eyes when I told him I was intending to go to university after completing my A Levels. I caught a glimpse of the heart-stopping, stomach-dropping panic.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Have you thought about getting a job?’
‘You don’t have to because your friends are, you know?’
I knew I didn’t have to. I wanted to. Even in those self-absorbed teenage years, I did feel for my dad. I was asking for the equivalent of 2 years’ worth of food shopping for our working-class family of four, to be paid over the course of the next 3 years. Yet, with the most pained smile I will probably ever witness, he agreed.
I studied Music, and it wasn’t until my third year that I came across my first female lecturer, a guest lecturer from the Music Therapy Master’s course. It was then that I realised there were no female lecturers in the department. We did not learn about any female composers and anything aside from Western music was crammed into a one-semester elective module in the first year – ethnomusicology – taught by a very charming, but very white, middle-class male.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I truly understand how teaching cannot be viewed as a matter outside of social class. Teaching is an overt genderised profession with evident historical roots within the capitalist system (Anyon, 1997; Arnot, 2002; hooks, 1994; Darder, 1991). I now question myself: Was it worth it? Is it worth it for working-class women now, after 20 years? What knowledge, or rather whose knowledge, are you paying for? These are just some of the questions I hope to answer through my research.
Working-Class Realities and the Cost of Aspiration
Class matters are deeply intertwined with gender and, needless to say, racial categories. (Davies, 2019; hooks, 1987; Darder, 1991) I have found that women are disproportionately affected by precarious work conditions, unpaid carer roles and responsibilities, as well as exclusion due to disability. Also, it is interesting to notice whose women one is referring to? In recent research, the UK Trades Union Congress (2025) revealed that women are 34% more likely to be on exploitative zero-hour contracts than men, BME women are 103% more likely than white men, and disabled women are 49% more likely.
When I started my undergraduate studies in 2005, university tuition fees in England were set at £1,500 a year. At that time, the National Minimum Wage was £5.05 per hour for those aged 22 and over, and £4.25 per hour for those aged 18 to 21. Fees were the equivalent of 297 hours’ and 353 hours’ worth of work, respectively. Have things got better? Unfortunately, no. The National Living Wage, as it is now known, is set at £12.21, and a year’s fees can be charged at a maximum of £9,535 in England and Wales: an equivalent of 781 hours. So, what kind of curriculum are you paying all this money for? What will you learn? Who benefits from ‘such learning’? Importantly, is it worth the mounting debt for the working class in particular? Alarmingly, if one pays attention to studies promoted by conservative psychologists, such as Jordan Peterson, equality policies, particularly in Scandinavian nations, have aggravated gender equality.
It is essential to recognise that prevailing societal ideologies influence the dominant forms of curriculum theory, design, and development. At present, as research documents, neoliberalism has been capable of imposing itself as a public pedagogy aiming for educational outcomes that are directed by primary market drivers. Students are treated as a commodity, like any other commodity, a captive mass of customers, and knowledge is viewed as a commodity as well (Apple, 2000; Giroux, 2011). There is an emphasis on ‘marketable skills,’ which reinforces capitalist values, namely, individualism, competition, and instrumental views of reason and existence. Since the market dictates education, pedagogy is compartmentalized and individualized to be in tune with those markets. In the course of my research so far, I have observed that the majority of online prospectuses foreground workplace skills that can be acquired during the course, before describing the degree content. For some, this isn’t very meaningful. The curriculum is designed to serve the labour market, not the students. It promotes skills for employability, assuming everyone is a potential worker, and adds little value for women who cannot work or are in insecure jobs, creating a sense of economic disempowerment. Notably, education is closely tied to a new emerging gendered class: the precariat. Distinct from the traditional working-class, the ‘precariat’ (a term originally coined in 2011 by British economist, Guy Standing (2014)) are characterised by their precarious employment, unstable living conditions and lack of rights both within and outside of the workplace.
From a progressive feminist perspective, this assumption overlooks structural inequalities (such as access to employment, leadership roles, and equal pay, to name but a few) that disproportionately affect women—particularly those in caregiving roles, precarious employment, or excluded from formal work altogether. It adds little value for the women who cannot work or are in insecure jobs, creating a sense of economic disempowerment. By prioritising individualised success and employability, neoliberal curriculum design erases collective struggles and reinforces gendered marginalisation within education.
Intersecting Inequalities: Who Is Left Behind?
Neoliberal framing also builds the curriculum as a site of power. Bernstein (1971) claims, “how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control”. The curriculum, therefore, is a selective tradition (Williams, 1983): when you select, you make choices of what is ‘in’ and ‘out.’…and in so doing, you murder countless knowledge platforms. ‘Educated knowledge’ is often defined by dominant Western, patriarchal, and capitalist ideologies, and higher education is no exception. The curriculum has an epistemicidal nerve (Paraskeva, 2011). The general curriculum engages in epistemological looting (Paraskeva, 2016), privileging Western Eurocentric narratives while silencing indigenous, feminist, and non-Western epistemologies. ‘Objective’ knowledge is masculinised, whilst socially constructed ways of knowing and emotional experiences are feminised and devalued. Actually, in many aspects, they have been produced as non-existent (Santos, 2014). Epistemological violence (Paraskeva 2016) against working-class women and other disenfranchised individuals and communities has historically been rampant -not just in the West – and this rode upon the wave of colonisation to the South. Hence, women from indigenous communities face double the marginalisation and oppression from both patriarchal and colonial powers.
How do the politics of the curriculum impact working-class women? They are systematically neglected: the curriculum rarely reflects the lived experiences of the working-class, as their knowledge is often rooted in survival, care, and community, and is not considered ‘academic’ or ‘valuable’. This invisibility also means that others, outside of their community, do not understand their realities. Women’s invisibility in the curriculum matters has been consolidated through men’s visibility.
Additionally, the current curriculum perpetuates social hierarchies. As a result of the white, patriarchal Western Eurocentric norms embedded in the curriculum, working-class women are assumed to be uneducated and unskilled despite their different ways of knowing, reinforcing classism, ableism, racism, and sexism in both education and society. Constant exclusion from educational narratives and opportunities can lead to disempowerment and alienation, also limiting their ability to advocate for themselves or their communities.
Towards Epistemological Justice
I was fortunate enough to secure a full-time job, albeit at minimum wage, while attending school. Working full-time hours and studying on a full-time course was intense, and sure, I would have attained better marks if it had not been for cramming coursework in work breaks, but I managed to see myself through and come out with a piece of paper on the other side to show the world I had a degree. Looking back, however, it cost a lot more than money. My identity – my working-class ontology, my epistemology, and even my accent, which set me apart – all had to be shed for me to fit in with my peers and absorb white Western male knowledge. I am not ashamed to admit that, if it were not for employers covering the costs of my Master’s and PhD studies, nor for the fantastic support I receive from my supervisors, I would not be where I am today.
I was, and still am, lucky — and it is not fair. As a society, we need to strive for something better, and I hope this is where my research will lead me. I cannot see how we can change society without changing education and teacher education. Although I am not naïve, as education alone cannot transform society, the truth is that the social transformation we so desperately need requires a radical shift in the way we think about and approach education. I am making it my mission to explore curriculum theories that promote epistemological justice, embrace diverse and plural ways of knowing, and break away from a territorialised curriculum that is fixed, canonised, and built on colonial and patriarchal frameworks.
REFERENCES
Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto Schooling. New York: Teachers College Press.
Apple, M. (2000). Official Knowledge. New York Routledge
Arnot, M. (2002) Reproducing Gender. New York: Routledge
Bernstein, B. (1971) ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’. In M. F. D. Young (ed), Knowledge and Control. New Directions for the Sociology of Education (pp. 47- 69). London: Collier-Macmillan
Darder, A. (1991). Culture and Power in the Classroom. New York: Routledge
Davies, A. (2019) Woman, Race and Class. New York: Penguin.
Giroux, H. (2011) Education and the Crisis of Public Values. New York: Peter Lang
hooks, b. (1987) Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge
Paraskeva, J. M. (2011) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. New York: Palgrave
Paraskeva, J. M. (2016) Curriculum Epistemicides. New York: Routledge
Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies from the South. Boulder: Paradigm
Standing, G. (2014) The Precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury
Understanding the process of socialization and the learning of politics and citizenship during the formative period of adolescence is crucial for comprehending the origin of the gender gap in political and civic participation later in adulthood, including experiences within the school environment. Schools, whether through explicit or implicit content, can contribute to the conceptualization of politics and citizenship as a male domain if their practices and interactions among students perpetuate gender biases and stereotypes (the tendency to attribute specific characteristics and traits to men and women (Jost & Kay, 2005)).
Schools possess formative potential that extends beyond the classroom, involving the institution as a whole. As Kerr (2015) emphasizes, citizenship education encompasses the classroom through the curriculum and teaching practices; the institution as a whole through spaces for deliberation and school participation; and the school’s relationship with the community through service activities and educational outings, among other aspects. While there is extensive literature and empirical evidence focused on the classroom and the influence of teachers on the development of students’ citizenship competences (Gainous & Martens, 2012; Schulz et al., 2018; Torney-Purta, 2002), less attention has been given to the role of school leaders in citizenship education, considering the formative potential of the entire school.
This project focus on school leadership (principals, management teams and teachers in leadership positions within the school) to observe their role in the process and experience of political socialization and citizenship education of Chilean students. In doing so, we aimed to identify their approach to gender issues and the existence of gender biases that could contribute to the construction and (re)production of a citizenship associated with the masculine or feminine roles in political life.
What have we done?
During the months of project execution, we gathered essential data to address the research objectives. Case studies were conducted to observe and analyse gender biases in learning and teaching processes within the school environment, with a specific focus on the role of educational leadership.
We collaborated with a sample of four secondary public schools in Santiago, Chile, including two exclusively female schools. To ensure gender balance in school leadership, we selected two schools led by female principals and two by male principals. In line with our initial proposal, we conducted in-depth interviews with educational leaders and citizenship education teachers. The objective was to gain insights into their perspectives on citizenship learning and teaching from a gender-oriented standpoint.
We interviewed a total of seven citizenship education teachers and six members of management teams. The analysis of these four school cases focused on the discourses and practices of leaders (political and citizenship beliefs and attitudes) and the opportunities for teaching and learning (spaces for deliberation and participation, as well as the school’s relationship with the community) offered by the school as a whole. The interviews, conducted between May and October 2023, lasted approximately one hour each.
What are our main findings so far?
The four schools analyzed exhibit differences in their school culture, yet they also share some characteristics in many of the examined issues.
From the cases examined, citizenship training plans have been developed, as mandated by the Ministry of Education (outlining citizenship education actions and learning opportunities for primary and secondary education students). In a couple of schools, units have been established to address gender issues. However, in the case of citizenship education plans, in general, these are not known by the school community and have a limited impact, as there has been no collective reflection on the type of citizenship the school community seeks to emphasize or the actions this will entail. It is suggested that the formulation of these plans has been primarily for regulatory compliance rather than constructing an educational plan for the community.
A noteworthy aspect in three of the schools is the recent establishment, within the last two years, of an internal department addressing gender issues. However, these departments or units are still in their early stages, and like the citizenship plans, their scope is not yet known or shared by the educational communities. While these units represent progress in addressing the visibility of gender issues, their focus has been oriented toward addressing gender diversity, coexistence problems, and non-discrimination rather than promoting formative or educational strategies from a non-sexist approach.
In all four cases, diverse citizenship conceptualizations are observed, which even differ within each school. Views range from critical positions regarding what has traditionally been understood as citizenship, related to civic duties and rights, to others where a broader and more active conception of citizenship linked to common good and democratic coexistence is observed. Regarding feminism, a common discourse is observed in all four schools around its relevance. While its importance is declared, the concept is not used institutionally, and instead, similar concepts such as gender equality or equity are mentioned.
Concerning forms of organisation and student participation, three parallel phenomena are observed in all cases:
1. A growing weakening of traditional forms of student participation such as Student Unions, which generally have low attendance and often do not garner validation among students.
2. Minority groups of students with higher levels of politicisation, participation, and mobilisation capacity, who often drive actions such as school occupations.
3. School administrators and teachers report a growing lack of interest and disenchantment among students with topics related to traditional and electoral politics, even due to causes such as feminism during the post-pandemic period (2021-2023). However, there is a reported increase in interest in other types of issues such as animal rights.
These realities have a correlation in the discourses of school leadership, where there is a lack of problematization in relation to the type of citizenship that the school privileges, as well as to possible gender gaps or an education that produces or reproduces gender biases. These discourses, rather, focus on reducing gender issues only to the promotion of non-discrimination and the promotion of sexual diversity, from a focus on reparation rather than prevention, instead of thinking about the development of strategies in the formative or educational field for a non-sexist approach (from pedagogical practices, contents, work materials).
What can we conclude at this point?
All in all, it can be said that there is progress in schools in relation to citizenship education and gender issues, which contributes to the recognition and visibility of both topics. However, these advances are limited and the school leadership rather lacks of a critical or reflective vision on citizenship and the challenges, gaps and biases that citizenship education faces in terms of gender.
Finally, we did not encounter any ethical issues in the fieldwork. Before the fieldwork this study was revised and approved by Diego Portales University ethical committee. Participants were required to read and sign a written informed consent prior to their interview. We also tried to be mostly transparent with our research purposes and the future use that any information will have.
