Discourse and the Construction of Gendered Identities in Education
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DISCOURSE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDERED IDENTITIES IN EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Children learn to take up gender as an element of their personal and social selves, and they do so, among other things, through learning the discourse practices in which all people are positioned as either male or female. Children develop an emotional commitment to their gender as early as 2 years of age and when they arrive in preschool, many of them already act, speak and behave according to conventional images of gender—though the contents of these images vary considerably according to culture, historical period, social class, ethnicity, age, and individual circumstances. Images of gender also vary in the lifetime of any individual, and as the individual moves from one context to another. Yet classrooms can be sites where a specific gender order is made to seem intractable: a binary and hierarchical order between girls and boys, and a shifting array of hegemonic or marginalized positions within each gender group. Classrooms may also be sites where students discover ways of talking and being that liberate them from more conventional forms of gender, and where they develop a reflexive awareness of the power of discourse to shape identities. The purpose of this chapter is to examine in which ways classroom talk is implicated in the construction and maintenance of gender. Conventional gender orders have been contested and also to some degree changed during the last decades, but so has the understanding of gender as a theoretical concept. Hence, the shifting images of gender in classroom discourse which are found in research literature from the last decades.
E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
From Rousseau through to the 1950s, gender differentiation was an explicit goal of education. This ideal was challenged after the Second World War, with the political ideology of equal rights and the educational ideology of child-centred development and learning gaining dominance. However, even though the language shifts and structural changes taking place suggested that gender was no longer a central M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 159–170. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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H . B . N I E L S E N A N D B . D AV I E S
defining feature of students, many of the earlier assumptions and practices constitutive of gender difference remained remarkably intact. ‘Boys’ and ‘girls’ had become ‘children’ or ‘students’, and mixed schools became the norm in most parts of the Western world. The ideal ‘un-gendered’ child in the child-centred ideology was implicitly a generic male—and in many classroom studies those observed and referred to as ‘students’ were actually boys. Until around 1970 the few studies focusing on gender influences in classroom interaction criticized the treatment of boys in primary school and suggested that the teachers, being female, were unable to meet the boys’ learning needs effectively (Brophy, 1985). The girls
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