High school English teacher Marie Kleiderlein examines her upbringing and experience in the field of social services in order to explain her personal affiliation with various feminisms. She also explores ways that her tenure as a teacher has shaped her thinking about feminism and education. She identifies areas of interest for further research regarding feminist theory.
Continue reading “So Many Feminisms: An English Teacher’s Perspective”
A number of new initiatives have recently been launched by the government’s equality group. These campaigns have also resulted in the development of a number of new resources that can be used in schools to generate discussion surrounding issues of gender and education. The two campaigns that have been publicised most widely in the Equality Group’s newsletter relate to teenage relationship abuse and body image. Continue reading “Gender in Education: Launch of New Resources for Use in Schools”
I started the historical research that is the basis for my article in the upcoming Gender and Education issue (23:6) in 2007. At this time, New Labour’s policy emphasis on ‘empowerment’ through community cohesion, regeneration and community-oriented schools, had attracted significant critique within research literature. Examining New Labour’s policy paradigm, and the schooling practices promoted by their policy ensemble, many had demonstrated the tendency to privilege middle-class modes of educational agency. Concurrently, despite being the specific target of a proliferation of policies, working-class children and parents have been routinely constructed as perpetually lacking. Spurred on by this, when starting my research, my primary interest lay in uncovering – and better understanding – the history of working-class educational agency that had appeared to be lost in dominant policy discourse. Interestingly, whilst completing my research, New Labour came to the end of its 13-year rule, and in swept the Conservative/Liberal Democratic Coalition, bringing with it a new (though perhaps not radically reformulated) reiteration of community ‘empowerment’. With David Cameron’s heralding of the ‘Big Society’ and Michael Gove’s ‘free schools’, community participation appears to continue to have significant rhetorical utility in contemporary education policy. Continue reading “Gender, community and education: cultures of resistance in Socialist Sunday Schools and Black Supplementary Schools”
Too often in discussions about gender identity the approach taken is extremely narrow. The discourse is largely dominated by the cisgendered, binary perspective that there is ‘male’ and that there is ‘female’ – and that both of these are biologically determined, stable categories. This is further reinforced when the discourse is situated in the context of children. The prevailing attitude is that any identity, theory or social group that destabilises such assumptions are too complicated and/or too ‘subversive’ to merit acknowledgement. It is therefore unsurprising that when school staff, policy makers and academics come to discus gender identity within the classroom, that transgendered children are usually entirely ignored. What can teachers can do to support such children? Continue reading “Supporting Transgender Children in the Primary Classroom: A Reflection”
Continue reading “Browne Report + the White Paper = A Murky Outlook for Educational Equality”