Gender in Learning and Teaching: Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries 9781138479159, 9781351066464

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Gender in Learning and Teaching

Gender in Learning and Teaching brings together leading gender and feminist scholars to provide a unique collection of international research into learning and teaching. Through dialogues across national traditions and boundaries, the authors provide new insights into the relations between feminist scholarship of pedagogy, gender and didactics, and offer in-depth accounts that critically investigate how gender relations are enacted, contested and analysed at the level of the classroom, the curriculum, and the institution. Drawing on original research, the chapters explore gender dynamics in relation to ­student-teacher interactions, gendered classroom practices, curriculum content and knowledge formation in different subjects. The book includes accounts of innovative approaches to curriculum development to address gender inequality. It includes new theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches which provide fresh insights into gendered practices, including intersectionality, new material feminism, epistemic gender positioning and cultural anthropology. The chapters span all education phases from early years to higher education. This book makes a compelling case for the continuing relevance of feminist pedagogy and the urgent need for strategies to address gender inequalities in the classroom and beyond. It will be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of theory, philosophy and feminist politics of learning and teaching; education and didactics; feminism and pedagogy; sociology and the arts. Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender at the University of Bath, UK. Her research utilises feminist, new materialist and posthumanist theories and methodologies to explore gendered inequalities, spatial practices, and staff and students’ participation in a range of higher educational sites. Her latest co-edited book is Posthuman Research Practices in Education (with Christina Hughes) and she is a co-editor of the journal Gender and Education. Chantal Amade-Escot is Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of ­Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France. Her research interests lie in the situated process of teaching and learning with a focus on gender, teacher and students’ joint action, teachers’ practical epistemology and the specificity of the content. She is also interested in the analytical power of the conceptual constructions developed by subject didactics research in classrooms. She is a co-editor of the French international journal Education & Didactics. Andrea Abbas is Head of the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK. Her research uses critical sociological theory to explore how gender and intersecting differences (age, class, disability, ethnicity) are challenged, perpetuated or transformed through educational practices and experiences. She co-leads the China Centre at the University of Bath. Her latest book is Quality in Undergraduate Education (with Monica McLean and Paul Ashwin).

Routledge Research in Educational Equality and Diversity

Books in the series include: An Asset-Based Approach to the Education of Latinos Understanding Gaps and Advances Eugene E. Garcia and Mehmet Dali Öztürk Whiteness, Pedagogy, and Youth in America Critical Whiteness Studies in the Classroom Samuel Jaye Tanner Building resilience of floating children and left-behind children in China Power, politics, participation, and education Guanglun Michael Mu Black Men in Law School Unmatched or Mismatched? Darrell D. Jackson British Pakistani Boys, Education and the Role of Religion In the Land of the Trojan Horse Karamat Iqbal Gender in Learning and Teaching Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries Edited by Carol A. Taylor, Chantal Amade-Escot and Andrea Abbas

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Educational-Equality-and-Diversity/book-series/ RREED

Gender in Learning and Teaching Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries Edited by Carol A. Taylor, Chantal Amade-Escot and Andrea Abbas

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Carol A. Taylor, Chantal Amade-Escot and Andrea Abbas; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Carol A. Taylor, Chantal Amade-Escot and Andrea Abbas to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-47915-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06646-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Preface

ix xi xv

A ndrea A bbas , C arol A . Taylor and C hantal A made - E scot

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: debates across Anglophone and European Didactic traditions

xvii

1

A ndrea A bbas , C arol A . Taylor and C hantal A made - E scot

2 The gendered history of Bildung as concept and practice: a speculative feminist analysis

11

C arol A . Taylor

Paired dialogue: notes on the potential of a feminist Bildung – a French perspective 21 J o ë l L ebeaume

3 Epistemic gender positioning: an analytical concept to (re)consider classroom practices within the French didactique research tradition

24

C hantal A made - E scot

Paired dialogue: subjects of learning and pedagogical encounters 35 S usanne G annon

4 Queering dissection: ‘I wanted to bury its heart, at least’ S ara T olbert

Paired dialogue: didactic transposition of scientific knowledge in the classroom 50 F lorence L igoz at

39

vi Contents

5 Gender, the postmodern paradigm shift and Pedagogical Anthropology

54

A nja K raus

Paired dialogue: ways of knowing – bodies, knowledge and power 64 C arol A . Taylor

6 Tackling intersecting gender inequalities through disciplinary-based higher education curricula: a Bernsteinian approach

68

A ndrea A bbas

Paired dialogue: can a Bernsteinian focus on intersecting gender inequalities support curriculum and disciplinary change? 79 I sabelle C ollet

7 A historical exploration of gender representations in French scientific and technological education school textbooks

83

J o ë l L ebeaume

Paired dialogue: gender differentiation in craft and domestic education – contrasting national approaches 96 C arrie Paechter

8 Temporalities, pedagogies and gender-based violence education in Australian schools

99

S usanne G annon

Paired dialogue: towards an articulation of the two layers of didactic transposition 110 C hantal A made - E scot

9 Butterflies for girls, tornadoes for boys: primary school science teaching in France and Geneva I sabelle C ollet

Paired dialogue: Pokemon, dragons and dinosaurs – a narrative of gender and science in/exclusions and why tackling them matters 122 S ara T olbert

114

Contents  vii

10 Playing, teaching and caring: generative productions of gender and pedagogy in/through early years assemblages

127

N ikki Fairchild

Paired dialogue: humanities, pedagogy and didactics – the tacit dimensions of early childhood education 137 A nja K raus

11 Students’ gendered learning in physical education: a didactic study at a French multi-ethnic middle school in an underprivileged area

142

I ngrid V erscheure and C laire D ebars

Paired dialogue: sport, physical education and gender – analysing complex pedagogic encounters 153 A ndreas A bbas

12 Beyond binary discourses: making LGBTQI+ identities visible in the curriculum

157

C arrie Paechter

Paired dialogue: why some bodies matter more than other bodies – a post-humanist/new material feminist perspective 168 N ikki Fairchild

13 In conversation: debating gender and feminism in learning, teaching and didactics

172

C arol A . Taylor and F lorence L igoz at

Index

181

List of figures

3.1 Replica of the worksheet (numbers are ours) 27 7.1 Two types of images about washing clothes in ‘Home Economics’ textbook (Leblanc, 1913) 90 7.2 Textbooks’ analysis grid 91 7.3 Replicas of the type of images in textbooks for girls’ schools 92 7.4 Technical contents and images within textbooks for technical and manual education (Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, 1977 [1983]) 94

Notes on contributors

Andrea Abbas is Professor of Education and Head of the Department of the Sociology of Higher Education at the University of Bath in the UK. She has an interest in how sociological theories can help us to understand how intersecting (in)equalities (of gender, social class, disability and ethnicity) are produced and can be interrupted through the work of universities. Her work focuses on learning and teaching and research and on students and academic staff. She is the author of How Powerful Knowledge Disrupts Inequality: Reconceptualising Quality in Undergraduate Education (with Monica McLean and Paul Ashwin). Chantal Amade-Escot  is Professor of Educational Research at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France. Her research area is ‘Physical Education Didactics’ and ‘Comparative Didactics’ with a focus on the integration of a gender perspective in the analysis of teaching and learning subject contents. She explores how gendered inequalities related to knowing, power and knowledge emerge as a by-product of classroom transactions. Another of her interests lies in the conceptual constructions and epistemological debates across research traditions in teaching and learning. She co-edited a special issue of Interchange on ‘comparative didactics’. Chantal is a co-editor of the French journal Education & Didactique and a member of the editorial board of Gender and Education. Isabelle Collet is a former computer scientist; she is Senior Lecturer at the University of Genève, Switzerland. As a sociologist, she published the book Does Computer Science Have a Gender? Hackers, Myths and Realities (2005), based on her PhD work, which received an award from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. She co-founded a peer-reviewed, French-language science journal Genre Éducation Formation. She has served as a scientific expert on gender-neutral education projects in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Her research interests are focused on closing the gender gap in science and developing inclusion strategies for women in science in higher education.

xii  Notes on contributors

Claire Debars is a doctoral student at the University of Toulouse (France) and a Physical Education teacher educator at the Faculty of Sport Sciences (STAPS: Sciences et Technique des Activités Physiques et Sportives), University of Montpellier, France. She is a specialist in sport pedagogy in the area of handball. Her research interests are in gender and didactics, teaching and learning games, heterogeneity and justice at school. In her doctoral research, Claire focuses on the gendered construction of knowledge inequalities in underprivileged schools. Nikki Fairchild is Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education and Care at the University of Chichester. Her PhD, research interests and publications enact post-humanist theorising, including the work of Deleuze and Guattari and new material feminisms, to extend existing theorisations of classroom practices, professionalism, and more-than-human distributed gendered subjectivities in Early Childhood. She is also interested in interdisciplinary ways to enact methodology and method via post-qualitative research and how this can be used to provide new ways to articulate both conference presentations/workshops and Early Childhood Education and Care research and professional practice. Susanne Gannon is Associate Professor in the Centre for Educational Research at Western Sydney University. Her diverse research interests include gender equity and sexualities, secondary curriculum and writing pedagogies. She draws on a range of qualitative methodologies including collective biography, autoethnography, narrative methods and textual analysis. She is a co-editor of Gender and Education and a regional editor of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Recent co-edited books are Resisting Educational Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities (2018), Contemporary Issues of Equity in Education (2014), and Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood (2014). Anja Kraus  is Professor in Esthetical Education at Stockholm University, Sweden. She studied Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the Free University Berlin, and Art Education at the University of the Arts Berlin, Germany. Among her research interests are pedagogical theories of learning, tacit knowledge, corporality and heterogeneity in school, the integration of approaches in liberal arts into didactical concepts and into empirical classroom research, ethnographical and body-phenomenological approaches, and anthropological questions. Joël Lebeaume is Professor of Educational Sciences at Paris Descartes University (Sorbonne Paris-Cité) and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. His research interests relate to Technological Education at compulsory school level. His curricular investigations combine Didactics and History and aim at understanding the evolutions and transformations of scientific and technological contents, the principles of their construction and

Notes on contributors  xiii

implementation, and their distinction for boys and girls. In exploring the ‘curricular form’ his research contributes to the discussion of the relevance of the prescribed contents. One of his books, L’enseignement ménager en France: Sciences et techniques au féminin, 1880–1980, addresses the history of the subject of ‘home economics’ in France. Florence Ligozat  is Professor in Comparative Didactics at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the meaning-making process in the teacher and student’s joint actions, as the outcome of the didactic transposition of mathematics and science in schooling contexts. She is particularly interested in cross-cultural comparisons of the enacted curriculum in classrooms and the reflections on the epistemology of the research traditions on Didactics in European countries. Since 2016, she has been the Link Convenor of the network 27 Didactics–Learning and Teaching within the European Educational Research Association. Professor Carrie Paechter is Director of the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families, Nottingham Trent University. Carrie’s research is focused around questions of identity and childhood. She is particularly interested in what it means to be a gendered, embodied child and how this is understood by children themselves. Other research foci include: gender, sexuality and sexual orientation; power/knowledge, gender and curriculum; legitimacy, especially within communities of practice; and online learning in divorce and similar life events. Her most recent book, LGBTQI Parented Families and Schools: Visibility, Representation, and Pride, is co-written with Anna Carlile and published by Routledge. Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK. Carol’s research utilises feminist, new materialist and post-humanist theories and methodologies to explore gender, power, knowledge and space; and she has a keen interest in using trans-, multi- and interdisciplinary methodological innovation to further gendered social justice in education. Carol’s latest co-edited book is Posthuman Research Practices in Education (with Christina Hughes); she is a co-editor of the journal Gender and Education and is an Editorial Board member of the journals Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning and Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. She is Co-Convener of the Didactics, Learning and Teaching, and Gender and Education Networks of the European Educational Research Association. Sara Tolbert  is Associate Professor in the Teaching, Learning, & Sociocultural Studies Department at the University of Arizona’s College of Education. She received her PhD in Education from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Sara’s research focuses on developing transformative models of science teacher education, and exploring how teachers

xiv  Notes on contributors

leverage multidimensional aspects of pedagogy, caring, ethics, science and community to create opportunities for justice-oriented science education from marginalised social, political and economic locations. Sara also contemplates feminisms, aesthetics, science, politics, philosophy, art, activisms, traditional Indigenous lifeways and string figures/speculative futures as/for acts of love and collective survivance. Ingrid Verscheure  is Associate Professor of Educational Research at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France. Her Didactics research interests concern gender equality in education and physical education and the need for a focus on knowledge contents. Her studies, from preschool to the end of compulsory school, draw on longitudinal participatory intervention research with the purpose of facilitating changes in teaching and learning practices to increase justice among students. Ingrid’s recent co-edited book, Les inégalités d’accès aux savoirs se construisent aussi en EPS. Analyses didactiques et sociologiques, gives an overview of access to physical education knowledge in relation to social inequalities. She is a member of the scientific committee of the French-language journal Genre Éducation Formation.

Preface Andrea Abbas, Carol A. Taylor and Chantal Amade-Escot

This edited collection has had an interesting collaborative genesis. Initial interest in the exploration of the relationship between gendered and feminist approaches to learning and teaching research in European didactics and Anglophone traditions arose as a result of our organising, participating in and attending seminars, symposia and workshops at the European Conference for Education Researchers during the period 2014–2018. This work was consolidated around a special call on gender in the Didactics Learning and Teaching Network and extended both within that Network and outwards via fruitful collaborations with the Higher Education Network and more recently the newly established Gender and Education Network. Over a period of four years symposia and workshops have attracted feminist and gender-focused researchers from the Anglophone tradition from the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (USA), Australia, Canada and New Zealand who have engaged in debate with European Didactics researchers from France, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and Denmark – and more widely from Hungary, Tunisia and Turkey. These debates revealed that there is not a fully-fledged understanding of the relationship between these two traditions – which is understandable given that each tradition encompasses many different conceptual approaches, theoretical frameworks and orientations to empirical investigation arising from their differing national histories and situations. It became increasingly clear that a closer exploration would be valuable to helping us all move forward in a more knowing and productive way. It was striking that those who participated in these symposia had similar interests and were tackling related issues, regardless of which tradition they located themselves within. Overall the focus was on understanding the role of education in producing intersecting gendered inequalities and on a shared commitment to develop ways of tackling or challenging these. However, while concerns and approaches overlapped, there were clear differences and the connections between them were fuzzy. For example, we could see that different traditions not only use distinct lines of theorising and diverse methodological approaches but also that they draw upon related authors and share some methodological concerns and approaches. They also share political agendas around increasing gender equality and the importance of embedding

xvi Preface

intersectional (ethnicity, sexuality, disability, etc.) and fluid notions of gender into analysis. However, the way that they have historically connected with these different ideas and the ways that they frame, articulate and study these phenomena can be very different. This book provides a home for these important debates. It makes a distinctive contribution by exploring the resonances and divergences in understandings, theorisations of and methodological orientations to gender and feminism in learning and teaching. In doing so, it seeks elements of a rapprochement between the variegated Anglophone and Didactics traditions while at the same time foregrounding their productive differences. We hope readers enjoy the dialogic spirit in which this book is written. Certainly, for us and the chapter authors whose work appears in this book, engaging in this ongoing dialogue has been a positive and intellectually generative enterprise.

Acknowledgements

This book emerged through dialogues, debates and discussions over several years with colleagues at the European Conference of Educational Research. Our shared interests in identifying gender inequalities in our everyday work in education, and our collective feminist passion for addressing these inequalities, have informed our thinking in this book and helped push our practice forward. In addition to the authors whose work is included in this book, we want to recognise the work of the following colleagues with whom we have shared this intellectual journey: Kristina Andersson, Maria Berge, Annica Caldeborg, Anna Danielsson, Rosemary Deem, Souha Elandoulsi, Murielle Gérin, Helene Götschel, Annica Gullberg, Rachel Handforth, Anna Herbert, Maud Hietzge, Sandra Hummel, Anita Hussénius, Malena Lidar, Monique Loquet, Anna Lund, Catherine Milne, Ana Mouraz, Marie Öhman, Eliane Pautal, Betül Sarı, Kathryn Scantlebury, Ayşegül Taşıtman and Martine Vinson. Carol, Chantal and Andrea January 2019

1 Introduction Debates across Anglophone and European Didactics traditions Andrea Abbas, Carol A. Taylor and Chantal Amade-Escot Introduction This book is the first to debate the relationship between Anglophone feminist research in learning and teaching and the gendered analysis of pedagogy and curricula that emerges from the European Didactics tradition. These two distinct traditions have different historical, intellectual and political roots, which we briefly introduce in this chapter. Our introduction to these two areas of work, which we somewhat tentatively describe as traditions, is necessarily partial and succinct. We focus on the similarities and differences in their foundations, their theoretical and empirical foci, and on their practical and political ambitions. First, a brief introduction to the book is provided. The book is organised into 13 chapters. This introduction (Chapter 1) frames the debates, and the conclusion of the book (Chapter 13) comprises a conversation between two authors: Florence Ligozat, a European Didactics researcher, and Carol ­Taylor, an Anglophone feminist. They are respectively Chair and Co-Chair of the Didactics Network of the European Educational Research Association. Florence and Carol reflect upon the key issues raised in the book, how those issues have informed the trajectories of the two fields, and the intellectual and practical consonances between the two traditions. They also speculate on the future of gendered and feminist research in learning and teaching in each tradition. The 11 chapters that make up the main body of the book focus on gender and feminism in learning and teaching practice, policy and research, in ways which illuminate and deepen debates about the relationship between the two traditions. The main body of the book is equally divided in terms of chapters from researchers from each tradition. Each provides an illustration of the theoretical, methodological and/or empirical foci typical of approaches in their field. The examples span the breadth of education systems they are located across all educational sectors: from primary to secondary to higher education. In addition, and importantly, the 11 chapters are concluded with a ‘paired dialogue’ or commentary from an author from the opposite tradition that engages with the content of the chapter. The exception is Chapter 13, which is a dialogue

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between two authors who focus on historical and contemporary pedagogic, gender and feminist matters arising within the Anglophone and European traditions. Together these chapters identify and demonstrate the distinctions and the fuzzy boundaries between the two bodies of work. In the next section, we illustrate how their historical development has contributed to the phenomena that both distinguish and unite them.

Historical roots One of the things that distinguish and shape the two approaches is their diverse histories. Connell’s (2008) work reminds us that in producing origin narratives regarding disciplines (or in this case what we are referring to as ‘traditions’ or approaches) we should be mindful of (re)producing existing dominances of academic or knowledge traditions, disciplines and intellectual ideas. Here, we describe two contrasting intellectual traditions from globally dominant Western countries, albeit that feminist and gendered perspectives are arguably still marginal in both contexts. In this context, the Anglophone tradition of feminist and gender research is better synchronised with the dominance of English language in academia globally, giving it an advantage on the international stage. It is perhaps even more the case now than previously that ideas written in the French, German and Nordic or Scandinavian languages of European Didactics tend to struggle for global attention if they are not translated into English. As will become apparent throughout this book European academics are much more likely to include influences from Anglophone countries and very few Anglophone researchers publish or read articles beyond English language publications. However, even in Anglophone countries there are still national distinctions which produce theoretical specificities and publishing preferences. These differences create imbalances in how fields get shaped and in how their relative significance and importance is perceived. These matters are touched on in the concluding chapter and noted by Susanne Gannon who points out in Chapter 8 that an important illustration of the influence of language on power and meaning is that the concept of didactics is considered a pejorative term for bad pedagogy once it is translated into English. The two traditions were both developed from within more than one distinctive geopolitical, economic, social, historical and cultural location. Prior to the increasing use of feminist scholarship from around 2000, European Didactics provided a northern European perspective on subject didactics exploring and developing pedagogic and curricula research to improve teaching and learning. This mainstream perspective on the key influences on Didactics traditions has been described by Hudson and Meyer (2011), and key ideas are also described by Caillot (2007) and Schneuwly (2011). The origin narratives of Didactics identify three linguistic groups as being influential. The German-speaking tradition is rooted in the concept of Bildung (see Chapters 2 and 5). The French-speaking tradition of Didactique(s) focuses

Introduction  3

on how subject-specific knowledges get transposed, as curriculum choices take it from the society to the classroom, to learners (particularly evident in Chapters 3, 7 and 11). Finally, the Nordic tradition, which is not specifically represented in this collection, focuses on the content of educational practices and discourses within a pragmatist view and a critical transactional approach including the perspective on power and knowledge theorised by Foucault. Southern and Eastern Europe are not represented due to lack of space and, here again, different influences prevail. However, all northern European Didactics traditions are influenced by John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), a religious refugee from Eastern Europe, whose philosophy and practice provided the grounds for a focus on the content of the teaching-studying-learning process in subject-specific educational settings that has been so influential for European Didactics. Gender perspectives on subject didactics emerged early this century (Danielsson, 2010; Schneuwly, 2015). However, gender perspectives have not disrupted the malestream origin narratives of Didactics described above, which is based upon male theorising, but they have taken Didactics in a more critical and inclusive direction. In Didactics, the term ‘didactic transposition’ is important in describing the focus of the tradition on the process through which disciplinary knowledges are selected from disciplines and the wider world (e.g. engineering or medicine) and put into curricula and pedagogised into educational contexts. The concept of didactic transposition could provide a gendered lens that would throw light on how the history of European Didactics itself came to exclude and then (begin to) include gendered or feminist narratives. This potential for feminist and gendered perspectives to redescribe the gendered histories of academic disciplines is apparent in Collet’s work in Chapter 9 and Lebeaume’s work in Chapter 7 of this volume. These chapters offer a retelling of disciplinary didactics that shows how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and domestic science education have implicitly reproduced gender inequalities. The historical backdrop to Anglophone feminist approaches to learning and teaching has not been as coherently narrated as the Didactics tradition has. However, there are significant works in this field, and it is located in feminist research into education rather than in learning and teaching. For example, Skelton and Francis (2009) trace the history of feminist perspectives on education back to the Australian Dale Spender who claimed in the early 1980s that the knowledge and practices perpetuated by the overt and hidden curricula in schools served men’s interests. Often feminist perspectives on learning and teaching cohere around issues that are pertinent to policy or girls’ position in society. Epstein et al. (1998), Francis and Skelton (2005) and Archer and Francis (2006) take issue with wider explanations for and reactions to girls’ higher performance in schools. American feminist pedagogues such as Patti Lather (1991) and bell hooks (1994) are perhaps the most well known and they are often presented as foundational of the

4  Andrea Abbas et al.

Anglophone feminist pedagogy on a global scale (as can be seen in this collection). Feminist perspectives on teaching and learning in the Anglophone nations tend to be seen as having emerged from diverse radical political traditions. Indeed, some trace the roots of feminist knowledge and pedagogy to the 17th and 18th centuries, to writers such as the white British playwright, author and activist Aphra Behn, or to the 1940s and the Black American scholars Claudia James and Esther Cooper’s analysis of the position of Black women in society (Amsler, 2015). However, most see the late 1960s, when civil rights movements were proliferating, as the period of most influence (David, 2014; Leathwood and Read, 2009; Mayberry and Rose, 1999). In the Anglophone tradition, feminist perspectives on learning and teaching have also been linked to the emergence of gender studies education where radical curricula and pedagogy arose (including women’s studies; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer/questioning and intersex (LGBTQI) studies; and men’s studies) (Henderson, 2014). Departments and courses specialising in these subjects have proliferated in some countries but in others they have peaked and declined, or been shut down due to hostile political contexts. Minnich (2005) wrote of how on US campuses gender studies departments and other critical scholars had been spatially and intellectually marginalised. Where such courses have stretched beyond the English-speaking world, the Anglophone countries have often been seen as more ‘advanced’, which, as noted above, tends to reinscribe how power of language aligns with perceptions of significance in the production of knowledge. So, while these subjects have their roots in the women’s movement and their influence has been felt in a variety of academic disciplines such as sociology, history, cultural studies, colonial and so-called postcolonial studies, their influence has been uneven. In the current context, there are positive signs of a resurgence of interest in feminism, evidenced in the Anglophone world by concerns about gender equality regarding unequal pay, unequal success and sexual abuse and violence, symbolised by the #MeToo and #NeverOk, and such work aligns with more global movements on decolonising the curriculum and ‘why is my curriculum white’ campaigns. Across Europe and Anglophone countries, feminist research has had some success in influencing the education sector but there is still some considerable way to go. The marginalisation of feminist knowledge in broader university curricula and schools’ curricula means that feminist perspectives have had only limited impact. For example, Nikki Fairchild (Chapter 10) and Carrie Paechter (Chapter 12) indicate that feminist pedagogy and curricula have insufficiently penetrated Early Years education and Care and school policies in the UK. However, there have been changes to curricula and pedagogy (see Chapter 8, where Susanne Gannon discusses education on gender violence in Australia). These gains, while important in themselves, are often localised and tenuous, dependent as they are on the initiatives of committed practitioners.

Introduction  5

Theoretical traditions in gender and feminist research Internationally speaking, the debates about the possible connections and differences between European Didactics and Anglophone traditions relating to curriculum studies, pedagogical content knowledge and classroom practices were started recently (Amade-Escot, 2000; Gundem and Hopmann, 1998; Klette, 2007). However, the feminist narrative which is generated in this book takes the debate beyond questioning how gender is addressed within these traditions to start to ask how debate across the traditions can be taken forward. The three core strands of European Didactics have shaped the different ways that learning and teaching are theorised in this tradition. Researchers aligned with the German Didaktik tradition of Bildung critique the gendered culture of knowledge production (Scholand, 2011) particularly in STEM. They highlight the risk and danger of reifying traditional gender roles through teaching. By questioning the Enlightenment philosophy of research, new approaches to didactics integrate postmodernist, post-­structuralist, queer theories or post-humanism which challenge ‘mainstream’ research in ­German Didaktik (Goetschel, 2010; Taylor, 2016; see also Chapter 5). The French-­speaking tradition focuses on how gender affects the didactical transposition in textbooks (see Chapter 7), discourses and teaching practices (­Monnier, 2018; Opériol, 2014; see also Chapter 9). Using the joint action didactic framework to analyse didactical interactions, Verscheure and Amade-Escot (2004) were the first to illustrate how gendered knowledge is differentially constructed in the classroom. Further studies in various classroom settings show how and to what extent these gendered constructions can reinforce or challenge gender mainstreaming approaches to tackling inequalities (­A made-Escot, 2017; Pautal and ­Vinson, 2017; Vinson and Elandoulsi, 2014; see also Chapter 11). Contemporary Nordic studies investigate gender, knowledge and power with a post-structural approach to discourse analysis and/or using queer theory to explore teaching and learning (Barajas, 2010; Danielsson and Linder, 2009; Larsson et al., 2009). Using a pragmatist standpoint, Nordic researchers explore how teacher-student interactions and actions simultaneously contribute to knowledge construction, meaning-making and producing gendered power relations (Danielsson et al., 2018). Whereas European Didactics began with malestream Didactics then later introduced feminist and gender perspective, Anglophone feminist research into learning and teaching has its core origins in feminist theorising which set itself apart and in opposition to malestream theorising (David, 2014; Leathwood and Read, 2009). Harding (2008) and Smith (1990), for example, challenge the oppressive nature of male theorising in science and sociology respectively. Hence, at the heart of feminist perspectives on learning and teaching there are activist ambitions fuelled by different brands of critical theory (Coate, 2006). The critiques that have stimulated feminisms’ development come largely from other critical theorists, for example, from

6  Andrea Abbas et al.

Black women and men, from disabled women, from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other (LGBTQI+) perspectives and so forth (Arnot, 2002). As different groups of women and men have challenged feminist perspectives for disregarding their experiences, identities and/or the structures that oppress or liberate them, feminist theory has pushed towards greater complexities or, in popular characterisation, has moved through a variety of ‘waves’ (see Gillis et al., 2014). Since second wave feminism in the early 1970s, theoretical innovations have tended towards more intersectional approaches which see gender inequalities for individuals, groups, organisations and wider social structures as interacting with other (dis)advantaging phenomena to produce complex effects (Abbas et al., 2016). More recently, feminist research, teaching and learning has featured new materialist feminism, a greater focus on the body and embodiment, more attention to emotion, postcolonial and post-human perspectives, radical perspectives on southern, feminist and decolonised knowledge and an interest in young people’s use of digital and social media (Harding, 2008; Henderson, 2014; Ringrose, 2018; Taylor, 2013). Finally, a common characteristic of current European Didactics approaches to gender is to provide fine-grained, descriptive accounts of classroom interactions, relations, transactions and dynamics, with a particular focus on how gender impacts on knowledge construction, meaning-making and subject contents. This research is rooted in the various didactical frameworks of each European tradition while also finding stimulating sources of inspiration in postmodern, post-structural feminist theories, critical pedagogies, queer theory and intersectional approaches. There is some similarity with Anglophone perspectives in this respect. In addition, in both traditions, feminist researchers co-opt and adapt malestream theorising. Also, while Anglophone perspectives often focus on a feminist concern, such as gender violence, these issues are also of concern to European gender researchers.

Introducing the chapters and the paired dialogues In Chapter 2 Carol Taylor from the UK begins the work of reclaiming and repurposing the concept of Bildung for feminist aims. She argues that the masculinist, colonial, individualist notion of Bildung can be replaced with a more socially just and inclusive reframing of the concept. Joel Lebeaume proposes some overlap between the theories of the French sociologist Durkheim and Bildung. He suggests that a cultural revolution would be needed for Bildung to stimulate educational, social and economic change. In Chapter 3 Chantal Amade-Escot introduces the French Didactique concept of epistemic gender positioning: fluidity, multiplicity and relationality are the mechanisms for producing gendered knowledge, curricula and pedagogies in classroom settings. Epistemic gender positioning participated in the enactment of an unavoidable, implicit and differential didactic contract between teachers and students. In the paired dialogue Susan Gannon compares

Introduction  7

this approach with a pedagogical encounter in an Australian context using an empirical example from her own work to illustrate the similarities and differences. In Chapter 4 the American academic Sara Tolbert uses Sarah Ahmed’s concept of orientations to explore students’ conceptual and physical orientations to dissections in science. Florence Lizogat from Switzerland appreciates the fact that the analysis provided by Sara could help to challenge the didactic transposition in ways that do not reify the nature of scientific practices but open them up for a feminist consideration of the aesthetic and moral judgements embedded in these practices. In Chapter 5 Anja Krauss, a German scholar currently based in Sweden, explores the strengths and issues underpinning Enlightenment thinking and European Didactics. She laments the lack of value given to embodied knowledge, advocating pedagogic anthropology a European humanistic pedagogic approach (Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik in German). British scholar Carol Taylor draws out similarities between her own and Anja’s work and welcomes the introduction to pedagogic anthropology as a potential antidote to dehumanising marketised classrooms. In Chapter 6 British academic Andrea Abbas introduces the pedagogic device, a concept developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to underpin a description and critique of the way that intersecting gender inequalities permeate academic departments. She illustrates how Bernstein’s work provides a line of questioning which can generate more liberating practices. In the paired dialogue, Swiss scholar Isabelle Collet gives an example of where an approach based on a similar concept has worked in information technology by offering new definitions of excellence that address epistemic gender equality. In Chapter 7 Joel Lebeaume demonstrates how the didactic transposition of French school knowledge in arts and crafts, manual work, home economics, applied sciences and technology education is gendered historically via text books and how this changes over time to embody different masculinities and femininities using comparative historical analysis. Carrie Paechter points out that in the UK there was no national curriculum and a different schooling system. However similar inequities are found in participation in domestic science and other science subjects and in the unequal valuing of these subjects after the Second World War, when domestic and craft subjects were placed in the realm of the practical disciplines. In Chapter 8 Susanne Gannon compares the curricula and pedagogy between two temporally distant interventions into Australian education regarding gender violence. Her analysis draws out the feminist principles underpinning the pedagogic techniques advocated and it identifies similarities and differences across time. Chantal Amade-Escot advocates that a stronger feminist pedagogy could emerge from combining the Anglophone post-­structuralist analysis of curricular text and the European didactic finegrained analysis of classroom interaction.

8  Andrea Abbas et al.

In Chapter 9 Swiss author Isabelle Collet makes the argument that STEM education and its wider representation has generated women’s lack of success in particular STEM subjects such as computing. She sees the primary curriculum as key to rectifying this. Sara Tolbert illustrates the process that Isabelle describes by giving an account of how American schooling failed her daughter in this respect. In Chapter 10 the British academic Nikki Fairchild explores the way that policy genders those working in Early Childhood Education and Care and illustrates how new materialist lenses provide a possibility for conceptualising and developing new pedagogical approaches. German author Anja Kraus suggests that the policy level is guided by a sense of human rationality and needs a different theoretical approach. In Chapter 11 Ingrid Verscheure and Claire Debars adopt a temporal perspective to explore physical education students’ gendered learning in a French multi-ethnic class. Using an intersectional lens to describe the functioning of the differential didactic contract, they note that it is constructed differently over curriculum planning, over lesson planning and through micro-­interactions in classes. Andrea Abbas suggests that one of the differences between Ingrid and Claire’s work and Anglophone studies is that in ­A nglophone studies students’ wider lives and broader structural factors are seen as key to developing insights into how pedagogic processes work. In Chapter 12 Carrie Paechter calls for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other (LGBTQI+) identities and relationships to be integrated into the policies and curricula of schools. In her commentary Nikki Fairchild points out the similarity between her own and Carrie Paechter’s approach. She also suggests that the posthuman perspective that she uses may help to overcome the othering of bodies described by Carrie.

References Abbas, A., Ashwin, P. and McLean, M. (2016). The influence of curricula content on English sociology students’ transformations: the case of feminist knowledge. Teaching in Higher Education, 21 (4): 442–456. Amade-Escot, C. (2000). The contribution of two research programs on teaching content: ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ and ‘didactics of physical education’. Journal of Teaching Physical Education, 20 (1): 78–101. Amade-Escot, C. (2017). How the gender order is enacted in Physical Education: the didactique approach. In G. Doll-Tepper, R. Bailey and K. Koenen (Eds.), Sport, Education and Social Policy. The State of the Social Sciences of Sport. London: ­Routledge, Taylor & Francis, ICSSPE perspectives, 62–79. Amsler, S. (2015). The Education of Radical Democracy. London: Routledge. Archer, L. and Francis, B. (2006). Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement: Race, Gender, Class and ‘Success’. London: Taylor & Francis. Arnot, M. (2002). Reproducing Gender? Essays on Educational Theory and Feminist Politics. London: Routledge.

Introduction  9 Barajas, K.E. (2010). The pimp and the happy whore: ‘doing gender’ in film talk in a school setting. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 54 (6): 581–596. Caillot, M. (2007). The building of a new academic field: the case of French didactique. European Educational Research Journal, 6 (2): 125–130. Coate, K. (2006). Imagining women in the curriculum: the transgressive impossibility of women’s studies. Studies in Higher Education, 31 (4): 407–442. Connell, R. (2008). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social ­Science. London: Polity Press. Danielsson, A.T. (2010). Gender in physics education research: a review and a look forward. In M. Blomqvist and E. Ehnsmyr (Eds.), Never Mind the Gap! Gendering Science in Transgressive Encounters. Uppsala Universitet: Centre of Gender Research, 65–84. Danielsson, A.T., Berge, M. and Lidar, M. (2018). Knowledge and power in the technology classroom: a framework for studying teachers and students in action. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 13 (1): 163–184. Danielsson, A.T. and Linder, C. (2009). Learning in physics by doing laboratory work: towards a new conceptual framework. Gender and Education, 21(2): 129–144. David, M. (2014). Feminism, Gender and Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies. Farnham: Ashgate. Epstein, D., Elwood, J., Hey, V. and Maw, J. (Eds.) (1998). Schoolboy frictions, feminism and more. In Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and Achievement. Buckingham: Open University Press, 3–18. Francis, B. and Skelton, D. (2005). Reassessing Gender and Achievement: Questioning Contemporary Key Debates. London: Psychology Press. Gillis, S., Howe, G. and Munford, R. (Eds.) (2004). Introduction. In Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. New York: Palgrave Brown, 1–6. Goetschel, H. (2010). The entanglement of gender and physics: beings, knowledges and practices. In M. Blomqvist and E. Ehnsmyr (Eds.), Never Mind the Gap! ­G endering Science in Transgressive Encounters. Uppsala Universitet: Centre of Gender Research, 41–64. Gundem, B.B. and Hopmann, S. (Eds.) (1998). Didaktik and/or Curriculum: An International Dialogue. New York: Peter Lang. Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities and Modernities. New York: Cornell University Press. Henderson, E.F. (2014). Gender Pedagogy Teaching, Learning and Tracing Gender in Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge. Hudson, B. and Meyer, M.A. (2011). Beyond Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe. New York: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Klette, K. (2007). Trends on research on teaching and learning in schools: didactics meets classroom study. European Educational Research Journal, 6 (2): 147–160. Larsson, H., Fagrell, B. and Redelius, K. (2009). Queering physical education. ­Between benevolence towards girls and a tribute to masculinity. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 14 (1): 1–17. Lather, P. (1991). Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern. London: Routledge. Leathwood, C. and Read, B. (2009). Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education. A Feminised Future? Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

10  Andrea Abbas et al. Mayberry, M. and Rose, E. (1999). Meeting the Challenge: Innovative Feminist Pedagogies in Action. New York: Routledge. Minnich, E.K. (2005). Transforming Knowledge. Philadelphia, 2nd edition. Temple: University Press. Monnier, A. (2018). Le temps des dissertations. Chronique de l’accès des jeunes filles aux études supérieures (Genève, XIXe–XXe). Genève: Droz. Opériol, V. (2014). La perspective de genre en didactique de l’histoire. Quelques initiatives d’enseignant.e.s. In I. Collet and C. Dayer (Eds.), Former Envers et Contre le Genre. Bruxelles: De Boeck, Col. Raisons Éducatives, 247–267. Pautal, E. and Vinson, M. (2017). Interactions verbales et non-verbales: outils de compréhension de la co-construction des savoirs et du genre entre élèves. Recherches en Didactiques – Les Cahiers Théodile, 23: 27–46. Ringrose, J. (2018). Digital feminist pedagogy and post-truth misogyny. Teaching in Higher Education, 23 (5): 647–656. Schneuwly, B. (2015). La didactique des disciplines peut-elle intégrer les questions de genre. Conférence d’ouverture. In Centre Hubertine Auclert, Actes du colloque « Genre, didactique et formation ». Créteil: ESPE de l’Académie Créteil, 2–6. www. centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/sites/default/f iles/f ichiers/actes-genredidactique19102016.pdf Scholand, B. (2011). Double socialisation: gender and disciplinary cultures in higher education. In S. Hillen, T. Sturm and I. Willbergh, (Eds.), Challenges Facing Contemporary Didactics: Diversity of Students and the Role of New Media in Teaching and Learning. Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 113–126. Skelton, C. and Francis, B. (2009). Feminism and the Schooling Scandal. Oxon: Routledge. Smith, D.E. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, C.A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25 (6): 688–703. Taylor, C.A. (2016). Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education. Higher Education, 17 (3): 419–435. Verscheure, I. and Amade-Escot, C. (2004). Dynamiques différentielles des interactions didactiques selon le genre en EPS. Le cas de l’attaque en volley-ball en seconde. Revue STAPS, 66: 79–97. Vinson, M. and Elandoulsi, S. (2014). Curriculum et construction différentielle des savoirs selon le genre en EPS. Questions Vives: Recherches en Éducation, 22: 169–187.

2 The gendered history of Bildung as concept and practice A speculative feminist analysis Carol A. Taylor Introduction This chapter is written as a speculative feminist engagement with the tradition of Bildung and gender. Bildung is a core feature of European educational thinking but has, as yet, not been much considered in Anglophone contexts. The chapter addresses this neglect of Bildung and argues that a feminist lens is useful both in exposing the culturally specific and historically gendered nature of Bildung, in particular its promotion of separate modes of education for girls and women, and in illuminating how a feminist perspective might be used to develop a more expansive concept of Bildung, that is, one oriented to the promotion of a more inclusive, socially just higher education. The chapter uses a concept as method approach to ground its speculative feminist engagement with Bildung. Deriving from Deleuze and Guattari (1994), this approach is characterized by Lenz Taguchi (2016: 214) as ‘the pedagogical process of learning from and with the concept’. In this chapter, I use Bildung as a concept to ‘learn with’ in order to explore gendered historical articulations of Bildung and to consider how a feminist rethinking of Bildung may help focus on the need for more socially just pedagogies in higher education. The chapter begins by outlining the concept as method approach. It then turns to the Enlightenment origins of Bildung which, I argue, tie it firmly to Western-centric, colonialist and male modes of understanding. A range of historical educational practices are then discussed to illuminate how Bildung was utilized as an ideological educative process (Taylor, 2016) to cultivate unequal gendered norms and to secure the cultural dominance of heteronormative masculinity (Boalick, 2007; Smith, 1987). Following this, Butler’s (1999: 141) work is used to reconceptualize Bildung as a gendered performative. My argument throughout is that, for Bildung to be allied to feminist concerns for a more socially just higher education, it has to move away from male/female binaries and, instead, activate more fluid appreciations of gender identity.

Developing a speculative feminist analysis of Bildung Lenz Taguchi (2016: 214) argues that ‘the pedagogical process of learning from and with the concept’ has three aspects. The first aspect involves tracing

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the concept’s conditions of creation; the second entails mapping its proliferations and effects in the discursive terrain; and the third identifies ways in which the concept may be used to explore new possibilities. I take up these three aspects of the concept as method approach below to construct a speculative feminist analysis of the gendered history of Bildung, and its conceptual and practical ‘usefulness’. My reasons for pursuing a feminist analysis of Bildung are to productively reconfigure ‘the event, the problem, and the concept itself ’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2016: 214). It is important to note here that feminism is not a singular movement or way of thinking. Feminism involves diverse theories, projects and orientations which prioritize women’s experiences, views and interests. Feminists share political commitments to expose, contest and actively work to ameliorate forms of social, economic and cultural domination, oppression or violence which are often manifest in patriarchal attitudes, capitalist formations and geopolitical practices (Belenky, 1986; Delamont, 2006), and feminists have often viewed education as an important site for feminist practices, pedagogy and activism (Guillard, 2012; Keller, 2012; Naples and Bojar, 2013). The feminist analysis I develop is that of affirmative speculative feminism (Braidotti, 2013). This is a critical-analytical mode of ‘thinking [which goes] beyond inherited categories and capacities’ (Haraway, 2016: 34) and engages with matters of concern – in this case Bildung and the production of gendered in/equalities – while proceeding with care and considering the problem with generosity. The speculative feminist dimension of affirmative critique involves ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) that feminist politics provokes. The ‘trouble’ I am concerned with is both conceptual – the trouble of reconceptualizing the ethical-political promise of Bildung via a feminist analysis – and practical – the unfinished business of gender inequality in higher education. Some feminists might question why I wish to bother with Bildung at all, given the educationally excluding practices it has given rise to. Wouldn’t it be better to consign it to the past as a historically specific concept which is now past its sell-by date? I want to hold off from doing that for the moment in order to consider if Bildung can be reshaped as a useful conceptual and practical resource for feminists to do higher education differently, that is, more equitably. I now turn to Bildung and, in accordance with the first aspect of the concept as method approach, trace its conditions of creation.

What is Bildung? Bildung is a core feature of European educational thinking but is little known in Anglophone contexts. There is no easy translation into English of this complex concept. At its most general level, Bildung refers to the relations between the ‘outer’ processes of self-formation which occur in education, and ‘inner’ modes of cultivation which shape identity formation through contact with culture. Herder, one of the original disseminators of Bildung as a pedagogic concept, attributed a spiritual element to Bildung in that it supports the

History of Bildung as concept and practice  13

development of an ‘inner sanctum’ for the ‘enlightened, trained, fine, reasonable, educated, virtuous, enjoying human being that God demands’ (cited in Horlacher, 2004: 420). Bildung has also been attributed with an educationally transformative dimension, in that it brings the ‘holistic development of the individual’ into a productive relation with ‘broader hopes for a better society’ (Horlacher, 2004: 409). In the Anglophone world, Bildung is probably best known in relation to Humboldt’s establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810. Humboldt’s view was that the purpose of the university (and education more generally) was to enable students to become autonomous individuals and good citizens by developing their powers of reason in an educational environment which supported free thinking. In Humboldt’s view, the aim of education was not to provide vocational or professional skills, or to direct the path in life students should take, but to provide a holistic education to enable and sustain students in finding their own path in life (Anderson, 2004). For Humboldt, Bildung combined political and personal, character-building dimensions and, in terms of the university, entailed the pursuit of a ‘universal’ education based on the liberal arts. The concept of Bildung embraces the view that knowledge ‘fundamentally changes and develops a human being’ (Liedman, cited in Sjostrom et al., 2017: 2) and is, thus, about ‘a person’s becoming a subject’ in civil society (Kivelä et al., 2012: 304). Bildung was never simply about content learned in educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) but was from the start conceptualized as a lifelong project of self-­ formation in relation to the goals of individual autonomy and self-perfection through reason. Questions about the relationship between personal development, personal agency and the formation of civil society were also matters of concern to early feminists. Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) noted that the exclusion of women from full civil, legal and political rights both had its roots in and was justified by girls’ exclusion from public education. This is important because it brings to the fore the fact that the central issue at the heart of Bildung – what constitutes an educated, cultivated or civilized human being? – is intimately entangled with issues of gender (and social class, and race). Bildung – posited as ‘universal’ – on closer feminist view is, in practice, culturally conditioned. It is, therefore, worth taking a closer look at the relation between the universal and the social in the formation of the individual, as such questions are central to the development of a feminist analysis of gender and Bildung, and also central to any potential reclaiming of Bildung that feminists might want to do.

Humbolt, Bildung and gender In 1793, Humboldt wrote the following: What do we demand of a nation, of an age, of entire mankind, if it is to occasion respect and admiration? We demand that Bildung, wisdom, and virtue, as powerfully and universally propagated as possible, should

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prevail under its aegis, that it augment its inner worth to such an extent that the concept of humanity … would be of a rich and worthy substance. And the demand does not stop here. It is expected that man leave a visible impression of his worth on the constitutions he forms and even on inanimate Nature around him, indeed that he should breathe his virtue and his strength (in such might and dominance are they to permeate his being) into his progeny. For only in this way may the acquired merits be perpetuated, and without these, without the comforting thought of a certain sequence of elevation and Bildung, human existence would be more transient than the existence of a flower that, upon withering, has at least the certainty of leaving behind the germ of its likeness. (Humboldt, 1969: 59) Humboldt’s words indicate that Bildung as concept is being put to work to shape a complex set of values, behaviours and social practices. These combine the use of reason, virtue and force in developing the potential of humanity, in advancing the nation-building aims of man, in shaping nature to man’s ends and in projecting the aim that man act as a civilizing influence on a global scale. For Humboldt, the educative power of Bildung is not just about individual transformation but is entwined with social and political ambitions for human, national and global development. Important for my argument is that, although Humboldt refers to ‘Humanity’, it is the agency of man as individual and men as collective (not woman or women) which is central to these developments. Feminists are often accused of unfairly picking up on the words ‘man’, ‘mankind’ and ‘he’ as if they were mere linguistic constructions. After all, Humboldt grew up in a time and culture before it was necessary to use the phrase ‘his and her’ or ‘she/he’ as we commonly do today; also, this argument continues, in those times ‘he’ was a generic term which included ‘she’. This argument doesn’t hold up well under feminist scrutiny. Spender (1980) has demonstrated that language is not neutral. Language is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas; language is itself a shaper of ideas and, thereby, a shaper of cultural practices. This feminist line of argument indicates that the words ‘he’ and ‘man’ are not universal, inclusive terms but, rather, function as a specific validation of male social, cultural and epistemic power which renders women invisible. In this context, it is worth remembering that, during the 19th-­ century development of ‘classical’ Bildung, virtually every branch of science and medicine made pronouncements that reading, writing and thinking were dangerous for women. The Lancet (a prestigious medical journal) contained numerous articles which drew on scientific evidence to prove that women’s brains would burst and their uteruses atrophy if they engaged in rigorous thinking (Spender, 1980). Humboldt’s writings substantiate the body of evidence which indicates that the concept of Bildung as it actively circulated in 19th-century social life worked as a deliberate means to exclude women from education and learning.

History of Bildung as concept and practice  15

Humboldt thought that the universal human condition inhered in a harmonized balance created by the binary opposites of male and female. He states in his 1794 work, On Gender Differences and Their Impact on Organic Nature that one must proceed according to the ‘appropriate path’ ordained by one’s gender, and emphasizes that differences in the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ constitute one’s Endzweck, that is, one’s ultimate purpose in life (Humboldt, cited in Gary, 2008: 35). Humboldt stressed that ‘nature … provides its sons with “masculinity” – characterized by power, fire, energy, and liveliness – and its daughters with “femininity” – which represents composure, warmth, and intimacy’ (Humboldt, cited in Gary, 2008: 35). Humboldt was clear on this point: a woman’s ultimate purpose in life prevents her acquiring a civic form of Bildung commensurate with that of men. In his view, women’s feminine nature, their domestic status as daughters and wives, and their seclusion in the home and out of the life of the public sphere, justified denying women the opportunity to participate in civic forms of Bildung. Tracing Bildung as concept from a feminist perspective, then, reveals that the apparently universalistic and apolitical goals of Bildung have little traction in reality. Bildung is seen to ­ iesta be a gendered and unequal historically specific construction. Indeed, B (2002: 346) emphasizes this point, arguing that ‘the (modern) conception of Bildung was a very specific answer to a very specific question – the question of citizenship in an emerging civil society – and not, therefore, something universal, external or “typically human”’. If Bildung was developing as a socially gendered project then what forms of education were made available to girls and women? I turn to this question next in relation to the second aspect of the concept as method approach: to trace the concept’s proliferations and effects in the discursive terrain.

Bildung and education for girls and women In this section, I consider what Bildung as a gendered concept promotes in terms of educational practice. The evidence largely confirms Goozé’s (2007: 15) point that ‘eighteenth- and nineteenth-century educational models were gender specific, and the male interpretation of Bildung as leading to the development of an independent, autonomous self was generally not applied to the female sex’. What we see is that traditionally held ideas about ‘natural’ gender characteristics (see Humboldt above), and the fact that women were limited to different economic and social roles than men along the public/private dichotomy, meant that the educational model of development proposed by Bildung also followed existing gender paradigms. The economic growth of the bourgeois public sphere in the 19th century did not significantly alter middle-class women’s roles because, while the household became more and more defined as a consuming entity, assumptions about women’s ‘natural’ roles continued to confine them to reproductive activities, tie them to the ­domestic-home sphere, and largely exclude them from participation in the civic sphere. Girls’ education was either ignored or,

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when it was considered, was based on their future destinies within the home. School reform and school attendance during the 19th century was promoted for boys and oriented to training the future male work force. The school reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s statement – that women ‘were not to participate in public life or the world of learning’ (cited in Goozé, 2007: 16) – exemplify the widespread view that the educative project of Bildung should exclude women. The situation with university education was similar. Mazón (2003) notes that in 19th-century Germany the idea of a female student was both a source of popular hilarity and an occasion for severe embarrassment for university professors. Various reasons were given for denying women access, including: nature (the smaller size of women’s brains); politics (women could not vote and therefore had no legal right to participate in public life); culture (learning meant that women would have to sacrifice their femininity) and morality (content taught might offend women’s delicate sensibilities and, of course, the sexual double standard meant women may have a bad effect on a male’s ability to focus on his studies). Women were therefore excluded from participation in university education until 1909. This prevented them from acquiring knowledge and developing their ‘own [individual] system of truth that marked the internalization of knowledge. This last stage of Bildung did not belong to women’ (Mazón, 2003: 40). At this point in time, Bildung was allied to a set of gendered social, cultural and legal practices which proscribed women’s participation in the holistic self-developmental goals of learning and consequently ensured they were excluded from the nation-building goals of citizenship and public life Bildung fostered for men. However, there is some evidence to suggest that the situation was a little more variegated. Two things are worth commenting on here. The first is that some modes of Bildung – in particular, those that relied more narrowly on ‘inner’ forms of development and character-building – were available to women. Literary genres such as poetry and letter writing emerged as new forms of gendered intellectual activity which promoted new opportunities for social participation between men and women in bourgeois gatherings in ‘salons’ (Gary, 2008). The second is that some philosophers did actually advocate a Bildung which included women. The most notable in this respect is Schleiermacher whose ‘proto-feminism’ has been seen as a central part of his sociopolitical philosophy. Schleiermacher focused on three aspects of Bildung for women. First, he encouraged women to strive for intellectual goods that were traditionally seen as the monopoly of men. For example, in Idea for a Catechism of Reason for Noble Ladies (1798), he urges women to ‘covet men’s culture, art, wisdom, and honor’ (Forster, 2017). Second, he encouraged women to seek sexual fulfilment and to free themselves from inhibitions about discussing sex. This is one of the central themes of his Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1800). Third, he expounded the view that women were valuable moral and intellectual resources for the improvement of society in general,

History of Bildung as concept and practice  17

given their aversion to the insensitivities and violences to which men are prone, and in the Idea for a Catechism he advises women ‘not [to] bear false witness for men. You should not beautify their barbarism with words and works’ (Forster, 2017). There is some evidence, too, that Schleiermacher considered the broad education of women advantageous to a narrower professional (male) education in developing deeper, more inclusive forms of social conversation (see Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct). Notable also is Schleiermacher’s criticism of Kant’s dualistic philosophy which separated mind and body, and of Kant’s disparagement of women and people of colour. In promoting a more expansive Bildung, and advocating gender equality between women and men, Schleiermacher has affinities with both Herder and Schlegel. Despite this, the dominant view – that Bildung did not include women – prevailed. Humboldt’s view that masculinity was about the display of independence, while femininity was defined by suffering receptivity, and Goethe’s view that Bildung in women was not attractive because her intelligence might diminish her physical beauty were widely shared (Lindén, 2014). All of this confirms the fact that Bildung as concept and practice was discursively allied with patriarchal views of active man/passive woman, and was embedded within a traditional social structure which justified educational discourses which excluded women from civic and political life.

Bildung: summarizing the feminist critique The second aspect of the concept as method approach – mapping the concept’s proliferation and effects in the discursive terrain – brings to the surface two interlinked sets of practices: first, those practices which produce some bodies as bodies which/who do not count as ‘proper’ subjects of education (women); and second, those modes of knowing which do not ‘count’ (those which are feminine and, therefore, unreasonable). From a feminist perspective, this analysis indicates how the concept of Bildung has been defined by those in power (in essence, privileged white European males), how those powerful groups have been able to define what knowledge is and whose knowledge counts in relation to Bildung, as well as how they have circumscribed knowledge production in schools and universities by limiting access and participation. A  feminist analysis discloses that debates about gender, knowledge and identity are not separable from Bildung but are, in fact, intrinsic to it. Bildung’s gendered history is exclusionary and (although there is no time to go into it here) is entangled with a range of other social exclusions based on social class, ability, able-bodiedness, race and nation. As  such, Bildung has played a part in the epistemological erasure and othering of those forms of ­k nowledge – ­feminine, popular, indigenous, non-white, non-­Western – which do not ‘fit’ with humanist Enlightenment master narrative of reason, ‘truth’ and objectivity. A feminist critique indicates that the self-formation Bildung promotes is far from universal – it is particular and specific. In essence, it is about the

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cultivation of gendered norms of the educated gentleman. Bildung relies on, and promotes, a notion of educative progress allied to the construction of the male subject. Seen in this light, classic Bildungsromans are, essentially, celebratory narratives about ‘boys becoming men’. Moreover, while Bildung as an ideological pedagogic process has been oriented to the construction of the male subject, not any male subjectivity will do: Bildung has been about securing a particular mode of heteronormative masculinity (Smith, 1987). ­B ildung, then, has historically figured as a normative technology of the self to regulate, produce and maintain male subjects within a binary, heteronormative masculinity (Boalick, 2007). This point is particularly important for the argument I make below – because any feminist reclaiming of Bildung to promote gendered educational equality has to be conceptually and practically situated within more flexible nonbinary understandings of gender identity. I take up Butler’s theory of gender performativity to further this argument.

Bildung as gendered performative Judith Butler’s (1999) concept of gender performativity has the process of ‘becoming’ as a defining characteristic, writing: Woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (Butler, 1999: 43–44) There is, she asserts, no core, essence or substance to gender in nature; gender is constituted as a seemingly ‘natural’ fact by its social, discursive and bodily expressions – ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1999: 33). Furthermore, she argues that this ‘fictive construction’ of gender ‘works’ and is regulated through the ‘heterosexual matrix’, that is, a set of historical, social, cultural and political discursive practices which determine what gets done and what counts as ‘correct’, ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ expressions of binary gendered identities (Butler, 1999: 42–44). Applying Butler’s account of gender performativity to Bildung enables us to grasp the work Bildung does as a discursive public pedagogy to install heteronormative masculinity as an illusion of a natural and essential masculine gender core. Bildung and its formative gendering processes do work to maintain and ‘solidify’ that masculine core on educational grounds. This is why the basis of Bildung in a binary dichotomy between men as active, rational social, civic and political agents and women as their polar opposites – irrational, emotional, homely, caring, gentle, vulnerable – is so important. Bildung as

History of Bildung as concept and practice  19

concept has (had) real, material effects for the educational lives of girls and women. This is confirmed by Smith (1987: 216): Bildung … is not an ‘organic’ but a social phenomenon that leads to the construction of male identity in our sex-gender system by granting men access to self-representation in the patriarchal … order. As such Bildung is a central form of the institutional cultivation of gender roles. Bourdieu (2001), likewise, classifies Bildung as a form of masculine domination. However, Butler’s (1999: 11) central point regarding gender performativity is that both sex and gender are socially constructed categories, because the body is ‘a politically neutral surface on which culture acts’. If this is so, and gender and sex are things that are ‘done’ through their performative constitution and reiteration, and are not what one ontologically ‘is’, then this raises the possibility that sex and gender are ‘tenuously constituted’ and can be undone (Butler, 1999: 179). This undoing occurs because, as we saw above, the subject is continually in the making, continually becoming – which means that gendered identities are mutable, open to change, to alteration and to reconfiguration. Butler’s account of subjectivity dismisses traditional notions of the subject as a self-contained, coherent, fixed, stable or essentialized entity and, instead, proposes fluid processes of self-making as central to gendered subject formation within specific historical contexts and discursive regimes. This shift of focus from binary categories of gender identity to more fluid processes of gendering is relevant to the feminist reclaiming and recasting of Bildung I want to pursue. First, it helps dethrone the idea of the sovereign, stable and rational self which has been so central to Bildung as a humanist, Enlightenment project. Second, it expands the ground for a more flexible, open subject who may combine rational and emotional qualities, who may express masculine and feminine attributes, and who may engage with different forms of knowledge and cultural pursuits, beyond those thought to be of value to the traditional subject of Bildung. Third, it accords discursive agency to a nonbinary, post-sovereign subject who is free to educate her/himself/themselves in-between, beyond and away from the constraints of the heteronormative strictures that traditional Bildung proposed. This point about the subject’s discursive agency is crucial because, although dominant concepts, discourses and practices produce, condition and constrain the subject, the subject can still exercise discursive agency to create the possibility of doing things differently, that is, to do things in ways which subvert established practices. In earlier research, I explored how this subversion happens with students in sixth form college (Taylor, 2011). In the feminist argument I develop here concerning Bildung, I suggest that the subject’s discursive agency gives her the possibility to deploy self-cultivation as an educative practice to mount insurrections against binary gender prescriptions. Such a Bildung may open up feminist possibilities for subjects to make productive, creative and political

20  Carol A. Taylor

interventions in their everyday educational contexts. In the next and final section, I consider how this might appear in higher education practice and, in this, I use the third aspect of the concept as method approach.

Towards a feminist Bildung? How might Bildung be enabled to explore new conceptual possibilities for learning and self-cultivation in higher education, beyond its gendered history and the binary identity practices it has historically given rise to? How, in other words, might Bildung constitute a useful resource for feminists in developing more gender equal pedagogies and more socially just educational practices? First, as I indicated in the previous section, Butler’s (1999) work on discursive agency suggests that the acknowledgement and inclusion of more fluid gendered performatives in learning and teaching activities is, of itself, a powerful challenge to deeply ingrained ideologies which hold binary gender ­relations in place. Utilizing curriculum resources in which gendered struggles and failures are represented as matters of concern could open a space for discussion of the exclusionary nature of many educational practices. Likewise, educational praxis inspired by a feminist rejection of the separation between the private and the public, emotion and reason, the political and the personal could help produce Bildung as a more open, appreciative and inclusive practice of self- and co-cultivation. Second, contesting Bildung’s exclusionary intellectual heritage is an urgent and necessary way of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) in order to address gender, race and class inequality. An education which includes decolonizing the curriculum, using an intersectional lens to critically engage with White so-called canonical texts, or giving voice to indigenous accounts in responsible ways, would widen the orbit for a feminist Bildung. Third, a feminist-inflected Bildung could help reanimate Bildung as a more expansive ethical-political project. Current environmental concerns make it clear that human survival is deeply entangled with survival for other nonhuman species and with the need for sustainable global ecosystems such as air and water. Given that Bildung’s central concern has always been the development of educated citizens and the cultivation of ethical-political human beings, a Bildung allied to the feminist pursuit of equality would not only contest practices which produce deep and wide disparities in educational opportunity, but also support a radical re-engagement with social and cultural questions of values, ethics and human responsibility in a global world. The question then becomes: what of Bildung can we adapt to make feminist trouble so that the learning, education and lifelong project of self-­development it enables can be enacted and embodied in relational, ethical praxis? This reconceived feminist Bildung would need to be affirmative, creative, uncertain, open and generous; it would need to work across cultural and national borders and human/nonhuman boundaries; and it would treat gender (and all other) inequalities as a provocation for thinking and doing education differently. None of this is easy but it is necessary. Bildung has always been a mobile concept (Taylor, 2016) and, in my view, it is worth hanging onto its promise

History of Bildung as concept and practice  21

while at the same time staying with the trouble of trying to reconstitute it as a feminist concept-practice so that higher education may become a more radically open process of civic engagement. A feminist reconfiguring of Bildung would have to incorporate knowledge which is rational and affective, logical and emotional, as well as knowledge which is embodied, intellectual, aesthetic and moral. In doing so, Bildung can be revived, rearticulated, transformed and put to educative use as a feminist ‘counter-concept’ (Sjostrom et al., 2017) which offers an intellectual space for critique which exceeds prevailing cultural norms and educational practices. If it manages to do that, it has a chance to consign the exclusionary gendered specificity of the Bildung which was affiliated to masculinist, colonialist, humanist Enlightenment goals to the past.

Paired dialogue: notes on the potential of a feminist Bildung – a French perspective Joël Lebeaume In this chapter Carol Taylor utilizes feminist methodology drawing upon the concept as method approach to conduct a philosophical analysis of how the foundations of liberal education have been informed by the German concept Bildung. I feel it should be noted that according to Krais (2013), this concept, which is untranslatable into other languages, is subtly different from that of Erziehung. The concepts of Erziehung (at home, in the family) and Bildung (at school) between them provide an implicit sense of two gendered forms of education by distinguishing between the functions of the school and the family. Traditionally and historically these concepts relate to the organization of educational time with children being at school (in the morning) and out of school (in the afternoon). Hence, they temporally and conceptually define the mothers’ role as being related to the concept of Erziehung. This positions them as caretakers of family capital and as needing to be at home. Carol acknowledges that the traditional Bildung concept is historically discriminatory as Krais (2013) suggests. However, through her analysis she draws out its potential to inform and generate gender inclusive education in which the male/female binary would be displaced. She particularly focuses on higher education that is based on the model of the Humboldtian University. The Humboldtian ideal is strongly present in French universities and at the heart of all the reforms of higher education there but there are no references to the concept of Bildung. Indeed, this concept is virtually absent within the educational literature in France. However, the concept of Bildung is, I believe, in line with Durkheim’s orientation towards education: he is considered the French founder of (Continued)

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the sociology of education. He proposed that the aim of education is to generate ‘a general disposition of the mind and the will’ (Durkheim, 1938: 37) and this perspective might then offer the possibility of the suppression of the traditional ‘heterosexual matrix’ and an actualization of gender equality in the present time. But, having this intent embedded in the concepts that underlie education systems seems to be insufficient in and of itself for the construction and development of egalitarian education. Indeed, concepts such as Durkheim’s and Bildung constitute only the foundations of the curriculum and the operationalization of these tends to shift away from these ideals once the content is developed. In practice, then, the construction of curricula still generates the differentiated distribution of academic content to students and still contributes to gendered academic and professional orientations. The history of the development of Bildung in Germany reveals how the cultural, political and economic roots of an education system are shaped by concepts. The Bildung proposed by Humboldt is deeply associated with the emergence of an intellectual bourgeoisie who at that time were socially opposed to the economic bourgeoisie, a positioning which is still present in the structuring of the educational system. This is evident not only in universities but also in the access routes offered by the Gymnasium. Carol Taylor’s feminist argument, for contemporary inclusive education based on Bildung, proposes that we need or could have a true cultural revolution in our time. To be successful it would have to have revolutionary effects that were similar to those stimulated by the Enlightenment.

References Anderson, R.D. (2004). European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belenky, M.F. (1986). Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books Inc. Biesta, G. (2002). Bildung and modernity: the future of Bildung in a world of difference. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21, 343–351. Boalick, A. (2007). Bildung Blocks: Problematic Masculinities in Stendhal. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Tenth anniversary edition. New York: Routledge. Delamont, S. (2006). Gender and higher education. The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education. London: Sage. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994). What Is Philosophy? London: Verso. Durkheim, É. (1938). L’évolution Pédagogique en France. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

History of Bildung as concept and practice  23 Forster, M. (2017). Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2017/entries/schleiermacher/. Gary, S. (2008). Bildung and Gender in 19th Century Bourgeois Germany: A Cultural Studies Analysis of Texts by Women Writers. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Maryland. Goozé, M. (2007). Challenging Separate Spheres: Female Bildung in Eighteenth- and ­Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Peter Lang. Guillard, J. (2012). Potentialities of participatory pedagogy in the women’s studies classroom. Feminist Teacher, 23 (1), 50–62. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Horlacher, R. (2004). Bildung – a construction of a history of philosophy of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23, 409–426. Humboldt, W. von (1969). Theorie der Bildung des menschen. In A. Flitner and G. Klaus Giel (Eds.), Wilhelm von Humbodt, Werke in fiinf Biinden: Vol. I. Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 57–61. Keller, J.M. (2012). Virtual feminisms: girls’ blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15 (3), 429–447. Kivelä, A., Siljander, P. and Sutinen, A. (2012). Between Bildung and growth: con­ heories nections and controversies. In P. Siljander, A. Kivelä and A. Sutinen (Eds.), T of Bildung and Growth. Rotterdam: Sense, 303–312. Krais, B. (2013). Lettre à mes amis français. Travail, Genre et Sociétés, 2 (30), 203–213. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2016). The concept as method: tracing and mapping the problem of the neuro(n) in the field of education. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 16 (2), 213–223. Lindén, C. (2014). It takes a real man to show true femininity: gender transgression in Goethe’s and Humboldt’s concept of Bildung. In P. Josephson, T. Karlsohn and J. Östling (Eds.), The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and Legacies. Accessed at http:// booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789004271944. Mazón, P. (2003). Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education 1865–1914. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Naples, N. and Bojar, K. (Eds.) (2013). Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field. New York: Routledge. Sjöström, J., Frerichs, N., Zuin, V. and Eilks, I. (2017). Use of the concept of Bildung in the international science education literature, its potential, and implications for teaching and learning. Studies in Science Education, 53 (2), 165–192. Smith, J. (1987). Cultivating gender: sexual difference, Bildung, and the bildungsroman. Michigan Germanic Studies, 13, 206–225. Spender, D. (1980). Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Taylor, C.A. (2011). ‘Hope in failure’: a level students, discursive agency, post-­ feminism and feminism. Gender and Education, 23 (7), 825–841. Taylor, C.A. (2016). Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education. Higher Education, 17 (3), 419–435. Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson.

3 Epistemic gender positioning An analytical concept to (re)consider classroom practices within the French didactique research tradition Chantal Amade-Escot Introduction This chapter discusses the theoretical concept of ‘epistemic gender positioning’ as used in French didactique research and its relevance for providing new perspectives on gender in the teaching and learning of specific subjects in preschool, primary, and secondary schools. It argues that the strength of a gender-­ positioning lens lies in its ability to produce in-depth analysis that takes the teacher, the students, and the situatedness of knowledge into account simultaneously as interrelated instances. The chapter begins by providing some insights into the French context that leads feminist researchers to precisely characterize, in the everyday life of the class, how boys and girls construct their knowledge differently through actions and discourses. Theoretically, the chapter draws on the idea that the knowledge taught and learned is a by-product of the teacher’s and students’ didactical joint action. This is illustrated by a vignette which introduces the core concepts used and posits gender as a relational category beyond the reductionist masculinity/femininity binary. The next section outlines the conceptual framework and methodology. The discussion continues through two additional research excerpts, concerning physical education and science education, which further illustrate the potential of gender positioning in accounting for the differential dynamics of the didactic contract. The discussion here indicates that gender differences and inequalities among students go through tiny, almost imperceptible processes in relation to the gendered facets of each particular piece of content. The conclusion summarizes the distinctive contribution of the French didactique research tradition to the understanding of how gender order is done/undone in the class and advocates the need to not only deconstruct but also challenge gender norms in teaching and learning.

The emergence of a gender focus in French didactique research Research on gender in teaching and learning first appeared in the late 1980s in France, with the development of the new sociology of education. Most

Epistemic gender positioning  25

of this research was conducted in the areas of sociology and psychology (see ­Duru-Bellat, 1995 for a useful review). Drawing on second-wave feminism, this initial body of work highlighted how schooling reproduces and maintains masculine domination and the gendered aspects of the cultural heritage of French society, notably the contribution of schools to the reproduction of stereotypes related to social sex roles. Based on the notion of ‘la construction scolaire des différences entre les sexes’ [sex differences as a school construction], three prominent factors were identified: (i) the generally male-oriented curriculum and the sexist contents of textbooks; (ii) the number and types of interactions between teacher and students; (iii) the underestimation of gender essentialism unconsciously attributed by teachers to girls and boys (Duru-Bellat, 1995). As in other Western countries, feminist researchers in France documented in depth the fact that female and male students are not given equal opportunities to participate at school and are treated differently in relation to g­ ender-based expectations. It has already been pointed out that if the social and cultural ideologies are not challenged and if explicit antisexist pedagogy is not introduced, equity in schools will remain no more than an aspiration. Notwithstanding this, in the French context to date little research has focused on classroom practices in relation to the knowledge taught and little attention has been paid to the issue of how the contents of lessons impact on student gendered learning. This is where the distinctive contribution of a didactical approach when studying gender in teaching and learning comes into play. Subject didactic research in France emerged in the early 1970s in a period of important shifts in curriculum reforms subsequent to the massive spread of secondary education. Calling attention to the building of French didactics, Caillot (2007: 127) argues that the greatest specificity of ‘any didactique is that a specific subject is always involved’. In the French-speaking world of educational research didactics is strongly related to: (i) the study of the subject content and its function in the teaching and learning, (ii) the way it is embedded in learning environments and brought into play within teacher-student interactions, and (iii) the extent to which a student’s relationship to knowledge impacts on her/his learning and developmental process. However, until the 2000s, didactic research in France did not pay much attention to gender and could be seen as gender-blind research. Recent years have been marked by an effort at gendering research through various perspectives: curriculum and textbook analysis (see Chapter 7), teacher practices (see Chapter 9), students’ relations to knowledge, and teacher education. Yet, despite this, a focus on gender still remains marginal in French didactics. In this context, studying classroom practices with the purpose of critically describing gendered knowledge construction is an innovative trend. For nearly two decades, a broad research programme called ‘Genre & Didactique’ has been in progress at the University of Toulouse, aiming to identify, in the everyday life of the class, how boys and girls construct their knowledge differently through actions and discourses. Studies were first conducted in physical education (Amade-Escot, 2017) and indicated that this school subject was not innocent but was, rather, ‘one of the most sex-differentiated

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subjects on the school curriculum that contributes to the social construction of homogeneous gendered categories’ (Flintoff and Scraton, 2006: 768). Important for this chapter is that the specific forms of embodiments; the values of strength, power, and spatial movement; and cultural experiences (Taylor, 2013) at the core of student learning in physical education generate empirical conditions for delving further into the issue of how a didactical approach (which focuses on, the specificity of the knowledge intended to be taught) can deepen understanding of how gender order is enacted in the classroom. Nowadays, the ‘Genre & Didactique’ research programme has been extended to other school subjects and has produced a series of observational case studies of a variety of subjects and settings within the French educational system. These case studies include theoretical and empirical works, doctoral studies and participatory action research works, all of which develop in-depth analysis of didactical interactions. Like the research underpinning this chapter, these studies share the same starting point: that boys and girls are physically and discursively produced to be differently literate according to the various school subjects. This process takes place through: (i) gendered differences in interactions between teachers and students, (ii) social relations between peers and (iii) differential academic expectations. The interactions explored in this chapter are aligned with the aims of the research programme which relies on the claim articulated by Mosconi, a feminist educational philosopher who wrote: To understand how teachers act with girls and boys in the classroom, fine-grained analysis of everyday classroom life and didactical interactions is needed. The differences and even the inequalities of treatment between students according to gender (but also according to their social origin, as well as their standing of excellence in the class) involve tiny, very subtle elements that cannot be seen without a very detailed analysis, including the didactical viewpoint. (Mosconi, 2003: 38, our translation)

The French didactique approach and the study of gender order in the classroom This section begins with a vignette as an empirical example which frames the subsequent discussion of ‘epistemic gender positioning’ and its importance in looking at didactical practices. Louise’s story Louise (not her real name – all names are pseudonyms) was a four-and-half-yearold girl, and this episode occurred during her early preschool learning. Louise belongs to a class called ‘moyenne section’ (age 4–5 years) in the French preschool system. The learning context is related to individual work monitored by the teacher. After having read a carnival tale and set up an informal conversation

Epistemic gender positioning  27

about disguises with the whole class, the teacher hands out a worksheet to each child. This worksheet presents nine different characters with animal and human faces (see Figure 3.1). The teacher then asks pupils ‘to circle each animal in green, each feminine character in pink, and each masculine character in blue’. Beyond the binary sex-stereotyping assignment provided by the teacher (pink for girls, blue for boys), it is worth noting that the knowledge content embedded in this learning exercise is complex and has various interwoven aspects: (i) cognitive, in categorizing and grouping items; (ii) observational, in making distinctions between human and non-human life forms; (iii) social, related to the traditional coloured representation of the gender binary; (iv) cultural, in relation to the carnival tale read earlier. Moreover, to some extent, two characters of the worksheet look ‘enigmatic’ (Figure 3.1, characters 4 and 6). During the first minutes Louise, strongly engaged in the task, circles characters 3, 5, and 7 in green; characters 1 and 8 in pink; and characters 2, 4, 6, and 9 in blue. She stops for a few seconds looking at the worksheet, then grabs another coloured pencil and circles character 6 again, in purple. How might we interpret Louise’s actions? Answering a teacher’s question about ‘why purple?’ later, Louise says: ‘Umm … It is … it is a boy … disguised as a girl!’ Matching her words with action, Louise takes the purple pencil again and recircles character 6: ‘…it should be circled in purple’. Three ideas emerge from this vignette of Louise’s actions that help to introduce the core concepts used to conduct a didactical inquiry on how gendered contents are enacted through classroom practices. The first idea concerns the feminine/masculine dichotomy embedded in the learning environment set up by this preschool teacher: a taken-for-granted feature of Western societies pervading the display of school contents. This is not new. Research has consistently shown that curriculum and classroom practices convey gendered

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Figure 3.1  Replica of the worksheet (numbers are ours).

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bias, even at preschool (Davies, 1989). The second idea is that Louise has a kind of independence with respect to the didactic contract (a core concept presented below). She feels free to use the purple crayon, thus introducing a breach with the teacher’s assignment. It is worth noting that Louise, a high achieving pupil, understands pretty well what the teacher’s expectations are but plays with them. The last idea is that Louise activates remarkable gender positioning. In some way she jeopardizes the binary dichotomy of feminine and masculine characters introduced by her teacher, thus producing resistance and repositioning. Altogether, these three ideas encourage us to go further into the theoretical tenets underlying the approach. Using the concept of epistemic gender positioning to account for individual agency within didactical practices The term ‘gender positioning’ is used to account for the different ways individuals act in their everyday lives according (or not) to traditional sex roles. In educational research, it has often been used in this sense, and is at odds with the research related to post-structuralist discourse analysis of power and resistance. Research on positioning emerged in the 1980s in the area of feminist studies (Davies, 1989; Harré and van Langenhove, 1999). Based on social constructionist psychology, these authors assume that human behaviour is goal-­directed by group norms, and that human agency is a product of the history of each individual’s interactions with other people. Drawing on the social, symbolic, and interactional dimensions of human action, and the importance of context and language, positioning theory considers that positions are not fixed but fluid and can change from one moment to the next, depending on the context, participants, meanings, and interactions. Harré and van Langenhove (1999) criticize the concept of ‘social role’ in American social psychology, and contend that the theory of ‘positioning’ goes further and offers a dynamic alternative to it. Broadening the scope of positioning we have argued elsewhere that ‘gender positioning’ is a fruitful concept in attempts to account for the transactional dynamics of knowledge construction in day-to-day classroom life (Amade-­Escot et al., 2012, 2015). Furthermore, the epistemological stance of positioning theory, in paying attention to the fluidity and the shifting forms of gendered actions, resonates with Butler’s (1990) idea of gender performativity which challenges the sex-role theory and the idea of identity as essence, still strong in education. However, to be clear, gender positioning in the didactic approach is understood as a knowledge-­specific concept (as illustrated by Louise’s vignette). How gender is understood in the French didactique approach to classroom practices When investigating gender in classroom practices the didactique approach examines the ways girls and boys construct their knowledge differently through academic expectations and within interactions with the teacher and/or

Epistemic gender positioning  29

among peers. This approach sees gender as a relational social construct that is fluid, multiple and shifting, and so goes beyond the traditional male and female binary (Butler, 1990; Chabaud-Rychter et al., 2010; Francis, 2006). In questioning the validity of traditional binary categories and the implicit and underlying vestiges of essentialism underpinning many school practices, our research tries to find a path between ‘modernist reductionism and post-­ structuralist relativism’ as discussed by Francis (1999). It does this by drawing on feminist research which accounts for the structural and institutional role of schooling practices in cultural reproduction and, at the same time, it acknowledges that gender must be conceptualized and investigated in terms of the subject’s fluid, shifting, and sometimes fragmented experiences that regulate, rather than determine, the enactment of unequal learning trajectories. I next turn to the didactic framework in relation to which the empirical studies are conducted.

Studying gender order in classroom practices through the joint action in didactic framework The didactical approach to classroom practices sheds light on how gendered learning is co-constructed through a fine-grained analysis of transactions related to the several facets of each particular piece of knowledge taught. It focuses on the differences and even the inequalities of treatment between students according to gender, their social origin, as well as their standing in the hierarchy of achievement in the class (see Chapter 11). To capture the details of the curriculum in motion in classroom settings, the approach draws on the idea that student learning occurs within the unavoidable tension between student and teacher agencies and a learning environment, called the ‘didactic milieu’, which is always cultural, institutional, material, and social. It aims to account for the complexity of the functioning of the didactical system conceptualized as an interwoven threefold relationship between the teacher, the students, and the particular situatedness of knowledge content. Assuming that the knowledge taught and learned and all the associated meaning makings are a by-product of teacher and student practices in culturally bounded environments, these practices are, in theoretical terms, envisaged as ‘didactical joint actions’. This does not mean that the participants have the same agendas and share the same goals; in fact, much research indicates the uniqueness of participants’ actions and their consequences in terms of gendered learning. The joint action in didactics ( JAD) conceptual framework is a descriptive framework within a pragmatist view of classroom practices. It enables teachers’ and students’ discourses, actions, and interactions in a given situation to be studied in order to depict student learning experiences and the meanings constructed through these experiences (Ligozat, 2011; Sensevy, 2007). Its purpose is to access the logic of didactical practices, and it draws on Bourdieu’s (1980) sense of practice as to how the practical concerns of everyday life (here in the classroom) condition the transmission and functioning

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of social or cultural habits. In the analysis which follows, I focus only on the interrelated aspects of the JAD framework which are relevant for a gendered analysis of didactical transactions: (i) ‘epistemic gender positioning’, which helps our understanding of how individuals (students and teacher) engage themselves in the practice of learning and teaching; (ii) ‘differential didactical contract’, which accounts for students’ various learning trajectories; and (iii) ‘practical epistemology’, which allows us to capture the gendered facets of knowledge privileged by participants. I have already delineated the former concept above, and I briefly sketch out the last two immediately below. Differential didactic contract as a result of teacher and student epistemic gender positioning In the French didactique tradition, the ‘didactic contract’ broadly refers to the teacher’s and students’ implicit system of mutual expectations, joint habits, and attribution of intentions. Focusing on teacher and students’ joint action related to the knowledge at stake during classroom transactions, this concept links the Didactique perspective with pragmatist and social-interactionist approaches of classroom practices (Ligozat, 2011). Nevertheless, unavoidable breaches in the didactic contract appear, particularly in relation to transactions that express discrepancies between the lines of actions of teacher and students. As noted by Schubauer-Leoni (1996), the didactic contract is inherently differential because it is not implicitly established with all the students of the classroom but with groups of students (and individuals), who have diverse standings of excellence in the class and diverse social backgrounds. The concept of differential didactic contract is often used to conduct relational analyses at the micro level of didactical transactions. Relevant to the purposes of this chapter, Verscheure shows how various forms of gender positioning and repositioning that teacher and students enact during didactical transactions play a major role in the differential evolution of the didactic contract (Verscheure and Amade-Escot, 2007). These dynamics are constrained by participants’ agency in terms of what each of them brings to the transactional situation. This leads us to envision the third key concept. Participants’ practical epistemologies and their intricate interplay with gender positioning The notion of practical epistemology in the JAD framework was first elaborated to account for the teacher’s action. It underlined that teachers’ views on the subject knowledge they teach are part of their actions (Sensevy, 2007). Within this pragmatist definition, the concept was extended to students’ action. In the JAD framework, it should be understood less as a knowledge base than as a pragmatist propensity to act in certain direction. In this sense, the teacher’s actions and discourses reveal what counts as valid knowledge and appropriate ways of performing in a specific social practice. Conversely,

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students’ actions following their own agenda (which, as I have already mentioned, may or may not be aligned with the teacher’s one) reveal the sense they give to the knowledge they encounter. Teaching and learning are discursive acts, where participants’ attention is directed towards certain events, questions, and relationships, while others are undervalued or ignored. The research posits that participants’ practical epistemologies can be fruitfully described through a gendered lens, namely through positioning. To sum up, the concept of practical epistemology helps to understand what facets of knowledge are privileged by teachers and students and the extent to which the knowledge taught and learned is marked by gendered patterns of expectation and perception of the subject.

Analysing epistemic gender positioning: two empirical illustrations In order to obtain a fine-grained description of the teacher’s and students’ actions and discourses, a qualitative research design which gathered data from video and audio recordings of lessons and interviews with participants is used. For ethical purposes, information on the study is shared with school teachers and authorities. In addition, parents’ consent and assent forms are collected and the use of video data is restricted to research purposes. The data analysis is inspired by Héritier’s (2002) anthropological idea that any social practice (and thus any school practice) encompasses gendered interpretation and is marked by what she coined as the ‘valence differentielle des sexes’ [differential valence of the sexes]. This term acknowledges that gender dichotomy and masculine domination are a taken-for-granted (in various forms) in all societies; yet, at the same time, the term dialectically attests to ‘the existence not of a radical division between the sexes, but of a relatively complex and unstable continuum, on the organic, psychological, emotional, and social planes’ (Héritier, 2010: 31, our translation). The analysis consists in identifying in each subject-content transaction the several facets of each particular piece of knowledge taught and the gendered forms, practices, and discourses that underpin them. This enables us to see how subject knowledge is informed by traditional gender binary norms (or not), and at the same time how the teacher and students might challenge these norms during classroom events. Through close analysis we can, then on one hand, identify sex-stereotyped reductionist social constructions, which, most often, reproduce gender binary norms and behaviours and marginalize students who are not clearly identified as acting according to these traditional demands and, on the other, we can begin to see the multiple modes of gender performativity that open up opportunities for resistance through the positioning and repositioning that each participant initiates in relation to knowledge during on-going transactions (as, for example, does Louise when she breaches the ‘pink and blue didactic contract’ using a purple pen!). Assuming that gender positioning evolves during didactical transactions with regard to

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the knowledge at stake, the crucial point when conducting data analysis is to record all forms of positioning. Following Héritier’s assertion about the ‘relative complex and unstable continuum’ of gender performativity and seeking equity and genuineness, we try to report on all participants’ contrasted ways of performing a task and to pinpoint in their actions and discourses which forms of individual gender positioning are activated: those reinforcing traditional gender order and also those undoing gender. The differential learning trajectories are described in the two empirical analyses below – one from physical education, the other from science education. How a teacher’s practical epistemology impacts on gendered learning This video excerpt concerns a physical education unit in a Tunisian high school class (15–16 years) and focuses on the handstand forward roll in gymnastics (Amade-Escot et al., 2015). This subject content encompasses various combinations of aesthetic and acrobatic movements. Reductionist forms of practices associated with dominant gender norms envision aesthetic movements as feminine whereas a masculine stereotype values the acrobatic dimension. This is a gender stereotypical vision because: (i) aesthetics and acrobatics are not dichotomous categories and should be combined in a proper handstand; (ii) female students may choose to perform acrobatically, and conversely male students may pay attention to the correctness of their body movement; and (iii) learning to perform a handstand forward roll implies controlling both dimensions together in action. These considerations drive the analysis. In action and the associated discourse, a teacher may value the aesthetic or the acrobatic dimension, or a combination of both when teaching. Students may (or may not) elicit one of these dimensions or both, thus indicating the meanings they are construing. In the selected excerpt, Mohamed, the teacher, gives students instructions related to the acrobatic facet of the handstand forward roll movement: ‘you should throw the leg and then roll’. To Salim, a male student who never reaches the handstand position, he says: ‘go, go, push hard on your leg’; to the class: ‘hey guys, make an explosive push’. Mohamed asks Ouissal, a highly skilled female student, to demonstrate how to reach the handstand position. He comments on her performance to the class: ‘you should be as strong as she is’. From his discourse, always related to strength or force, which, according to Whitson (1994), illustrates how masculinity is publicly celebrated, a pre-eminent masculine gender positioning stands out. Ouissal’s actions repeatedly favour the aesthetic dimension of the gymnastic skills, with body alignment, and feet and toes pointed, thus performing perfect, tight handstands. However, she never engages herself in the roll, thus introducing a breach of the didactic contract (i.e. she does not choose to follow the teacher’s instructions). Interestingly, Mohamed never interacts with her on this theme. Ouissal does not find any support or opportunity to experience the acrobatic dimension of a gymnastic movement. An implicit and gendered differential didactic contract emerges

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through transactions as if the handstand forward roll is not an objective for a female student. Mohamed’s actions indicate what is valuable gymnastic knowledge for her in comparison with that implicitly negotiated with male students, who are called upon to perform more acrobatic gymnastics. Mohamed’s positioning illustrates a teacher’s practical epistemology paying tribute to masculinity, and at the same time being benevolent towards female students – reinforcing gendered dichotomies of body movement as pointed out by Larson et al. (2009). Gender positioning and students’ practical epistemologies during group work This video excerpt comes from research by Pautal and Vinson (2017), whose work I have permission to reanalyse for the purpose of this chapter. These data concern the teaching of biology in a French primary school (age 9–10 years), particularly the study of how the human blood circulation functions, within an enquiry-based pedagogy. During the previous two lessons, students identified the different blood vessels and the function of the blood; they saw a short video on heart anatomy and participated in scientific workshops related to these contents. In the following excerpt, the knowledge to be transmitted concerns a scientific debate in groups on human blood flow and its related scientific model. The teacher distributes a paper representing a blank human body to each group. She asks the students to exchange ideas with the purpose of collectively deciding ‘how many blood circuits are needed to make the blood function efficient’ and to ‘draw how it works on the poster’. The excerpt involves two girls (Lucie and Asmae) and two boys (Marius and John). Marius and Lucie are high achieving students. Asmae is seated between Lucie and Marius. John is on the opposite side of the table. Lucie and Marius place the poster facing them. They take the floor; the other students do not talk much. 1 lucie: ‘There is one [circuit] in the head … and then there’s a circuit that comes back … I think’ (Lucie draws two circuits from the heart on the poster) 2 marius: ‘NO … the circuit goes all over the body … I believe there’s only one tube’ 3 lucie: ‘but the dirty blood … it goes, it goes …’ (She sketches the lungs) 4 MARIUS: (raising one arm) ‘NO … what I am trying to say is … at the beginning all blood is clean, and it goes around the body. It is cleaned up in the heart, and then … it leaves again’ 5 ASMAE: ‘but it’s not possible … the clean blood and the dirty blood will mix as a slop’ 6 Marius to John: ‘and you, you should talk, you should explain…’

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7 8 9 10 11

John: (silent) Marius: (to the group) ‘who agrees with me?’ John: (raising a hand) ‘me’ Asmae , following: ‘me’ Lucie , after a second: ‘me too’ (She erases her previous

drawing with two

circuits) Lucie provides the first statement and draws two circuits on the poster. Interrupting her, Marius resists Lucie’s statement. Lucie objects to Marius’s proposal with a rational argument related to ‘the dirty blood’ and sketches the lungs (3). It can be said that, at this stage, Lucie’s blood flow model is compatible with the knowledge that is intended to be established. Marius interrupts her again, adding his own rational claim for a single circuit (4). At the end of these four turns of talk, two models related to the blood flow have been put forward: Lucie believes that there are two circuits, while Marius believes that only one is needed. Nevertheless, their different practical epistemologies are appropriate to the didactic contract of a scientific debate as both rationally argue their own vision. Such differences are entirely appropriate in such a ­social-constructivist didactic milieu. However, Marius does not draw anything, leaving the girl to do the written work. An additional understanding of this dialogue (at 2 and 4) is that Marius’s epistemic gender positioning falls into ‘manterrupting’ (he interrupts Lucie with two sturdy ‘NO’s). This analysis is sustained by the next turns: when Asmae intervenes with a rational counter-argument to the mixing of the clean and dirty blood (5), Marius stops contributing any argument to the scientific debate. Unsuccessful in finding support from John (6), he asks for a vote (8). John and Asmae agree with him. Discouraged, Lucie follows the vote, erasing her drawing (11). In asking for a vote, Marius stepped out of the didactic contract of a scientific debate. By this power act, he blocked the discussion and thus the collective knowledge construction. Marius shifted towards a (traditional) masculine gender positioning while Asmae and Lucie gave up, abandoning their relevant model of two blood circuits and adopting behaviour that may be interpreted as silenced traditional feminine gender repositioning. Consequently, the intended knowledge faded away. This excerpt confirms the interplays of practical epistemology, knowledge, and power as in science and technology classrooms (see Danielsson et al., 2017).

Conclusion and implications for teaching and learning This chapter explains the distinctive contribution the French didactique tradition makes to feminist dialogues on teaching and learning. In doing so, it adds an important dimension to the debates on gender explored in this book. It outlines the concept of epistemic gender positioning and demonstrates its analytical potential in investigating gender in different school subjects, in relation to a vignette and two examples of research data. The theoretical discussion brings to the fore the idea that gender positioning is always linked with

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each participant’s practical epistemology, in the sense that teacher and students, who are embedded and act within an implicit and differential didactic contract, value or privilege different facets of knowledge depending on context, meanings, and interactions. The findings in this chapter illuminate how gender differences in knowledge construction vary depending on the very specific subject content and how they are brought into play during classroom events. At the same time they exhibit similar patterns of interactions in different subjects that align this research with the scope of comparative didactics and ‘the relationships between content-specific and generic features of teaching and learning practices’ (Ligozat et al., 2015: 314). Moreover, such studies indicate that gendered learning trajectories among students go through tiny and almost imperceptible processes that need to be analysed. In mobilizing the interrelated concepts of epistemic gender positioning, differential didactic contract, and practical epistemology, the French didactique tradition sheds new light upon how gender inequalities are perpetuated in classroom settings. Because teaching and learning specific subjects are situated actions, they also demonstrate the incredible diversity and uncertainty of student learning and how classroom practices offer resources and opportunities but also constraints that limit gender educational benefits. The events analysed demonstrate the subtle processes entailed in the production of the gender order in the classroom and how this, more often than not, privileges masculinity. Underscoring the relational process involved in the production of gendered content and the risk of marginalization of girls and boys who are not clearly identified as acting according to their assigned sex, the approach suggests that greater attention should be paid to teacher and students’ joint action related to knowledge during classroom events. A better understanding of the didactical phenomena that are at the core of doing/ undoing gender in the class may open the way to new emancipatory and feminist educational projects in which gender norms are not only deconstructed but challenged (Francis, 1999).

Paired dialogue: subjects of learning and pedagogical en­­counters Susanne Gannon The didactique research tradition draws attention to bodies, relations, and knowledge as co-constructed among students and teachers in the live space of the classroom. The micropolitical intricacies of classroom life are observed through video and audio recordings and interviews. The examples presented in this chapter provide fine-grained analysis of what children and teachers do in tiny moments in classrooms, and how (Continued)

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these are infused by gendered positionings. Bodies feature in the secondary gymnastics lesson, where strength and grace (or acrobatic and aesthetic dimensions) are differentially valued by the teacher for male and female students. Artefacts feature in the early childhood literacy lesson where the worksheet requiring classification as ‘male’, ‘female’, or ‘animal’ confuses the child – not because of the degendering of animals but because of the gender ambiguity of a human clown. Young people resist and modify the demands that are made of them in both lessons, demonstrating that the ‘didactic contract’ requires negotiation and adjustment, within particular subject specific conventions. My own work, in the Anglophone tradition, has drawn on the concept of ‘pedagogical encounters’ to explore how many orders of things – ­human and non-human, animate and inanimate – come together unpredictably in spaces of learning (Davies and Gannon, 2009). The example below is from narrative field notes from an elective Year 12 English Extension class, during which students develop an externally evaluated creative writing project. The class comprises three 17-year-old male students and an experienced female teacher. Bodies are carefully and casually arranged: ‘Although the classroom is big, the three students sit at the front of the classroom in a rather cramped row.’ Ms M. ‘rests against a desk slightly to the side of the students’ row, creating an intimate and casual space’. She has brought in ‘outrageous openings’ from ‘philosophical novels’ ranging from Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The synergies between the two traditions become clear: gymnastics focuses on correct formation of bodies; English focuses on correct formation of minds and literary tastes. In my field notes, discussion is highlighted as the mode of engagement with knowledge: we see the teacher’s questions lead towards the close study of language that characterizes literary study. This excerpt, for example, is from discussion of the first sentences of Notes from the Underground: ‘I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.’ Ms M asks about the character of the narrator. Billy (all names are pseudonyms) says that the opening ‘gently gives some idea of ­character’. Charles suggests that ‘the first person gives an idea of character.’ Ms M asks ‘how does the way it is written add to that?’ She asks about the effects of ‘short, blunt sentences’ and highlights the ways in which the speech patterns give the text a self-critical tone, so the reader can access ideas about the character of the narrator. Miss M returns to her initial question about enticing the reader, asking, ‘Do you want to read more about this man?’ Where are the hints of gender in this lesson? In bodies ‘cramped’ into small plastic chairs? In ‘philosophical’ texts selected by the teacher?

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In the invitation extended to young men to feel, express choices and preferences, and become analytical and sensitive readers? Gender intersects with age, experience, and power differentials. In this lesson as well artefacts (extracts of first lines from novels), bodies (students and teachers), and the interactions between them form what Amade-Escot terms the ‘didactic contract’ and what I see as the conditions for ‘pedagogical encounters’.

References Amade-Escot, C. (2017). How gender order is enacted in Physical Education: the didactique approach. In G. Doll-Tepper, R. Bailey and K. Koenen (Eds.), Sport, Education and Social Policy. The State of the Social Sciences of Sport. London: Routledge, 62–79. Amade-Escot, C., Elandoulsi, S. and Verscheure, I. (2012). Gender positioning as an analytical tool for the studying of learning in physical education didactics. E ­ uropean Conference on Educational Research, 18–21 September, Cádiz. www.eera-ecer.de/ ecer-programmes/conference/6/contribution/16572/ Amade-Escot, C., Elandoulsi, S. and Verscheure, I. (2015). Physical education in Tunisia: teachers’ practical epistemology, students’ positioning and gender issues. Sport, Education and Society, 20 (5): 656–675. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Politics of Subversion. New York: Routledge. Caillot, M. (2007). The building of a new academic field: the case of French didactiques. European Educational Research Journal, 6 (2): 125–130. Chabaud-Rychter, D., Descoutures, V., Devreux, A.-M. and Varikas, E. (2010). Sous les Sciences Sociales, le Genre. Relectures Critiques de Max Weber à Bruno Latour. Paris: La Découverte. Danielsson, A.T., Berge, M. and Lidar, M. (2017). Knowledge and power in the technology classroom: a framework for studying teachers and students in action. Cultural Studies of Science Education. doi:10.1007/s11422-016-9782-0. Davies, B. (1989). Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool Children and Gender. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Davies, B. and Gannon, S. (Eds.) (2009). Pedagogical Encounters. New York: Peter Lang. Duru-Bellat, M. (1995). Filles et garçons à l’école, approches sociologiques et ­psycho-sociales: La construction scolaire des différences entre les sexes. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 110: 75–109. Flintoff, A. and Scraton, S. (2006). Girls and physical education. In D. Kirk, M. O’Sullivan and D. Macdonald (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Physical Education. London: Sage, 767–783. Francis, B. (1999). Modernist reductionism or post-structuralist relativism: can we move on? An evaluation of the arguments in relation to feminist educational research. Gender and Education, 11 (4): 381–393. Francis, B. (2006). The ‘nature of gender’. In C. Skelton, B. Francis and L. Smulyan (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Education. London: Sage, 7–17.

38  Chantal Amade-Escot Harré, R. and van Langenhove L. (1999). Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell Ltd. Héritier, F. (2002). Masculin – Féminin. Dissoudre la Hiérarchie. Paris: Odile Jacob. Héritier, F. (2010). (Dir.) Hommes, Femmes: La Construction de la Différence. Paris: Le Pommier. Larson, H., Fagrell, B. and Redelius, K. (2009). Queering physical education. Between benevolence towards girls and a tribute to masculinity. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 14 (1): 1–17. Ligozat, F. (2011). The development of comparative didactics & joint action theory in the context of the French-speaking subject didactiques. European Conference on Educational Research, 1–16 September, Berlin. http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/ unige:75023 Ligozat, F., Amade-Escot, C. and Östman, L. (2015). Beyond subject specific approaches of teaching and learning: comparative didactics. Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, 46 (4): 313–321. Mosconi, N. (2003). Rapport au savoir et division socio-sexuée des savoirs à l’école. La lettre de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, 51: 31–38. Pautal, E. and Vinson, M. (2017). Interactions verbales et non-verbales: outils de compréhension de la co-construction des savoirs et du genre entre élèves. ­Recherches en Didactiques, 23: 27–46. Schubauer-Leoni, M.L. (1996). Etude du contrat didactique pour des élèves en difficulté en mathématiques. Problématique didactique et/ou psychosociale. In  C.  Raisky and M. Caillot (Eds.), Au-delà des Didactiques le Didactique: Débats Autour de Concepts Fédérateurs. Brussels: De Boëck, 159–189. Sensevy, G. (2007). Des catégories pour décrire et comprendre l’action didactique. In G. Sensevy and A. Mercier (Eds.), Agir Ensemble. L’action didactique conjointe du professeur et des élèves. Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 13–49. Taylor, C. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25 (6): 688–703. Verscheure, I. and Amade-Escot, C. (2007). The gendered construction of physical education content as the result of the differentiated didactic contract. Physical ­Education and Sport Pedagogy, 12 (3): 245–272. Whitson, D. (1994). The embodiment of gender: discipline, domination and empowerment. In S. Birrell and S. Cole (Eds.), Women, Sport and Culture. Champaign: Human Kinetics, 353–371.

4 Queering dissection ‘I wanted to bury its heart, at least’ Sara Tolbert

Introduction: becoming a (science) teacher My first science classroom teaching job was at a junior high school in the South Bronx, NY. At the time, about 99% of the students were from economically oppressed minoritized communities. We didn’t really have a budget for materials, and barely had enough books for every student. In the spring of my first year teaching, the science department head finally gave me a tour of the science supply room. Many of the supplies seemed like they’d been there since the 1970s. I scrounged up what I could, including a large plastic jar of preserved frogs and a couple of jars of owl castings for dissection. We didn’t have science labs, and I traveled from class to class (students walking the halls between classes was seen as ‘dangerous’) which meant I carried the supplies with me. In high school (between ages 14 and 18 in the USA), I had made an ethical decision to refrain from dissection in science classes. I didn’t think there was a justifiable need for high school students to dissect animals in order to be able to identify their organs. It seemed to me to be both disrespectful and nonessential and it made me feel sick to see students groaning and joking during dissection. I tried to register for Anatomy and Physiology my senior year (i.e. last year of high school, age 17), but I was told that I wouldn’t be able to take that class if I didn’t dissect – even if I were to sit out and observe. I wrote a front-page story for our school newspaper condemning the practice of forcing students to dissect as a condition for enrollment in specialized science courses. I don’t think it changed anything, but I felt that at least I had been able to take a very public stance on the issue. Years later at the junior high school where I first taught, I rarely saw ­Edwin in class. He was often suspended or just wouldn’t come to school. Many of the other teachers were either (quietly or openly) relieved when Edwin was out. When he was in class, he was often oppositional with teachers, bullied other kids, or, on a ‘good’ day, put his head down, but ultimately Edwin was a child in pain. And he liked science. Over time, he began to participate a little bit more and more each day and he started to come to class more and more.

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I arranged to dissect one frog per class as a demonstration (given the limited number of frogs as well as dissection tools) and to project the dissection using a document camera (we had one for the entire school, though it was rarely used) while inviting volunteers to come up and take turns doing the dissection. In spite of my own discomfort with dissection, I thought it would somehow be unfair of me to withhold this opportunity from my students who already had such limited access to laboratory resources. I remember several students in each class asking me how the frogs died. I actually didn’t really know what the process was for euthanizing frogs for dissection, but I lied and said they had all died of natural causes and had been donated to science. I remember setting up the dissection for Edwin’s class. ‘Miss Tolbert, that ain’t right’, he protested quietly. I lied to him, too: ‘Don’t worry; they all died of natural causes.’ As we took turns cutting into the frog, he sat quietly in the back corner. I saw him become overwhelmed with hurt and anger. My heart felt heavy. Somehow, I knew I had betrayed him. He walked out of the class. After that, I rarely saw him. His love of science – at least, from a school-based perspective – ended that day. His story has haunted me since. I use this vignette for two reasons: First, it raised difficult questions for me about ethics and science teaching, which have stayed with me and which underlie my concerns about gender and dissection in this chapter. Second, it is consistent with a feminist method of thinking with care, trying not to present myself as the ‘enlightened outsider who knows better’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 197), but rather as someone who struggled personally with the issues I continue to analyze in another woman’s classroom. In this chapter, therefore, I think with my own experiences as a student and teacher of science, my former students, a teacher collaborator, her students, and the more-than-human animals who were dissected. Thinking with care in this way has compelled me to more deeply consider the following questions, which I explore in this chapter: How is it that we, as students and educators, are taught to communicate what science is/should be? In what ways is taking up emotional/ethical stances (orientations) in school science gendered, and (therefore) marginalized? What compelled me to set aside my own ethical dilemmas in this case, rather than to engage them and share them openly with my students? What would a feminist approach to science teaching look like – that is, an approach committed to both the critique and transformation of scientific practice – in a fairly ‘standard’ secondary science laboratory activity like dissection?

Dissection in secondary science classrooms Dissection is often seen as a cornerstone of life sciences education, particularly in secondary school settings. Some critical and feminist scholars have pointed out ways in which dissection embodies violence and oppression in science and science education (Oakley, 2009), while others have highlighted the potential of dissection as ‘gross pedagogy’ that can disrupt gender norms

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(Weinstein and Broda, 2009). Oakley (2009) points out how the practice of dissection in schools raises social concerns, animal welfare concerns, health and environmental concerns, and pedagogical concerns for students and teachers. She and other feminist scholars have argued that the objective detachment of scientific practice (i.e. researcher/researched dichotomy and objectification of the researched such as that which is embodied in dissection experiences) is masculinist, and marginalizes – and even serves to push out – students who take up a more empathetic stance with regard to ‘researcher’ and ‘the researched’ (Fox Keller, 1984; Oakley, 2009). On the other hand, Weinstein and Broda (2009: 771) illustrate how one teacher, by engaging students at a private Catholic girls’ school in the ‘public’ handling of pig organs, ‘broke taboos, even if unconsciously held, of public performances of gender and class’ where ‘the girlishness of the students was directly challenged’. Some scholars argue that dissection in secondary schools has demonstrated very little to no advantage over other approaches to biology education (such as computer models) in terms of preparing students to learn and understand anatomical features of various animals (Hug, 2008; Milano, 2010). One benefit of dissection over other simulative approaches to dissection tasks is the preparation of students to learn actual dissection skills (De Villiers and Monk, 2005). Some scholars question, however, whether or not this advantage outweighs the disadvantage of turning students who are averse to dissection away from pursuing any interest in the biological sciences (De Villiers and Monk, 2005; Oakley, 2009). Research on dissection in secondary schools has also pointed to how access to dissection experiences is higher in well-resourced, White-majority schools compared to under-funded schools serving minoritized students (De Villiers and Monk, 2005). In this regard, having the option to participate in dissection or not at the secondary level could be viewed as a structural inequity as well as a marker of racial/socioeconomic status and privilege. Few science education scholars have addressed how the intersecting roles of race, gender, cultural practices, and materiality intra-act for and among girls of color within masculinist and colonizing contexts of science and science education (Scantlebury, 2005), and even fewer studies have attended to the intersecting cultural, gendered, and racialized experiences of students during classroom dissection activities (Bruna, 2010).

Orientations, diffractions, and dissections Orientations are about the direction we take that put some things and not others within our reach. (Ahmed, 2010: 245) As a former social/environmental studies (accidentally) turned science teacher and now (science) teacher educator, I am particularly invested in rethinking science education not as an enterprise designed to funnel students into

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some sort of sterile, masculinist STEM pipeline, but rather how to better, more response-ably intra-act within ‘the various technoscientific enterprises in which we are all implicated’ (Barad, 2000: 223). Sara Ahmed’s (2006, 2010) work on orientations is particularly useful here in thinking about how students’ identities, bodies, experiences and cultural practices intra-act with biological ‘objects’ or ‘specimens’. She writes that orientations matter: In both senses of the word ‘matter.’ First, orientations matter in the simple sense that orientations are significant and important. To be oriented in a certain way is how certain things come to be significant, come to be objects for me … Orientations also matter in the second sense of being about physical or corporeal substance. Orientations shape the corporeal substance of bodies and whatever occupies space. Orientations affect how subjects and objects materialize or come to take shape in the way that they do. (Ahmed, 2010: 235) Ahmed’s writings on orientations and objects reveal the gendered and (domestic) labor relations that are invisible in Husserl’s phenomenological ­framing/bracketing of the philosopher’s table. Both her work and Barad’s take up the ways in which our inheritances intra-act with objects and beings. In my case, I’m interested in how our intra-actions with objects – in this case, the ‘specimen’ in dissection – constitute orientations away from versus toward the sciences. In the transcribed excerpts which follow, I draw on Ahmed’s work to illustrate how students and teachers differently orient to the ‘specimen’, and, therefore, to school science, and how these orientations relate to gender, race, class, and cultural practices. I use diffractive analysis as thinking with theory and care (Barad, 2014; Mazzei, 2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012) to generate questions and perspectives (knowledge) around difference (rather than coding for similarities, or categories), primarily from the students’ conversation with me, but also from my own and the science teacher, Ms. Bell’s, experiences with dissection as both teachers and students of science. These points of difference among the various human participants’ orientations – including myself as (becoming) teacher and researcher – toward dissection and, perhaps, school/science more broadly, constituted within and diffracted through the dissection apparatus (i.e. the scalpel, tray, and ‘specimens’), may help us re/ think what it means, or can mean, to become a student/teacher/doer/thinker in science and society.

Dissection as opportunity Ms. Bell works in a small school with very limited resources. The school serves predominantly minoritized students in a low-income neighborhood. As a researcher interested in youth empowerment through science education

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at the school, I regularly met with Ms. Bell as well as separately with a group of students who would share with me their perspectives about science and science class at their school. Despite limited resources, Ms. Bell used crowdfunding to raise money for cats that her ninth graders would dissect in their Integrated Science class: Dissection is something I do every year and I feel strongly about doing dissection because I had a very empowering moment in 10th grade when I was allowed to dissect a cat and based on my performance I was allowed to go see open heart surgery … it was during that experience that I decided what I wanted to do in life and that was to understand why people die and how they die and what causes death because I literally watched a woman be taken off, basically killed and then brought back to life and a machine was just doing her processes for her. I share that experience with my students because the cat is something, is a large organism and it’s something that not all high school science teachers teach and I really feel strongly about using a mammalian specimen and a cat as opposed to a fetal pig [because the cat] has some unique characteristics…. I run through it as, watch me do this step, then you go do it, then come back and see me do it instead of me standing over them or them just reading a dissection guide and when I was in school I used a dissection guide but then I spent years, over 10 years in pathology and never had a dissection guide for doing the human so that’s how I teach and when I would teach medical residents how to dissect during an autopsy … it’s probably the best three weeks of the year for me as a teacher. (Ms. Bell, Interview, 3/15/16) For Ms. Bell, dissection was a transformative experience that oriented her toward science, a definitive turning point, even, that led her to pursue a career in forensic pathology and, eventually, science teaching. The following conversation is taken from an audio-recorded meeting with this small group of students from Ms. Bell’s class, including two girls, Nicole, who is Mexican American, and Snoopy, who is Pacific Islander, as well as one boy, Marcos, who is Mexican American (names are pseudonyms, chosen by students themselves). We met several times during the semester, and during this particular meeting the topic of dissection came up as something they wanted to talk about, as they recounted their experiences in their science class the week before. Nicole:  We did dissections and it was optional, but if you didn’t do it you had to do another whole other thing and it was vocabulary and stuff. But there was some groups in the classroom that just didn’t do either of them. They just kind of sat there and it was kind of like a chill period for them … I feel sad that they’re taking advantage – they should have been

44  Sara Tolbert

at least included in the opportunity to dissect a cat. We were dissecting cats. We were dissecting the eyeballs [prior to dissecting the cat]. It’s sad that they missed out on the opportunity to do that. Then Snoopy didn’t do it at all. The specimens constitute an opportunity for some students to learn science. Some students choose not to do the dissection or the alternative activity: ‘it was kind of like a chill period for them’, which Nicole views as taking advantage of the choices provided by the teacher (dissection vs. vocabulary activity). Also, I note here that though I ask them what they think, Nicole replies with a comment about how she feels, specifically, about how she feels sad. This becomes a recurring refrain throughout our conversation. She orients toward/away from the ‘object’ or ‘specimen’ with feelings, emotion, sadness – not ‘thinking’, per se, at least, not in the traditional sense of the word. Snoopy:  I

didn’t do the eyeballs [that day] because I was sick [that day]. But I did the vocabulary. Nicole:  You didn’t do the cat, either. Snoopy:  I did the vocabulary though. Snoopy’s orientation away from the dissection activity, she wants to be clear, it seems, is not an orientation away from schoolwork – in other words, she asserts (twice) that she was not one of those who was ‘taking advantage’.

Making sacred spaces for specimens in science Nicole continues talking about her feelings of sadness during the dissection activity. She reveals not only the lack of space for emotional responses, such as abhorrence, to scientific practices but also the lack of attention to rituals of relationship in science, to sacred forms, like burial, of honoring the morethan-human beings with whom we are in relation (see Higgins and Tolbert, forthcoming). Nicole:  Well, I didn’t do any dissecting. I was watching. It’s so sad. Sara:  What about it made you feel sad? Nicole:  I wanted to bury its heart at least. Ms. Bell cut open its heart

and I was sad, like that’s sad. It’s really horrible. …She [Ms. Bell] was ‘no, we’re going to just throw it all away.’

Nicole’s experience parallels those documented by other women in science who highlight how ‘a feeling for the organism’ is not encouraged in science, but is seen to be integral to feminist scientific knowledge production (Barton and Osborne, 2001; Fox Keller, 1984; Stengers, 2000). Beyond having a feeling for the organism, Nicole wants to make room for a sacred practice of

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ritual in the science classroom. She wants to bury its heart at least, but there is not space for this in school or science. ‘Spaces, too, are oriented in the sense that certain bodies are in this place or that place’ (Ahmed, 2010: 235). ‘Specimens’ (dead cats) are to be disposed of (thrown away) in biohazard waste receptacles, not buried.

Disrupting and reinforcing gender performances Despite her own and others’ discomfort with the dissection activity, Nicole describes how other students became more engaged once they saw other students’, like Marco’s, enthusiasm for the activity. Nicole:  But I did definitely notice kids were much more open to the oppor-

tunity once they saw other kids [do it] … Like some of the leaders, like Marcos, wanted to do cat. So all the basketball guys – I’m sorry, but they did – they were like, ‘ok, fine we’ll go help you do it.’ Sara:  Was that because they didn’t really want to necessarily do it themselves? Nicole:  I don’t think anybody really wanted to do it at first, except for four kids. Marcos:  I wanted to do it. Snoopy:  He’s one of the four that wanted to do it. Nicole:  I think after that they saw some leadership take place. We definitely got more involved in it. Ms. Bell showed us how to do it. She kind of just let them free reign do their own cat. She wasn’t even paying attention to them. She just gave them scalpels and were like ‘figure it out.’ Nicole publicly recognizes Marcos as a leader here. Marcos is mostly quiet throughout our conversation, not really relating at all to the girls’ concerns. Nicole sees Marcos, a great basketball player, as someone who has clout (leadership), especially with the basketball team. Nicole sees Marcos’ ability to get others (‘the basketball guys’) to participate in the dissection, despite their hesitations, as related to ‘leadership’ taking place but, yet, not students’ refusal to participate as leadership, regardless of her own discomfort with the dissection activity. Nicole does not position herself here as a leader. The boys who can get other boys to participate are leaders. Nicole’s positioning herself as non-leader and Marco as leader is a performance, a subjectification, of gendered hierarchies around leadership (Butler, 1990). While reinforcing gendered notions of leadership, the dissection experience also created opportunities for students to disrupt gender stereotypes. For example, the ‘specimens’ are entangled with student identity performances of being ‘creepy’. Sara:  So

you said at first only four people who wanted to do it. Why? Why do you think? Did they say? Did you guys have a conversation about why people would want to?

46  Sara Tolbert Nicole:  Two

of the girls in our class were very interested in the medical field. It’s obviously been part of the medical field for a long time. A few of the girls were very interested in dissection. Some of the girls were just like creepy. They wanted to dissect stuff. Marcos was just trying to be creepy.

A collision of cultural practices: ‘If you’re going to kill it, you should eat it’ Nicole shares that she is not opposed to the slaughtering of animals in some contexts. For example, the cultural practice of slaughtering pigs in Mexico is different. Nicole orients differently to the practice of dissection because of the way the animal is treated in the end (eaten vs. ‘thrown away’). Nicole:  [Ms.

Bell’s] like ‘cut it open’ and then she’s like, ‘this is how you do it’ – Oh, god it was horrible. I’ve never been so upset, I don’t think. Watching. I’ve seen pigs. I think that having a pig … I wasn’t that upset … Just like it happens, like in Mexico. They get pigs, cut them open, cut off its head. Snoopy:  How is that different though? Nicole:  It’s different. It’s for like eating it. I understand because you’re going to eat it. If you’re going to kill it, you should eat it. It [the dissection] was just sad. I was sad. Again, the experiences of sadness come from what Nicole perceives here as a lack of respect for the cat. She articulates a different form of ethical engagement.

‘Cats have a purpose to educate us’ In concluding the conversation, I asked the students if they saw any value in them having been able to dissect animals in their science class. Nicole:  It definitely gave us a… Snoopy:  Nice experience. ‘Cuz, what

Ms. Bell was saying, is we usually we don’t get to dissect as freshmen in high school. Nicole:  I don’t know how, she told us we weren’t going to dissect at the beginning of the year. Then we … It definitely got us ready for the real world. Some of us are going to have jobs like that. It’s the first real thing I’ve seen in high school. I’ve seen real things but the first … eye opening kind of a thing. Like people do this for a living. This is how you do it. They have to do this kind of stuff every day. Snoopy:  Kind of got people thinking about maybe … it was kind of a hands-on thing. If you want to do this, this is how it’s going to be. You got to experience if you want to do this when you get older.

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The students somehow equate being able to do dissection with job preparedness but they do not seem clear about what type of job might require them to do this work, other than medical professions referenced earlier; however, they understand that dissection was an integral part of their teacher’s professional training as a pathologist. The ‘apparatus’ (specimen + dissection tools) affords pre-professional training. Nicole:  It

also taught me, you have to cut off your emotions for this situation, because I wanted to cry. And I think I did cry. I teared up, and I was like, oh, my God … I also put myself in the way like cats have a purpose to educate us, I guess. And give us the new experience. But that was the mindset that I had to put myself in while doing the dissection. I was pretty sad though. Snoopy:  I mean it was good that we did it. Because not a lot of high schools actually … the schools don’t support that, because it’s expensive to get cats. And a lot of schools don’t buy them for science classes. But we were able to get it and actually dissect them. Nicole and Snoopy try to resolve some of their dissonance around the dissection. It is not the killing of the cat per se that Nicole is opposed to. Here both Nicole and Snoopy try to reconcile their dissonance, disgust, and discomfort by ‘cut(ting) off [her] emotions’ so that they can allow the cat some agency in educating the students, in providing them with a new experience. Snoopy also identifies the contexts of economic oppression that she, her family, and the school face regularly, highlighting the dissection as an exception in this case.

Re/visioning a queer-feminist science classroom If orientations are an effect of what we tend toward, then they point to the future, to what is not yet present. (Ahmed, 2010: 247–248) Indeed, intra-actions iteratively reconfigure what is possible and what is impossible. (Barad, 2007: 234) Thinking with Sara Ahmed, Karen Barad, Nicole, Snoopy, Marcos, Ms. Bell, Edwin, and myself ‘produces questions [and perspectives] not possible otherwise’ (Mazzei, 2014: 745). Generally speaking, scholarship on dissection has fallen along the binary of either ‘for’ or ‘against’. The perspectives and orientations constituted through the dissection in this study reveal a more complex array of differences. They help us contemplate questions such as: How do different participants orient to the apparatus: specimen + dissection tools? How are their orientations informed by their inheritances, differences, along the

48  Sara Tolbert

lines of gender with race, culture, class? How do their differing orientations as students of science help us, as scholars, teacher educators, feminists, orient differently to the phenomenon of science teaching? Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013: 684–685) affirm that: Children, youth, and adults need to collaboratively engage in practices of intra-active engagements of imagination, where multiple images and discourses about the school environment, ill- and well-being, are allowed to be expressed, enunciated and actualized. The focus group conversation offered an opportunity for students to articulate their ‘intra-active engagements of imagination’, where multiple, differing discourses about the dissection experience were ‘expressed, enunciated and actualized’ in ways that the science classroom space may not have afforded. Revisiting my own experiences as a science teacher, I wonder what would have happened if I had allowed Edwin, and his peers, the same opportunity? Perhaps Edwin’s orientation to school and science would have been constituted differently in a science classroom that acknowledged and valued various forms of ethical and feminist resistance to scientific practice. Bazzul (2015: 502) writes that science education should cultivate ‘resistance to the dominant structures of science and science education that work to constitute students, teachers, and citizens as subjects’, and argues that ‘being-through-resistance from below happens in community with other bodies’. Science educators can help students like Nicole re/conceptualize leadership as resistance rather than as a way of getting people to do things they are not ethically comfortable with. When leadership is positioned as conformity to dominant perspectives, women and people of color are marginalized in the science classroom and in science. Science educators can also work to deconstruct these hegemonic masculinist conceptions of leadership which exclude and marginalize women. Though all three students viewed being able to dissect cats as a ‘privilege’, educators and students can deconstruct certain economic privileges differently as well – as not just worthy of striving for only because they are available to well-resourced schools. A feminist science pedagogy grounded in the interests and concerns of the most marginalized students in science class and society can reveal alternative lines of flight beyond simply access to dominant resources (Harding, 2015). Weinstein and Broda (2009: 778) suggest that ‘the grotesque is a key resource in any curriculum seeking to queer science education, rewrite it so that the excluded, the marginal, and oppressed find a place of transformative possibility within those fields we call science’. Making the abject visible (dissection as a horror for some, a pleasure for others) could have been another way to open up a conversation with students about the abject nature of science and scientific practice. Students could use their divergent orientations as grounds for discussing ways in which scientific practice has been both beneficial in some contexts and oppressive in others – as well the

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ways in which it has privileged the interests of White men while marginalizing the experiences and concerns of women and people of color. Making the abject visible can, then, be a key part of ethical engagement with socio-­ scientific practice. Students orient, or re/orient, to science through their teacher, their own experiences, and through the material/discursive context of school science activities. This chapter has shown that eliciting and acknowledging students’ contrasting orientations can help us better understand the ways that the discursive and material contexts of school science, and scientific practice, work together to constitute subjectivities that simultaneously reproduce and disrupt intersecting systems of oppression along the lines of race, class, gender, etc. The specimen and cutting tools afford the opportunity for girls to disrupt gender norms, queering their own identity as girls, in a sense, by ‘acting creepy’ or taking on pre-professional identities as medical students. Both Barad (2007) and Ahmed (2006: 33) point out that thinking about/ with/through objects also means thinking not only about their characteristics and functions ‘but also what they allow us to do’, whether it be to perform a ‘creepy’ identity, or take on a premedical orientation, or facilitate students’ experiences with laboratory sciences in an otherwise resource-deprived context of oppression. Revisioning science education from a feminist perspective requires engaging feminist critiques of science, such as those articulated by feminist scholars as well as students like Nicole and Snoopy, while also actively facilitating a feminist classroom space through which possibilities for the transformation of the sciences are cultivated (Mayberry, 2001; Scantlebury, 2014). In this case, the dissection activity was intended to provide low-income minoritized students access to a college-level science experience but at the same time traditional and even recolonizing notions of access required two girls of color, Snoopy and Nicole, to re/orient toward a school science activity as both job preparation and as an activity distinct from their emotional selves. Secondary school is such a critical stage of becoming for students, and this is crucial in science and science education when students are making implicit or explicit choices about ‘is science me?’ or ‘is science useful?’, or even ‘can science really ever be about justice?’. This dissection activity has indicated that, in one sense, students orient toward but, in a larger sense, they orient away from school science. This is particularly the case for Nicole, who is so emotionally engaged that, as we see throughout the discussion, for her, to ‘cut off’ one’s emotions requires a huge compromise to her identity: ‘Bodies tend toward some objects more than others given their tendencies’ (Ahmed, 2010: 247). The students’ perspectives, then, challenge us to consider how science educators can be differently prepared NOT as representatives of scientific communities but to develop a role as interlocutors of/within more critical, multilogical socio-scientific practices. As such, students’ multiple gendered, cultural, and ethical subjectivities can be nurtured as well as critically transformed.

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Paired dialogue: didactic transposition of scientific knowledge in the classroom Florence Ligozat In your chapter I discovered certain aspects of the ‘transposition’ of a scientific practice in the classroom which I never questioned before (I will explain the term ‘transposition’ below). It made me think that the issues you discuss are not just the property of dissections, but can be generalized to many kinds of teaching situations in which there are tensions between different values: for example, academic/subject values versus ‘incorporated’ personal values that may be related to social class, gender, ethnicity, or religion. The feminist approach that you use highlights the struggles between these values from different perspectives. This is really important to help teachers and students, but also curriculum makers in setting up a dialogue about the nature of scientific practices. The reasons why we may ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ doing a dissection embed aesthetics and moral judgments that are not side considerations but are at the core of the meaning of the scientific practice (see Wickman, 2006). A major outcome of your chapter is to show the added value of the feminist approach in uncovering the different orientations taken by the participants towards the materiality of dissection as a scientific practice. The consequence is that it gives opportunities to teachers to scaffold the discourse on the nature of science and our relationship to living beings, from a bottom-up perspective. In the theoretical framework that I use, it means challenging the ‘didactic transposition’ of scientific knowledge in the classroom, as the French didactician Yves Chevallard would put it (see Chevallard, 1985, a reference which is unfortunately only in French, and Chevallard and Bosch, 2014, a secondary literature in English). Below, I include a couple of examples to explain what the ‘didactic transposition’ is in the French framework for Didactics, as a research domain on teaching and learning the various subjects in school (Caillot, 2007). Dissections in French schools were forbidden by law in 2014 under the pressure of animal protection lobbies, then they were reintroduced in more restrictive ways in 2016 under the pressure of the high school teachers’ trade union (only invertebrates, and pieces of vertebrates that are grown for food consumption may be dissected). This rehabilitation was justified explicitly by the benefit of the ‘encounter with the real world’ for the students and also implicitly by the preservation of the freedom of the teachers to choose their teaching methods (a very important matter in France). This controversy indicates that the possibility for dissections to exist in the classroom at all comes along with certain institutional discourses to justify its legitimacy: the necessity

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of the encounter with the real world; the choice between different teaching methods. The sociohistorical, epistemological, and moral issues about dissection as a pluri-dimensional scientific practice become reified to the necessity of the encounter with the real world in biology (this is just an example, of course). Such discourses tend to be naturalized in curriculum materials and further in teaching practices to such an extent that the teachers may forget alternative discourses and choices and lose sight of the pluri-dimensions of dissections as a scientific practice (for instance, a consequence may be that doing dissection is the way to become a ‘true’ biologist, i.e. one who confronts the ‘real world’, etc.). This is exactly what ‘didactic transposition’ is about: the institutional (re)construction of school knowledge for teaching purposes. Transposed knowledge has – at best – a family resemblance with social practices outside schools, but they do not carry the full complexity and the set of sociohistorical conditions in which they were constructed. In the French framework, didactic transposition is considered as an unavoidable process to make knowledge teachable and legitimate in schools. It starts in the making of the curriculum texts and teaching materials (external transposition), and it carries on within the classroom, where the teachers make decisions about their teaching methods, select teaching activities, etc. (internal transposition). I never had any experience of dissection in my high school scientific curriculum in France in the late 1980s. At this time, such a practice was already subtly avoided by many teachers. A ‘lost opportunity’ Mrs. Bell would say. I realize now that my teachers had already chosen for me that I would not try my hand at dissections, whereas it was a possibility offered in the biology programme. This is a transposition act directly related to the teachers’ personal values and beliefs. The interesting feature of the concept of didactic transposition is that it acknowledges that the knowledge embedded in the curriculum texts is never fully ‘well defined’. Knowing that, it forces us, as teachers and researchers, to find ways to rebuild its complexity with the students’ participation and not just to ‘pass it on’ to them. The feminist approach that you suggest offers some ways to challenge the didactic transposition regarding the nature of scientific practices.

References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010). Orientations matter. In D. Coole and S. Frost (Eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (pp. 234–257). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

52  Sara Tolbert Barad, K. (2000). Reconceiving scientific literacy as agential literacy: or, learning how to intra-act responsibly within the world. In R. Reid and S. Traweek (Eds.), Doing Science + Culture (pp. 221–258). New York: Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20 (3), 168–187. Barton, A. and Osborne, M. (Eds.) (2001). Teaching Science in Diverse Settings: Marginalized Discourses and Classroom Practices. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Bazzul, J. (2015). The sociopolitical importance of genetic, phenomenological approaches to science teaching and learning. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 10 (2), 495–503. Bruna, K.R. (2010). Ways with words: language play and the science learning of Mexican newcomer adolescents. In A. Rodriguez (Ed.), Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy (pp. 61–80). Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Caillot, M. (2007). The building of a new academic field: the case of French didactiques. European Educational Research Journal, 6 (2), 125–130. Chevallard, Y. (1985). La transposition didactique: du savoir savant au savoir enseigné (3ème éd. revue et augmentée). Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage, Ed. Chevallard, Y. and Bosch, M. (2014). Didactic transposition in mathematics education. In S. Lerman (Éd.), Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education (pp. 170–174). Netherlands: Springer. De Villiers, R. and Monk, M. (2005). The first cut is the deepest: reflections on the state of animal dissection in biology education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37(5), 583–600. Fox Keller, E. (1984). A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara ­McClintock. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity & Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higgins, M. and Tolbert, S. (forthcoming). Designing a Curriculum (to-come) for ­Response-able Inheritance in Science Education. Parallax. Hug, B. (2008). Re-examining the practice of dissection: what does it teach? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 40 (1), 91–105. Lenz Taguchi, H. and Palmer, A. (2013). A more ‘livable’ school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-/well-being with (in) school environments. Gender and Education, 25(6), 671–687. Mayberry, M. (2001). Reproductive and resistant pedagogies: the comparative roles of collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy in science education. In M.  ­Mayberry, B. Subramaniam and L. Weasler (Eds.), Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (pp. 145–156). London: Routledge. Mazzei, L.A. (2014). Beyond an easy sense: a diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20 (6), 742–746. Milano, R.N. (2010). Biology Teachers’ Dissection Practices and Influences that Lead to their Adoption: An Exploratory Research. New Haven: Southern Connecticut State University. Oakley, J. (2009). Under the knife: animal dissection as a contested school science activity. Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education, 1 (2), 59–67.

Queering dissection  53 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60 (2), 197–216. Scantlebury, K. (2005). Learning from Flyy girls: feminist research ethics in urban schools. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6 (1), Art. 32, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0501321. Scantlebury, K. (2014). Gender matters: building on the past, recognizing the present, and moving toward the future. In N. Lederman, and S. Abell (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Science Education (2nd ed., pp. 187–203). New York and London: Routledge. Stengers, I. (2000). The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: University of ­M innesota Press. Weinstein, M. and Broda, M. (2009). Resuscitating the critical in the biological grotesque: blood, guts, biomachismo in science/education and human guinea pig discourse. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 4 (4), 761–780. Wickman, P.-O. (2006). Aesthetic Experience in Science Education: Learning and ­Meaning-making as Situated Talk and Action. Mahwah: L. Erlbaum.

5 Gender, the postmodern paradigm shift and Pedagogical Anthropology Anja Kraus

Introduction: pedagogy and European modernity The pedagogical imparting of social values through schooling usually happens in the context of a particular society. The concept of society refers to a nation and to a geographical and social territory, as well as pertaining to a defined population who are subject to a political authority and who, more or less, share a set of social expectations. In the contemporary global world there is, on the whole, international agreement about the coherence of most territories. However, in diverse global societies there are multifaceted populations who hold a range of different values that coexist with, but are often in subservience to, mainstream ideas, or they operate at the margins of society. Thus, there is a dominance of certain social ideas in a society, including educational systems. Dominant ideas are associated with the most powerful groups who occupy most of the mainstream public and social space. According to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), hegemonic orders of knowledge are thus formed, claiming universality and being comprehended as q­ uasi-natural social reality. Individuals and groups constitute their subjectivities and identities within such hegemonic orders. For those from non-dominant groups this often involves cultural negotiation and the development of hybrid identities. There is a strong and, perhaps, inevitable tendency for schooling to only represent the concerns and values of certain social subgroups. Historically this would have been free men, nobility and monastery novices. Today it is those classified as legal residents and those with high socio-economic status. In the European context, this has meant that white men from well-to-do families have had an undue influence on schooling and the dominant values it represents. Others, such as the socially and economically disadvantaged, immigrants and/or women, have been or still are (to some degree) marginalized, ignored or excluded. Such inequalities have been recognized by resident and international populations and they have formed a range of political and social movements, underpinned by ideologies such as feminisms. These movements contest dominant, mainstream views and direct their actions towards defining, establishing and achieving political, economic, personal and social rights

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for marginalized social groups. Feminism directs its attention primarily to the achievement of social justice and equality for women and girls. The Enlightenment movement and its mode of thought and ethics was the most influential in 17th-century Europe. Its main effects were to increase secularization and to switch the focus of ethical and social concerns and debates to social equality with exclusive reference to rationality and to human rights. As an analytical concept and normative ideal, the Enlightenment intersects with the political and intellectual currents of modernism. For example, it valued the rejection of tradition; the prioritization of individualism; freedom and formal equality; the notion of human perfectibility; faith in social, scientific and technological progress; and rationalization and professionalization (Berman, 2010). During this Age of Reason, scholars adopted empiricism, which importantly proposed that knowledge and theories should be based upon methodical observations and scientific experiment. This approach and perspective have endured and remain a central influence in research and evaluation regarding European schooling. The Enlightenment approach to education also has global significance in underpinning international league tables and postulating that populations have rights to education and that schools should be democratic. The Enlightenment programme puts reason and rationality – which refer to the quality or state of being reasonable (rather than emotion or ­engagement) – at the heart of all exploration. With reference to grammar and logics (and some suggest rhetoric), cognitively controlled knowledge is supposed to enable a person to put thought and reason above the particularities of the very conditions at hand. Sensual spontaneity and understanding are transcended (Husserl, [1936] 1970). In the process of reasoning, the perspectives of other rational beings are deliberated and diverse requirements are taken into account; hereby a perspective is broadened and generalized. The fundamental principle of reason is the Kantian categorical imperative: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant, [1785] 2005 cited in Korsgaard, 1985: 24). Accordingly, reason is about considering what one ought, rather than what one wants to do: to reason means to take social responsibility. However, reason will not emerge spontaneously, it needs discipline. ‘Man can only become man by education’ says Kant ([1803] 2003: 6). His idea was that human nature could be continually improved. The individual is considered a part of the educative programme of Enlightenment, defined as man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. This, however, poses an ambiguity: ‘One of the greatest problems of education is how to unite submission and the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of exercising his free will’ (Kant, [1803] 2003: 27). Pedagogy is thus not natural, it needs plans; and pedagogy – understood as the science of education – should therefore be raised to academic status and studied at a university level. This is, in the fact, what occurred in Germany, Sweden and other European countries but not, interestingly, in the UK.

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Enlightenment principles and contemporary schooling Pedagogical theory and practice are mostly aimed at developing definite interventions in previously designed pedagogical situations. On the one hand, pedagogic interventions are designed so that teaching improves from the perspective of what society needs; on the other hand, there is also a high regard for the personality, responsibility and autonomy of the individual. The child, caring and educating are framed normatively and education is seen as inevitably connecting society and the individual in morally and ethically desirable ways. This stress on normative social framing as well as on the rights, duties and responsibility of the individual teacher and child to fulfil them is aligned with Enlightenment thinking. Indeed, three key principles (among others) that shape education today can be traced back to the ideas of the Enlightenment. First, the main aim of school is widely regarded as being to impart available knowledge and to develop abilities that are oriented towards previously set national standards. Second, important pedagogical concepts like competencies, learning processes, efforts, etc. can be/are standardized and metrified as measurable outputs. Third, in a modernist context, human and social qualities such as gender and gendering are considered to be normative factors which either need to be left outside of what is considered relevant in education or need to be the subject of deliberation within educative contexts. This historical focus of Enlightenment thought on reasoning as a virtue has become overshadowed. The monopoly of power is today ruled by the semantics of economy, government, police and justice and not by reasoning. The earliest criticisms of the ideas of the Enlightenment were by romanticists whose thought did not have much influence over the pedagogical sciences or science more generally. After the Second World War in Germany, another broad and strong critique of the ethical impact of reason was developed: especially of the categorical imperative. Horkheimer and Adorno ([1947] 2002) reassembled the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged and concluded that Enlightenment ideals were themselves based on a false sense of historical progression and development. Arendt (1986) in her analysis of crimes in the Third Reich deeply questions the moral value of the categorical imperative. Her critique refers to one of the major figures in the organization of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, who stated that he lived all his life according to Kantian precept, including his complete obedience to Nazi authority. In his case, the Kantian imperative turned into: Act only according to a maxim that is made to a universal law. These critiques of the Enlightenment project align with those put forward by feminists (see Gilligan, 1982) which disclose the sexist ideas that are embedded in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Feminist understandings of gender are one of the driving forces of this critique on Enlightenment ideas which I return to later in this chapter. However, Arnold Farr (2002) warns that if anti-discriminatory perspectives confuse critique with criticism, there may be a tendency to reject certain

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traditional (Enlightenment) texts, principles and ideas that may be necessary for an effective emancipatory philosophy and politics. He argues that the demand of universality made by the categorical imperative is not antithetical to anti-discriminatory theories, but rather a necessary ingredient of emancipatory approaches. The question then arises: how can the critique of the Enlightenment and modernism be brought together with the emancipatory potential of the categorical imperative? In the following, we will bear this question in mind. My argument will suggest that these controversial ideas cannot be reconciled but they can be held in a – hopefully productive – abeyance, when ciphering out the ethical agenda of gender in the frame of Pedagogical Anthropology as a perspective on pedagogy.

Pedagogical Anthropology, postmodernism and tacit knowledge Pedagogical Anthropology refers to a philosophy of education (in German: ‘Bildungstheorie’) that has been developed with reference to the humanistic European pedagogical tradition (in German: ‘Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’), which aims at bringing the vitality and complexity of the pedagogical relationship into the foreground of pedagogy. The rationale of Pedagogical Anthropology resembles the Enlightenment idea of emancipation. However, instead of basing a framework upon a socially normative sense of what individuals need to develop according to a rationalistic sense of individual responsibility, it focuses on the relationship between adult and child or teacher and student which, it argues, is fundamentally different from other personal relationships. Nohl (1949: 134) describes it as a ‘compassionate relationship between an adult and a developing being who attains his/her life and shape on his/her own’. The relationship is asymmetric as the adult is there for the child in a way that the child is not there for the adult; it is moreover ‘the loving relationship of a mature person with a ‘developing’ person, entered into for the sake of child so that he can discover his own life and form’ (Nohl, cited in Spiecker, 1984: 203). The very asymmetric relationship is directed to the child’s right to have his/her own as-good-as-possible future. The most important quality of this relationship is pedagogical tact, i.e. tactfully holding back insofar that the child can act for him- or herself. Critical to this pedagogical relationship is the awareness, that upbringing comes to an end when the child no longer needs to be called (by the teacher or adult) to self-activity. At this point the child has the wherewithal to educate himor herself. Seen as whole, the pedagogical relationship has its own dignity: ‘The dignity of practice is independent of theory; practice only becomes more conscious with theory’ (Schleiermacher, [1826] 1957: 11). This dignity counts also for the rather distinct categorical imperative of never doing a child wrong. A child should be set free, and as much as it is able to, take responsibility. Not least, pedagogy is determined here as a further factor in the social balance of power, inasmuch as the pedagogues should guarantee that

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no instance rules over the child: ‘the educator must defend the youth’s individual right to development and self-realization against unjustified external interventions’ (Wulf, 2003: 31). Some important considerations arise from this. The sacrosanct dignity of the specific personal relationship between adult and child cannot be described with language, and it is also difficult for educators to reflect on this relationship in an immediate or direct sense. The pedagogical relationship is moreover dependent on the individuals, on social and cultural impacts, as well as on the circumstances at hand. It is thus shaped in various ways by the context and in the moment – which means it is not at the disposal of a generalized form of moralization. The pedagogical relationship unfolds its own goals and agendas, dependent on the pedagogical framing and the intention to work towards setting free the entrusted children. There is thus no ultimate and universal categorical imperative to apply, even if it forms the underpinning ground for this project: ‘Education can only be deduced from the aims of life; and morality has not been able to define these aims in a universally recognized manner’ (Dilthey, 1958: 7). If we follow the rationale from Pedagogical Anthropology through, then the standardization and metrification of the pedagogical relationship and its representation as scientific evidence is therefore not possible. Based on these ideas, Wulf and Zirfas (1994: 6) draw out the following consequences for a programme of Pedagogical Anthropology: Pedagogical Anthropology proceeds in a pluralistic manner. It thereby avoids the premature hardening of its knowledge, and can remain open for the non-identical. This pluralism, which is clearly distinct from arbitrariness, results in a principal openness […], which does not aim at reduction, but rather at an increase of complexity of anthropological knowledge. Practices, structures and ideas that are studied from an emic standpoint (from within a distinct social group) are confronted with problems of representation, interpretation, the construction of deconstruction and methodological diversity, and this is also the case with children’s perspectives, non-European cultures and marginalized perspectives. Historicity and culturality are central dimensions of anthropological knowledge: ‘These dimensions … [make] an important contribution to human beings’ understanding of themselves in the twenty-first century’, Wulf (2013: xii) says – and this is certainly the case with regard to gender. From this perspective, Wulf and Zirfas (2007) put forward an idea of a specific rationality that is integrative of pedagogical relationships and applicable to practical issues. Their argument unfolds as follows. The Enlightenment tradition treats ideas about pedagogy with reference to a definitive social reality. It reads social reality as if it were a text, that is to say, social reality is dealt with as if it were ruled by completeness, closeness, unambiguity and linearity. On the basis of this preconception, important pedagogical concepts

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such as competence, effort, learning, etc. – and also gender – are put into the logical scheme of a text. Definitive statements are then made – To be a girl/ boy/other means to be … – because pedagogical phenomena are deemed to exactly fit the description of them, which is often reduced to (a kind of ) text on norms and normativity and personal, social, economic and political demands. In this way, norms get standardized and, in an optimistic way, valid rules for an effective practical pedagogy are formulated. This refers us back to the categorical imperative, e.g. Act only according to that maxim by which you can, at the same time will that it should become a universal law, or Act only according to a maxim that is made to a universal law. But, the core of pedagogy – the pedagogical relationship – is ignored. In order to grasp pedagogy ex-post facto and from a humanistic perspective, Wulf and Zirfas (2007) first took issue with Lyotard’s ([1979] 1984) proclamation that postmodernism marked a paradigm shift with the ‘end of (modernist) master narratives’, such as emancipation, autonomy and societal progress. While modernity was characterized by outstanding human ideals and normative frames, postmodernity instead stresses self-interpretation, contingency, discursivity and staging. Then, the multimodal utterances and self-­interpretations of acting persons; the contingency of social and cultural phenomena; the discursivity of all kinds of individual, social and cultural orders as well as the stage character of a phenomenon are brought into focus. In essence, postmodernist thinking problematizes the concept of objectivity both in theoretical and in empirical research. Linked to this, the principle of consensus is put at stake and is investigated. A much greater variety of interpretation are put at (researchers and participants) disposal. From this perspective, new fields of social research are opened up. From a postmodern perspective, gender is positioned as an interpretative process and as social ­ascription – To be a girl/boy/other is said to mean/may mean … – and a much greater emphasis is placed upon the materiality of the body, experience and history. However, a postmodern perspective might raise certain dangers for considerations of gender: if there being no evaluation rules, then how to establish the relative value of the perspectives being provided? The humanistic tradition of Pedagogical Anthropology provides a way to navigate and limit the potential in postmodernism for arbitrariness. It does this by pointing to the specifics of the pedagogical relationship and considers postmodern polyphony, not in terms of pedagogical aims and goals, but as the inevitable conditions for pedagogy as such. While many of these conditions can be seen, analysed and grasped, however some of them remain tacit and indescribable and less open to description and rational analysis. The interpretation of the polyphonic weave thus goes along with the ‘tacit turn’ in the Educational Sciences (see Bergstedt et al., 2012 and https://tacitdimensions.wordpress.com). By situating the concept of gender within the tacit turn, gender is seen mainly as knowledge which is imparted bodily and that comprises a whole range of non-explicit dimensions that are crucial in shaping pedagogic processes and practices. The analysis of tacit knowledge refers to implicit learning

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and knowing (Polanyi, 1958) based on non-episodic, incidental learning. Implicit knowing is considered not to be articulable in formal and systematic language, scientific formulae or specifications. However, it is represented in practices, for example, such as the pedagogical practices identified as part of the ‘hidden curriculum’ ( Jackson, 1968). Thinking with the tacit turn in relation to gender is then seen as being about the implicit attributions of particular qualities to the members of a certain social group. As such, implicit stereotypes or biases can be learned through past experiences, they are inherent in practices or they are (often without awareness) activated by the environment. The categorical imperative becomes important again, because it concerns the ongoing analysis of such factors in practices – To be a girl/boy/ other evolves in partially tacit terms … In the next section, I turn to some of the understandings that can be reached regarding how gender informs the field of theoretical and practical pedagogy.

Gender as an aspect of everyday practice: materiality, the body and the tacit turn As with much gendered and feminist research, Pedagogical Anthropology sees gender as something that cannot be ‘set apart’, separated off, or that can serve purely as an analytical perspective. It is moreover seen as a part of our daily practice and, thus, it is in a way inevitable to take it into account. As gender and gendering are taking place all the time and everywhere, the specific dynamics connected to it occur in a spontaneous way when participating in social life. This is mostly done practically and theoretically at once. In Pedagogical Anthropology, however, there are different definitions of gender that can affect the pedagogical relationship. First, gender signifies a range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between masculinity and femininity. Gender thus refers to socially determined roles and relations between males, females and other genders. Second, gender serves as a category to describe the phenomena of social life. As a sociocultural construct it is based on social norms and values that define the roles of men, women and other genders in society. Third, gender is an analytical tool which can help us to understand the constitution of certain practices and the significant knowledge domains. Analysis is here seen as a matter of practice. This approach seems to be the most useful for exploring the vitality and complexity of gender in pedagogical relationships and there I focus on this definition in the remainder of this chapter. I situate my discussion of Pedagogical Anthropology within the perspective of material feminism, which focuses attention on ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal practices’ (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008: 3) and I wish to show the strength of this as an analytical approach. Moi (1999) argues that the phenomenological category of the lived body can capture the way the material features of our bodies play a role in our subjective sense of self without giving a reductionist biological account of such

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embodiment. We read in Haraway’s (1991) ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ that gender is embedded in interpenetrating diverse material, spatial and temporal dimensions and that the boundaries between these are collapsing. She writes: Mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The ‘multinational’ material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-­maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble. (Haraway, 1991: 165) Haraway makes it clear that what it means to be a certain body (gender) is constituted as an interdependency of public and private, that gender is used for establishing certain power relations and that these relations can also be exploited for re-signifying and changing society. To look at gender as a lived practice means then to utilize it as an analytical tool to work out how the concepts of labour, individuation and other discursive power lines operate in a society. By practising gender as self-interpretation, contingency, discursivity and staging, hegemonies can be re-signified and changed. The underlying idea behind Haraway’s writing positions gender as performance. This perspective is also evident in Judith Butler’s (1990) work Gender Trouble, which characterizes gender as the result of reiterated performances which produce the effect of a static, so to say ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ gender, while obscuring the contradiction and instability of gender acts. This effect produces what we consider to be true gender. However, such truth is only a narrative or performative that is sustained by, to quote Butler (1990: 179), ‘the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them’. According to Butler (1990), an agreement on a gender formation is the result of social power and manipulation. Thus, a gender arrangement can also be changed through tacit application of such forces. One such example is ‘queer’ which both asserts and negates the implicit stereotypes of gender. Originally, used to describe strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric behaviour or looks, the word queer was re-appropriated in the 1980s as a neutral or positive self-identifier for non-heterosexual gender minorities. By establishing a social community as well as asserting a political identity, it became a programmatic term in a political sense. To appear as queer is then understood as a means to discover and develop implicit as well as explicit phenomena of power. From the perspective of Pedagogical Anthropology such identifying, re-signifying and changing hegemonies by practising gender can be done in a pedagogical relationship, and it can also be performed as a pedagogical relationship. From this perspective, the concept of gender is recognized less as descriptive, and more as an analytical tool that helps us to understand the

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constitution of institutions, procedures, practices and dominant knowledge domains at hand: What counts as gender in a certain situation? As the answer is (usually) dominant knowledge, the power domains at hand can be detected and unpacked. Hence, focusing on a body-phenomenological approach which embraces material feminism is an apt methodology for covering all kinds of anthropological questions. It can help us to explore the spectrum of diverse applications of the term gender, including bringing the body into the discussion on knowledge acquisition (Lund, 2013), and it can provide conceptual tools to develop reliable accounts of pedagogical relationships. This includes the categorical imperative which is inherent to the analysis: the rules and laws of social engagement are uncovered.

Pedagogical Anthropology: corporeality and the lived body Pedagogical Anthropology builds upon body-phenomenological findings by taking postmodern approaches into account. Like postmodern approaches body phenomenology is also interested in the materiality of the body, of experience and of history in terms of self-interpretation, contingency, discursivity and staging. However, in considering these terms it refers to the ‘lived body’ (Meyer-Drawe, 1999). ‘Beginning with the lived body’ means to take the human body as the most basic means for orientation and as the basis for pedagogic interactions. It is argued that we cannot ever overcome our body dispositions – such bodily disposition not only gives us an orientation, but even constitutes our orientation. Bodies are not only social identities enclosed by thinking about the body but also corporeal entities allowing us to ‘think through the body’ (Shusterman, 2012). Gender is instrumental to the corporeality of female and male bodies. However, the notion of ‘thinking through the body’ also allows for the unfolding of many different, and many more perspectives, on corporeal or bodily existence. I mention four perspectives here by way of illustration. First, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1961] 1993) phenomena come up as sensual impressions, not-articulable or articulated perceptions; subliminal thoughts are the origin of speaking in silence. Our body (for example, our way of walking) is our: natural attitude, we do not have perceptions (­Merleau-Ponty, [1945] 2005). We do not have a consciousness about our living body as we cannot distance ourselves from it: you are your body. The lived body is a ‘point zero’ of the orientation in an individual or situational field of seeing, acting or speaking (Waldenfels, 1998: 22). At point zero (where we always already are) one becomes (tacitly) aware of the determining factors of the constitution of a phenomenon. The phenomenological observer attempts to acquire the categories and rules of thinking and acting as a kind of native, thus carrying out research in an emic mode. However, there are gaps and blind spots at which observers’ own and extraneous categories and rules come

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into play in terms of sense-making. Gender is such a blind spot, one just is, in a way, one’s own gender, and it is difficult to describe it in detail. Second, by a shifting of perspective, we can look at our body as an object. This means, it is possible to objectify one’s own gendered body, but our descriptions are not solely the perspective from inside – we see ourselves from the eyes of another and through pre-given language, social norms and categories. Third, the body shows and even presents itself as something or in some way to others. When it comes to gender, Jagger (2008) points to its instability of it as a concept. This instability is often unacknowledged because it operates (as Butler notes above) and is made visible through repetitive acts and works as, to quote Jagger (2008: 29), a ‘fictional ideal that regulates the production of sexed subjects and identities’, and serves as a medium for the serial production of bodily appearance. Fourth, in a further shift of perspective, Jagger (2008) proposes that one can also grasp the fictional idea of gender(ing) through one’s own being; for example, a gender learning task can be developed by changing the parameters of one’s gender and exploring the responses of others (for example, by wearing gender inappropriate clothes or occupying space normally populated by the other gender). These activities expose power relations and places of gendering, including those embedded in the materials, symbolic orders and meanings connected to different gender concepts. Although the phenomenological approach is sometimes criticized for being somewhat obscure as it binds social acts to the subjective lived experience, all four aspects of exploration described above allow us to highlight the dignity of the pedagogical relationship, by respecting the multifaceted ways in which it is experienced through the gendered lived body and how individual bodies are products of culture, heritage and history. Such concerns are central to Pedagogical Anthropology and align with Haraway’s (1997: 305) proposal for a ‘non-essentialist feminist standpoint theory’. Such a theory is underpinned by ‘situated knowledge’ and flexible thinking, in which an ongoing criti­ araway cal reflection on contextual references and connections takes place. H (1995: 85) proposes the advantages of recognizing a ‘partial perspective’ that gives ‘priority to challenge, deconstruction, passionate constructions, interwoven connections, and the hope for change of knowledge systems and perspectives’. This proposal is important in that it enables research on practices that attend to the multimodality of utterances and self-interpretations of the acting persons, the contingency of social and cultural phenomena, the discursivity of all kinds of individual, social and cultural orders as well as the staged character of phenomena. However, to take on a ‘partial perspective’ also means, in a way, to free an individual to interpret him-/herself and to impel them to be aware of the contingency of social and cultural phenomena. In addition, taking a ‘partial perspective’ in analysis and judgement discourages us from acting according to a maxim that has been made into a universal law. If we were to make ‘partial perspective’ a maxim of analysis then we

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could utilize it to shape pedagogic processes and practices. In Pedagogical Anthropology this is achieved by contesting the dominant values associated with researching and evaluating pedagogy in education. Knowledge is something which is explored as contextualized and dependent on perspectives and methods: becoming a critical being within education, then, is learning to relate one’s own understandings to those of others.

Conclusion The chapter has considered the legacy of modernist, Enlightenment education systems and has critiqued their emphasis on reason, measurement, outcomes and evidence. It has proposed Pedagogical Anthropology as an undertaking able to transform Enlightenment ideas of emancipation by including the complexity highlighted by postmodern perspectives, the tacit turn in pedagogy and the importance of the body. The line of argument has led to the proposal to focus on situated knowledges as a scientific approach appropriate for gaining insights into corporeal reflexivity within a pedagogical relationship, in which diverse perspectives are appreciated. The aim is of the chapter is to identify, re-signify and change research hegemonies. The next step is for empirical studies in European didactics to draw on pedagogical anthropological perspectives to more deeply sound out the pedagogical impacts of corporeality in processes of signification.

Paired dialogue: ways of knowing – bodies, knowledge and power Carol A. Taylor This is a theoretically ambitious chapter which traces a series of historical and cultural shifts in the European intellectual landscape and relates these to education through the concept and practice of Pedagogical Anthropology. The scope is impressive, covering the founding principles and legacy of European Enlightenment modernity, the critique of this project by leading proponents of the Frankfurt school and the paradigm shift entailed in postmodernist understandings. Threaded through this – and what spoke to me particularly about the chapter – is a concern with how gender is conceptualized, understood and shaped as a set of sociocultural practices in these different ‘regimes of truth’ (to borrow Foucault’s [1980] familiar phrase) in the practices of schooling. Like Anja, I am interested in the Enlightenment project and have written about its contested legacy (Taylor, 2016). Like Anja, I can see both what is valuable about it – its move towards secular, disciplinary and rational ways of knowing – and how its values have historically worked as an exclusionary cultural logic which, in essence,

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has privileged particular ways of knowing (reason, rationalism, cognitivism, positivist science) and particular social groups (white, male, European, middle class). The Enlightenment legacy has, then, to borrow another phrase from Foucault (1980), played out educationally as a normative form of ‘power/knowledge’ to ‘other’ and exclude women, people of colour, Indigenous peoples, dis/abled people, among others, all of whom have been classified and labelled as emotional, immature, lacking in reason, less civilized, less developed. Such otherings have had real social consequences for the educational life chances and participation of those others, resulting in overt and covert forms of exclusion. In my own work, I have considered these exclusions from a posthumanist/new material feminist perspective to think about how the Enlightenment legacy has othered non-human bodies, reduced animals to meat for human use and enabled humans to ‘dispose’ of them in often cruel, violent and careless ways (Taylor, 2017). This had led me to considerations of how a posthuman/ new material feminist perspective offers an opening to a conceptualization of education as a more inclusive, joyful, troubling, difficult and environmentally sustainable ethical-­political project. In this, it reconnects with some of the profound depths of that great ­European concept of Bildung (self-formation) which has sadly always been absent in UK and other Anglophone educational contexts and which, as Anja points out, links in important ways with education as ethical-­political citizenship. Perhaps the strongest resonance between Anja’s chapter and my own research interests can be found in the ways we both focus in on the body and its materiality in pedagogy as the key site (a) for noticing how gendered inequalities ‘get done’ and (b) for targeting pedagogical work oriented to promoting greater gender equality. Both Anja and I agree that such work needs to be situated in a feminist approach to pedagogy and, as many of the chapters point out, there is a long legacy of such work in the Anglopone tradition. While Anja’s concept of tacit knowledge is different, the focus on corporeal knowledge is very similar to mine. For example, I have explored empirically how gendered bodies are produced through the micro-dynamics of spatial-material practices in a UK sociology classroom (Taylor, 2013). My final point concerns the analytical framework of Pedagogical Anthropology which, as an intellectual endeavour in Germany, is totally new to me. I found the focus on care, tact and dignity an important reminder of the need to keep in mind that long line of feminist work (see Gilligan, 1982) on an ethic of care in our current efforts to do feminist work in classrooms. We need more of this sort of work in UK higher education which seems to be heading inexorably down a path (Continued)

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of marketization in which the learning-teaching nexus is increasingly shaped as a contractual one. I was left with a few intriguing questions. How can the theory of Pedagogical Anthropology be put to work in empirical investigation? How can it be deployed in the practical enactments of learning and teaching to promote gendered equality? How might teachers actually take it up and use it to make their classrooms more of a space for feminist pedagogy to come alive?

References Alaimo, S. & Hekman, S. (2008). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arendt, H. (1986). The Origins of Totalitarism. London: André Deutsch. Bergstedt, B., Herbert, A., Kraus, A. & Wulf, C. (Eds.) (2012). Tacit Dimensions of Pedagogy. Münster, New York, Munich and Berlin: Waxmann. Berman, M. (2010). All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. ­London and Brooklyn: Verso. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Dilthey, W. (1958). Gesammelte Schriften. Stuttgart and Göttingen: B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Farr, A. (2002). Can a philosophy of race afford to abandon the Kantian categorical imperative? Journal of Social Philosophy, 33 (1), 17–32. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings ­1972–1977. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1995). Die Neuerfindung der Natur. Primaten, Cyborgs und Frauen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Onco Mouse™. Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T.W. ([1947] 2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, USA: Leland Stanford Junior University. Husserl, E. ([1936] 1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Jackson, P. (1968). Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston. Jagger, G. (2008). Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Kant, I. ([1803] 2003). On Education. Mineola and New York: Dover Publications Inc. Kant, I. ([1785] 2005). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Peterborough and ­Orchard Park: Broadview Press.

Gender, the postmodern paradigm shift  67 Korsgaard, C.M. (1985). Kant’s formula of universal law. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 66 (1–2), 24–47. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lund, A. (2013). Staging gender: the articulation of tacit gender dimensions in drama classes in a Swedish context. Gender and Education, 25, 907–922. Lyotard, J.-F. ([1979] 1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota: University of Minnesota. Merleau-Ponty, M. ([1961] 1993). Eye and mind. Trans. by Michael Smith. In G. Johnson & M. Smith (Eds.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (pp. 121–149). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. ([1945] 2005). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Meyer-Drawe, K. (1999). Zum metaphorischen Gehalt von Bildung und Erziehung. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 45 (2), 161–175. Moi, T. (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nohl, H. (1949). Padägogik aus dreiβig Jahren (Thirty Years of Pedagogics). Frankfurt/M.: G. Schulte-Blumke. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schleiermacher, F. ([1826] 1957). Pädagogische Schriften. Die Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1826. Vol. I. Düsseldorf and Munich: Verlag Helmut Küpper. Shusterman, R. (2012). Thinking through the Body. Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiecker, B. (1984). The pedagogical relationship. Oxford Review of Education, 10 (2), 203–209. Taylor, C.A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25 (6), 688–703. Taylor, C.A. (2016). Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education. Higher Education, 17 (3), 419–435. Taylor, C.A. (2017). For Hermann: how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Or, what my dog has taught me about a post-personal academic life. In S. Riddle, M. Harmes & P.A. Danaher (Eds.), Producing Pleasure within the Contemporary University (pp. 107–119). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Waldenfels, B. (1998). Grenzen der Normalisierung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Wulf, C. (2003). Educational Science. Hermeneutics, Empirical Research, Critical Theory. Münster, New York, Munich and Berlin: Waxmann. Wulf, C. (2013): Anthropology: A Continental Perspective. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wulf, C. & Zirfas, J. (Eds.) (1994). Theorien und Konzepte Pädagogischer Anthropologie. Donaueschingen: Auer. Wulf, C. & Zirfas, J. (Eds.) (2007). Pädagogik des Performativen. Theorien, Methoden, Perspektiven. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz.

6 Tackling intersecting gender inequalities through disciplinary-based higher education curricula A Bernsteinian approach Andrea Abbas Introduction In this chapter I use the sets of concepts associated with codes, the pedagogic device and knowledge structures (that were developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein, 1990, 2000) to explore the links between intersecting gender inequalities and the academic disciplines that are produced, taught and learned in universities. I suggest that these concepts can help to identify and describe how different academic disciplines implicitly and explicitly (re)produce, interrupt or transform intersecting gender inequalities in varied ways in different university contexts. Analysis based on them can underpin strategies to transform curricula so that they can begin to contribute to generating greater equality. The Bernsteinian approach I develop here has its roots in previous empirical studies I have conducted with colleagues (e.g. Abbas et al., 2016; Ashwin et al., 2017; Little et al., 2016; McLean et al., 2017). Here, I use the term intersecting gender inequalities to denote that gender inequalities are embedded in social processes simultaneously with those that generate social class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability and so forth. Intersecting gender inequalities are embodied in individual students’ and academics’ bodies, identities, actions, experiences, thoughts and so forth, and they are embedded in all the materials that constitute curriculum such as text books, teachers’ actions, class plans etc. (Abbas, 2004; see also Chapters 7, 9 and 11). The focus of the analytical and transformative approach I advocate here aims to expose and identify how to begin to transform these materially diverse and historically generated phenomena. For example, how physics curricula categorise and hierarchically value diverse men and women, people with disabilities and different ethnic groups, when it includes or excludes them as authors, objects of study or students. Also, how curricula hierarchically order different groups of people through the types of relationships that are embedded within disciplinary knowledge, for example, by identifying who defines its core concerns. Hence, it will help to expose how within universities the same processes that shape and facilitate the selection and passing on of curriculum generate and codetermine intransigent intersecting gender inequalities (Choo & Ferree, 2010). All aspects of curricula and knowledge

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are deeply significant to configuring the disciplinary bases that materialise in universities and they affect intersecting gender inequalities (Harding, 1986, 2008; Martin, 2001 [1987]; Young, 2008). However, concepts like Bernstein’s can help to identify and explore these complex phenomena. Networks of codetermining processes have embedded intersecting gender inequalities in the production and dissemination of valued knowledge over generations. These issues have been raised in a wide range of critical literature from a variety of different perspectives. Feminists, critical race theorists, those studying ethnicity, postcolonial scholars, disability activists and theoreticians of knowledge and social justice have all engaged with these issues (Connell, 2007; Fricker, 2007; Harding, 1986, 2008; Jansen, 2009; de Sousa Santos, 2016; Smith 1990; Wajcman 1991, 2006). Together this work has charted how capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism and so forth have, over centuries, distorted our understanding of the world. It argues that processes of dominance have resulted in Western, malestream, white, ­European and Anglophile knowledge and interests coming to oppress and obliterate competing knowledges, epistemologies and interests. This literature is an important resource that can help educators and researchers who are seeking to understand the role of their disciplines in producing dominance and in thinking through ways of transforming disciplines to more inclusive forms. I conclude by suggesting that we need to reconceptualise a strategy for tackling these inequalities with longer term objectives. It will inevitably involve generations of scholars and all universities as intersecting gender inequalities have become embedded over generations.

The Bernsteinian conceptual framework Feminists have been articulating problems with what some call ‘malestream knowledge’ in different ways for centuries and yet curricula that reinforce intersecting gender inequalities go largely unnoticed within most university disciplines (Amsler, 2015; Leathwood & Read, 2009). Even in disciplines like sociology where critical knowledge is a vital part of the discipline, students with diverse identities studying varying forms of sociology curricula can graduate not understanding the way sociological and other knowledge carries biases that disadvantage certain groups (Abbas et al., 2016; Ashwin et al., 2017; McLean et al., 2017). I propose that Bernstein’s (2000) three sets of rules (codes, the pedagogic device and knowledge structures) might provide a way into this problem and a mechanism for raising questioning that could reveal biases and guide analysis and transformation. Codes Bernstein (2000: 109) suggests that codes explicitly and implicitly ‘select and integrate relevant meanings’ and translate ‘power and control into principles of communication’. They ‘differentially regulate forms of consciousness’ including our understanding of what groups of people are valid producers of

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disciplinary knowledge (Bernstein, 2000: 4). Codes which generate intersecting gender inequalities are constituted through power which is given by classification rules and control which is established by framing rules. Classifications convey power: by defining the relations between things they assert boundaries. For example, Wajcman (2006) suggested that information technology (IT) (as a discipline and an occupation) defined the technology used by women as notech or at best low tech. In sociology, explicitly students will learn to classify a variety of groups of people as being significant objects of study in relation to social class (mostly poorer people are the focus), gender (mostly women are the focus) and ethnicity (those ethnic groups who do less well in society are the focus). They will occasionally encounter authors from these groups on their curriculum, but the core named theorists tend to be men, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Michael Foucault, etc. (Abbas et al., 2016). Hence implicitly, important theorists are mostly classified as white European men. Sociology students in the UK will learn that women are overwhelmingly classified as students (around 73% in the UK in 2013) (Higher Education Information Data Base for Institutions, 2014). The social class, ethnic mix, age and (dis)ability status of students will vary considerably depending on the university and department, for example, from all white students to majority ethnic minority which will give diversity (McLean et al., 2017). However, importantly, even in mixed environments, sociology departments will draw on a mixture of implicit and explicit classifications in ways that hierarchically order students’ consciousnesses so that middle-class white men are associated with the production of knowledge and others are mostly students and objects of study. Engineering students will implicitly learn to classify white men as core theorists, students and practitioners (around 21% of engineering undergraduate students were female in 2016/2017) (HESA, 2018). While women are classified by their absence despite a raft of high-profile campaigns aimed at getting women into engineering (WES, 2018). It is clear when academics conduct research, teach and learn, in these disciplines they are involved in consciously and unconsciously (re)producing intersecting gender codes. It is also apparent that campaigns to change this are not working. These campaigns do suggest that women engineers are held in high regard, but they do not pay attention to the way that intersecting gendered inequalities are embedded in disciplinary knowledge and the perspectives that students learn and that permeate academic and professional environments through the classifications engineers are consciously and unconsciously internalising. Framing ‘regulates the relations’ within a discipline, but also defines how a discipline is realised in contexts inside and outside of the university setting (Bernstein, 2000: 12). For example, it denotes the timing and pacing of curricula and determines who can speak with authority about what at which stage of their studies. Framing has the potential to contribute to change because it is the mechanism through which knowledge is or is not given space for challenge and discussion: for example, determining whether undergraduate engineering curricula can give space to debating whether or not the

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knowledge and skills are effected by the male dominance of the discipline is a framing issue and it has the potential to change classifications. Classifications and framings can be strong or weak. When classifications are strong hierarchies tend also to be steep and rigid. When framings are strong control is with academic experts who convey the discipline to students. Hence, in disciplines with strong classifications and framings it will be more difficult to transform curricula. Where framings are weak the power may be with students to shape curricula and to challenge classifications. These are important factors if we are thinking about how to transform existing gender inequalities and, as I argue below, students are important to this endeavour. Critical scholars variously claim that northern, Western, anglophone or Eurocentric, malestream, colonising and/or ableist knowledge dominates university disciplines worldwide (Connell, 2007; Leathwood & Read, 2009; Le Grange, 2016; May & Ferri, 2005). Interpreting this wide range of perspectives in terms of classification and framing reveals three common problems. First, historical and present classifications and framings denote that members of some groups are not valid producers of the discipline (Bernstein, 2000). This is the case with engineering in large parts of Europe where women engineers of the past are largely not included in curricula and where from 2010 to 2013 only 0.1% of scientific journal articles focused on integrating gender into scientific understanding (and this was a 14% increase on the 2007/2008 statistics). Ethnic minority women are even more invisible (European Commission, 2015). Second, overall, disciplinary knowledge has not integrated codes developed from the standpoint of people who are outside of the categories of white, middle class and male: particularly to the level of them seeming to be core to the discipline. Hence, when disability is integrated into architecture it is rarely done by an architect with a disability who has engaged with the sciences that underpin architecture and has shaped or fundamentally transformed the knowledge as a consequence of their positionality. Third, members of excluded groups often only appear in curricula as objects of study and they can be defined by disciplines in ways that would be considered sexist, racist, disableist and so forth, by members of these groups (Leathwood & Read, 2009; Morton, 2016; Swain et al., 2003). Disciplinary perspectives can, therefore, generate classifications and framings that position disenfranchised groups as objects and invalidate them as experts in the things they may know experientially and intellectually. Fricker (2007) draws attention to the injustice of the undermining of the epistemic credibility of particular groups and de Sousa Santos (2016) writes of the obliteration of alternative epistemologies through scientific knowledges in postcolonial contexts, such as those in Western universities. Whilst there is a tendency for us to reproduce codes, they are not fixed. There is always pressure to weaken codes and there are always ‘contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas’ embedded within codes that have the potential to surface. Significantly, in this chapter I am trying to identify strategies to weaken codes (Bernstein, 2000: 15).

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The pedagogic device Analysis of the pedagogic device has the potential to help identify how to weaken codes that reinforce intersecting gender inequalities. It regulates and produces pedagogic communication through three sets of rules that act ‘selectively’ on the possible universe of knowledge that is ‘available to be pedagogised’ within a given discipline (Bernstein, 2000: 27). The pedagogic device describes the mechanisms (rules) through which disciplines draw boundaries around what and whose knowledge is considered appropriate and available to be contextualised and what knowledge is irrelevant. There are three nested aspects to the pedagogic device: the distributive rules which are shaped by the division of labour and therefore allocate knowledge hierarchically to different groups according to where they are located in the workforce; the recontextualising rules which select from this knowledge and relocate it into different pedagogic contexts tending to operate in ways that reinforce the distributive rules; and the evaluative rules, which define how students and others can validly express that they have acquired the knowledge, and are derived from the recontextualising rules (Bernstein, 2000: 28). These are all powerful sites through which codes that (re)produce intersecting gender inequalities could be challenged and transformed. Here, for brevity, I focus on the role of the first two sets of rules. The distributive rules distribute thinkable and unthinkable knowledge across society. Thinkable knowledge is reproductive or ‘how to’ knowledge. It allows the acquirer to reproduce the current social conditions, for example, by reproducing a bridge or teaching in the way of your teacher. Unthinkable knowledge gives the acquirer access to concepts that create a gap between the world as it is and the concept (Bernstein, 2000; Young 2008). In this gap the acquirer can project and envisage new possibilities for how the world could be. For example, they learn bridge-building principles that allow them to generate a different form of bridge or theoretical insights that allow them to develop and design new pedagogic approaches for students and new contexts. Distributive rules ‘mark and distribute who may transmit what to whom and under what conditions, and they attempt to set the outer limit of valid discourse’ (Bernstein, 2000: 21). Universities are conceptualised as a specialised field of production. Entry to specialised fields are strongly guarded because the knowledge that is created empowers those who have acquired unthinkable disciplinary knowledge to claim expertise and make decisions about future directions of fields and societies and it gives them access to resources. The distributive rules affect the hierarchical arrangement of different groups within disciplines and wider society. They tell us about who is allowed access to unthinkable knowledge and whose unthinkable knowledge is given credence by society. For example, the decolonising the curriculum movement and analysis of feminist knowledge in the curriculum tell us a lot about whose knowledge is and is not allowed into specialised field of production: in this case black communities and women are excluded, even if such knowledge

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shows the characteristics of powerful knowledge (Le Grange, 2016; do Mar Pereira, 2017). The distributive rules are helpful for thinking about how intersecting inequalities interact with one another in the generation of disciplines within universities. Whilst in Bernsteinian research the division of labour, that shapes the distributive rules, is usually associated with social class, if the concept is translated to think about gender it provides a powerful lens. Globally, women are less likely to be professors in universities and more likely to be lecturers or junior researchers, even in disciplines where they numerically exceed men, such as in psychology or social work (European Commission, 2015). Indeed, the number of women remaining in disciplines and doing well declines from undergraduate, to masters, to PhDs and then throughout the different career stages (European Commission, 2015. In the UK, ethnic minority men are less likely to be in the higher echelons of academia as professors than white men, but more likely than white women: ethnic minority women are less likely than all of these groups to be professors (3.3% of professors in the UK) (Christoffersen, 2017). Hence, the distributive rules imply that one of the major problems with a strategy of changing intersecting gender inequalities through curricula is that those at the top of the profession, who have legitimate unthinkable knowledge, are not diverse and their positions in society are such that they can be personally invested in maintaining the status quo. Hence, there are broader questions regarding how to challenge inequalities from within universities because inevitably those who run them are empowered by the current distributive rules. In addition, there is the question of who will do the job of historical repair regarding identifying the huge swathes of knowledge that could be powerful in shaping a fairer society and stronger and more powerful disciplines but which have been historically excluded from consideration due to the distributive rules. The recontextualising rules regulate and embed: (a) the instructional discourse of a discipline (the knowledge content of curricula) and (b) the regulative discourse which is a discourse of the social order. These discourses are distinctive to each discipline and they give different value to things and social groups. The instructional discourse governs, for example, whether feminist analysis or the building designs of other cultures are important knowledges for architecture students to be able to draw upon and apply. The regulative discourse is integral to such a decision as it communicates the social order, including who should have the right to design buildings and whose needs should be taken into consideration. Bernstein suggests that these two discourses are inseparable and form a unified pedagogic discourse by selecting and reordering knowledge and skills from the whole of the field and redirecting it according to context. The pedagogic recontextualising fields of universities are critical in generating the ‘fundamental autonomy of education’. These are potential sites for action to transform intersecting gender inequalities but academics, as proponents of disciplines, may have fixed ideas about when and how students gain access to powerful, unthinkable knowledge. Bernstein (2000) states that in some sciences this may not be until postgraduate study whereas in social sciences this is at

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undergraduate level. This shapes the apparent (im)possibilities of transforming disciplinary knowledge through curricula. Disciplines are also more or less amenable to influences from the outside, such as from their related professions. Some academic disciplines, such as medical science, are very guided by external pressures and requirements and there are times when this may be beneficial with regard to overcoming inequalities. However, external pressure can also have the opposite effect. The pedagogic device is often at the heart of the intense struggles for power and control over curriculum. In the UK teacher training has often been at the centre of such a struggle. Teacher training that takes place mostly in schools can be seen by those who work in universities as a dumbing down of the profession: they advocate theoretical knowledge as necessary for a professional workforce. Those who advocate that teacher training should take place mostly or wholly in schools often see the theoretical knowledge provided by universities as less helpful than that which can be gained by learning from practitioners. Students arrive at university with identities that embody the intersecting gender codes they have historically acquired. Each student is different, and each individual department is made up of students who have different characteristics and biographies. Departments are contexts in which historically derived curricula can be recontextualised in ways that reproduce or challenge the existing intersecting gender codes of the disciplines for the particular groups of students who tend to come to their university. The changes that are aimed for here are not simple and there are no overnight solutions. This work of challenging the link between codes that contribute to intersecting gender inequalities and forms of disciplinary knowledge need tackling in disciplines in ways that transform it from within.

Knowledge structures As with most of Bernstein’s concepts, there is a complex set of theories associated with knowledge structures. Here I give only a brief description of some of those I think pertinent to tackling intersecting gender inequalities. In universities there are boundaries between academic disciplines which constitute classifications: these are manifest in the way that departments are in separate physical space; staff careers are orientated towards success in their discipline; their disciplines have their own texts, curricula, experts, international professional networks and so forth (Bernstein, 2000). Bernstein differentiates between singulars which are individual disciplines, such as physics, and regions which are made up of singulars (e.g. physics and mathematics) that have been recontextualised into degrees such as engineering which are usually orientated towards a profession or areas of work. These are more interdisciplinary degrees whose focus on vocations means that classifications between disciplines have become weaker. Another example would be when philosophy, sociology and so forth are recontextualised into education. The boundary between the field

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of employment and the university discipline is also sometimes weaker. The boundary between the inside and outside of the academy is important in maintaining the ‘specialisation’ and ‘otherness’ that gives it a status that prevents the disciplines from being accessible to ‘public discussion and challenge’ (Bernstein, 2000: 10). It may be therefore that regions are more open to challenge because their epistemological boundaries have already been challenged. This might provide opportunity for changes in the underpinning knowledge structure and the codes embedded within it. This is certainly the case for some university health researchers who have found opportunities to put patients’ interests at the centre of their research agenda liberating, compared to the more entrenched views of consultants (Little et al., 2016). However, Bernstein’s framework suggests that this would depend on the knowledge structures of the disciplines that have been recontextualised. There are two knowledge structures that are pertinent to this analysis: hierarchical knowledge structures and horizontal knowledge structures. Hierarchical knowledge structures pertain to disciplines that create ‘general propositions and theories’ and they ‘appear to their users to have an integrating code’ with new theories explaining all the former and with knowledge becoming ever more abstract (Bernstein, 2000: 161). An example, Bernstein gives is physics which also has an extremely specialised language. The second, horizontal knowledge structures have a series of specialised languages which compete to describe the same phenomenon and sit as alongside one another: as in literary criticism, different theories of criticism are not ultimately right or wrong, and they do not subsume one another but they provide different perspectives. Innovation in horizontal knowledge structures involves inventing a new language (theory). Disciplines with horizontal knowledge structures tend to engage more with lay discourses and the mundane knowledge of the world: such as sociology with its interest in society. People learning the discipline sometimes have trouble identifying when they are using the language of the discipline. Bernstein (2000) argues high-status disciplines tend to be more strongly bounded from the world around them: sciences such as physics and chemistry have more specialised languages that prevent laypersons from accessing the disciplines. Horizontal knowledge structures, with their less specialised languages, tend to give people access to unthinkable knowledge much earlier in their academic careers. Sociology, education and social policy undergraduates will be learning to use unthinkable knowledge regarding intersecting gender inequalities, in loosely framed space (such as participatory seminars) in their first year (McLean et al., 2017). However, some of the challenges of both styles are emphasised in the next section.

Changing curricula through Bernsteinian questioning In this section I illustrate a line of questioning that can be developed for different disciplines using this Bernsteinian perspective. The questions are not comprehensive: they demonstrate an approach that would have to be thought

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through in relation to each discipline in the context it is studied in. In previous research it has become apparent that any answers would vary according to the specific university as well as the discipline. Curricula are not standard across UK universities, but they are recontextualised for specific students by a distinctive group of academic staff. In the UK at least, there tend to be seminal texts for disciplines, but the way that they are organised and recontextualised into degrees is centred around different visions of what graduates need. For example, a study revealed that four sociology-related social science degrees had diverse curricula that aspired to develop four very different types of graduates: the criminal justice professional, the sociologically enlightened individual, influential sociologists and public service professionals (McLean et al., 2017). The importance of the perceived student body in shaping curricula is evident from Jenkins et al.’s (2017) analysis of the transformation of their sociology curricula to suit the changing ethnic composition of their students. I turn now to a series of illustrative questions that I believe show how a strategy to tackle intersecting gender inequalities could draw upon the Bernsteinian framework I have described. Question 1: what classifications pertaining to women, men, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and so forth are evident in the curricula? The first task would be to identify what significant groups should be represented in the curriculum for knowledge that is more socially just to be developed. Issues of intersecting individual identities should also be identified and included in this exercise. Next, existing classifications pertaining to the identified groups would need to be explored in every aspect of the curriculum, for example, in reading lists, learning objectives, session plans, seminar discussions, assessments, academics and students’ perspectives and so forth. Both absences and the forms of presence that different groups have in curricula shape forms of consciousness and order them hierarchically for those who engage with it. Consequently, how different groups are positioned within the discipline as generators of knowledge, as recontextualising curriculum designers, students or objects of knowledge, etc. is important for this stage of analysis. To generate insights into the intersecting effects it would be important to explore how different classifications (e.g. gender and disability) encountered reinforce, contradict or otherwise modify one another. Question 2: what would be needed to alter the classifications evident in the curricula to increase social justice? This question would follow on from the former and the aim would be to use Bernstein’s concepts to look for lines of action that could begin to transform the classifications. Disciplines would pose particular problems, for example, in engineering, where language is technical and specialised, and explicit codes

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might not be apparent in texts. Absences are signs of strong classifications as this defines a group as completely irrelevant. There might be evidences of the cleavages and contradictions, which Bernstein suggests are evidence that change is underway, that can be drawn upon to develop strategies for change. For example, in subjects where students and postgraduates are already aware of knowledge being biased towards particular groups they could participate in critiquing existing curricula and helping to build knowledge. In other disciplines, changes might need to happen at the level of the distribution rules (e.g. a wider range of knowledge from other cultures of categories of people perhaps needs considering) or the recontextualising rules (e.g. there is knowledge available at the disciplinary level which is not being recontextualised; for example, disability studies knowledge is generated in sociology-related social sciences but it is rarely recontextualised into the core curriculum). Question 3: do the distributive rules mean that unthinkable disciplinary knowledge is unevenly spread between different groups? Asking such a question of a discipline in a specific context would reveal injustices in relation to those who have access to the powerful knowledges that currently shape the world and can therefore shape the future of these disciplines. These are questions about who is studying the discipline and when they get access to theories that allow them to generate unthinkable knowledge. If this doesn’t happen until postgraduate study, then the composition of students at different levels is significant: women tend to proportionally decline in more of advanced levels of study and in higher ranking career levels. Question 4: how can the distributive rules come to incorporate social justice? This question relates to how to generate transformative action based on the former question. It is an important aspect of tackling how to transform the distributive rules relating to knowledge structures. In singular disciplines, which have a hierarchical knowledge structure that is highly classified and uses specialised languages, the boundaries around what appears to be valid are particularly viewed as technically driven. It is difficult to understand that it is at the same time political and oppressive. For example, the idea that the technology that is used by women is considered low-tech is seen as a scientific judgement and the obliteration of the science of other cultures has become historically defined as progress (rather than an act of oppression and violence) (de Sousa Santos, 2016; Wajcman, 2006). The specialised nature of the disciplinary knowledge that now counts as valid knowledge and is effective in its own terms means that it requires disciplinary experts to engage with the issue of how to generate more inclusive and socially just disciplinary knowledge. For this to happen, academics would need to become interested in social justice and to be able to conceptualise injustices and inequalities as being

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related to knowledge. This work would be best conceptualised in terms of how such activities could improve the scope and quality of the underlying knowledge and increase the potential of the discipline within and outside of academia, as it is likely to expand its concerns. The task would be different in regions where there is already some acceptance of the link between power, politics and knowledge but inequalities are still (re)produced. There remain important questions about how we develop unthinkable knowledge across the whole range of disciplines. Some of these questions can be opened up by exploring how the unity between the regulative and instructional discourses in specific disciplines can be made visible to academics and students. This again poses a difficult problem but without it the problems of inequality discussed above are insurmountable. Most academics aren’t used to seeing intersecting gender inequalities in their curricula, their concepts, theories and ways of doing research. Critical scholarship might help as may interdisciplinary work. Funding for research in this field would also help. However, this perspective on knowledge is difficult to grasp and in Bernstein’s own words, this gap between the material and the immaterial world needs disciplinary specific theories. There might be disciplines where this is easier, such as in sociology, where the most successful undergraduates will understand their role and the role of others in the creation of the discipline (Ashwin et al., 2017). However, the discipline is still permeated by inequalities. There is an emotional and intellectual difficulty with acknowledging that the conceptual lenses you cherish are oppressing others.

Conclusion: addressing the problem of university curricula using the pedagogic device This chapter has explored the relationship between disciplines and intersecting gender inequalities. Drawing on Bernstein, it points to a way of exploring complexity with precise concepts and a clarity of purpose. The difficulty about how to achieve greater equity through curricula became clear to those involved in the decolonising the curriculum movement, which began in South Africa and has since spread to other countries (Le Grange, 2016). Indeed, many of the deep questions that have been raised about university curricula in this chapter have been asked for decades from a host of different perspectives (Amsler, 2015). Harding (1986) and hooks (1989) were pioneers in this field for feminist and race scholarship. Minnich (2005) and do Mar Pereira (2017) have more recently explored questions about the status of critical scholarship and women’s, gender and feminist studies of knowledge in the academy: the marginalisation of these disciplines has implications for the problems raised in this chapter. At the moment in universities, in the UK and elsewhere, the decolonising the curriculum movement, why is my curriculum white?, the #neverok, #metoo, attention to race and disability hate crimes and bystander training, provide hope that there is a willingness to tackle injustices in universities. However, most of these campaigns and initiatives focus on sexism, racism, ableism and so forth in the university and

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are outside of disciplinary content. Initiatives that work to tackle numbers of students studying disciplines have also abounded over the four decades, particularly in relation to women studying science, technology, engineering and mathematical subjects (Phipps, 2008). There are also efforts to tackle inequalities through the UK’s Equality Challenge Unit which provides specific criteria for indicating that departments are working to improve gender and ethnic parity. However, these initiatives all aim for change without thinking about more structurally embedded curricula and disciplinary processes such as the ones described here. The changes that need to happen inside and outside of curricula to generate equality seem complex and overwhelming. We need intergenerational models, to think with, that will emphasise the importance of tackling these problems at many levels if we are really to instigate change. Strategies need to have longer term objectives because these questions that arise from examining disciplines relate to deeply embedded historical processes.

Paired dialogue: can a Bernsteinian focus on intersecting gender inequalities support curriculum and disciplinary change? Isabelle Collet This chapter proposes a conceptual framework from Bernstein to consider how to address the problem of university curricula which, through codes, framing and classification practices, continue to produce disciplinary knowledge that both reflects and advantages dominant social groups. Through Bernsteinian questioning, applicable in and adaptable for different disciplines, the argument is made that the pedagogic device can help challenge codes in ways which may transform them and so help promote greater equity in the university. The chapter proposes that gender cannot be considered as an isolated category and argues instead the need to take into account intersecting gender inequalities, that is, inequalities generated by social class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability and so on. This approach insists on the role of the institution, the discipline and the individual as intertwined factors in the production of conditions of equality, and gives the example of attempts to decolonise the curriculum or put in place curricula that takes account of women’s perspectives as positive moves in this direction. In this, it stands out from measures that tend to adopt a unidirectional focus, such as those which, for example, focus on ameliorating conditions for minority students, or constraining opportunities for those groups who may take advantage (Continued)

80  Andrea Abbas

of the processes of dominance, such as those conditions originating in economic advantage, colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, etc. The Bernsteinian approach outlined in the chapter makes me think of the inclusion strategy implemented in Carnegie Mellon University in the 2000s which aimed to close the gender gap in IT (Margolis & Fisher, 2002). The process led the institution to rethink the academic system as a whole, including admission criteria, training of teaching assistants and the materials that constitute curriculum (for example, promoting interdisciplinarity and introducing courses on gender studies). They also redefined what the IT skills should be and who is able to make a career in IT professions. In just a few years, Carnegie Mellon University jumped from 6% of women (a very common percentage for women in IT) to 39% of women, without having to resort to a quota policy. This was a major institutional culture change, which has produced a greater diversity, not only for women but also for ethnic minorities and poor students (Morley & Collet, 2017). The purpose of such an approach is not attempting to align women (or other minority groups) with a dominant model of excellence built on the heroic principles of sacrificing one’s life to science and productivity (Fassa & Kradolfer, 2010), based on power or control. It is more about finding a new and polysemous definition of excellence. Such a redefinition is particularly urgent if we want to remember the mission of the university: openness and access to knowledge for all. The content of the chapter above also aligns well with this mission, albeit that it addresses the way to achieve epistemic gender equality in a very different way.

References Abbas, A. (2004). The embodiment of class, gender and age through leisure: a realist analysis of long distance running. Leisure Studies, 23 (2), 159–175. Abbas, A. Ashwin, P. & McLean, M. (2016). The influence of curricula content on English sociology students’ transformations: the case of feminist knowledge. Teaching in Higher Education, 23 (4), 442–456. Amsler, S. (2015). The Education of Radical Democracy. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Ashwin, P., Abbas, A. & McLean, M. (2017). How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge? ­Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42 (4), 517–530. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 4: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised edition, Oxon: Rowan & Littlefield. Choo, H.Y. & Ferree, M.M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: a critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory, 28 (2), 129–149.

Tackling intersecting gender inequalities  81 Christoffersen, A. (2017). Intersectional Approaches to Equality Research and Data. Equality Challenge Unit. www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/­Research_and_ data_briefing_2_Intersectional_approaches_to_equality_research_and_data.pdf (last visited 24th June 2018). Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity. do Mar Pereira, M. (2017). Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: An Ethnography of Academia. London: Routledge. de Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Abingdon: Routledge. European Commission. (2015). SHE Statistics 2015. Brussels: European Commission. Fassa, F. & Kradolfer, S. (2010). Le Plafond de fer de l’université. Femmes et Carrières. Zurich: Seïsmo. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency). (2018). Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2016/17- Subjects studied. www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/ sfr247-higher-education-student-statistics/subjects. (last accessed 3rd June 2018). Higher Education Information Database for Institutions. (2014). www.heidi.co.uk/. (accessed 20th January 2015). hooks, b. (1986). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Jansen, J.D. (2009). Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jenkins, C., Barnes, C., McLean, M., Abbas, A. & Ashwin, P. (2017). Socially just pedagogies, capabilities and quality in higher education: global perspectives. In M. Walker & M. Wilson-Strydon (Eds.), Palgrave Studies in Global Citizenship Education and Democracy (pp. 45–67). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Leathwood, C. & Read, B. (2009). Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education. Maidenhead: The Open University Press. Le Grange, L. (2016). Decolonising the curriculum. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30 (2), 1–12. Little, B., Abbas, A. & Singh, M. (2016). Changing practices, changing values? A Bernsteinian analysis of knowledge production and knowledge exchange in two UK universities. In J. Valimaa, D. Hoffman, J. Brennan, et al. (Eds.), Changing Networks in Knowledge Societies (pp. 201–222), Berlin: Springer. Margolis, J. & Fisher, A. (2002). Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. ­Cambridge: MIT Press. Martin, E. (2001 [1987]). The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press. May, V.M. & Ferri, B.A. (2005). Fixated on ability, questioning ableist metaphors in feminist theories of resistance, history, theory. Criticism, 27 (1–2), 120–140. McLean, M., Abbas, A. & Ashwin, P. (2017). Quality in Undergraduate Education: How Powerful Knowledge Disrupts Inequality. London: Bloomsbury. Minnich, E.K. (2005). Transforming Knowledge (2nd edition), Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

82  Andrea Abbas Morley, C. & Collet, I. (2017). Femmes et métiers de l’informatique: un monde pour elles aussi. Cahiers du Genre, 1 (62), 183–202. Morton, B. (2016). You can’t see for lookin: how southern womanism informs perspectives of work and curriculum theory. Gender and Education, 28 (6), 742–755. Phipps, A. (2008). Women in Science Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Smith, D.E. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Swain, J., French, S. & Cameron, C. (2003). Controversial Issues in a Disabling Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Wajcman, J. (1991). Feminism Confronts Technology. Cambridge: Policy Press. Wajcman, J. (2006). Techno capitalism meets techno feminism: women and technology in a wireless world. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work, 16 (3), 7–20. Women in Engineering Statistics (WES). (2018). www.wes.org.uk/sites/default/ files/2018-01/Women%20in%20Engineering%20Statistics%20-%20January%20 2018%20-%20created%20by%20Sarah%20Peers_0.pdf (last visited 25th June 2018). Young, M. (2008). Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. London and New York: Routledge.

7 A historical exploration of gender representations in French scientific and technological education school textbooks Joël Lebeaume Introduction Francis’s (2006) discussion of gender studies in educational research draws attention to the fact that ‘gender’ has historically relied on conceptions based on binary oppositions: innate/acquired, nature/culture, masculinity/femininity. At the end of the 19th century, the hypothesis of biological difference was particularly clear in pedagogical discourses that considered intellectual differences between boys and girls in France (Mayeur, 1981) and widespread across Europe. Since then, however, feminists have drawn attention to the social construction of gender identities, and this view of gender, now widely accepted, underpins my analysis of French scientific and technological education school textbooks in this chapter. My analytical frame for the discussion is drawn from Mayeur (1988), Goodman (2012) and Rogers’s (2007a, 2007b) interdisciplinary approach which includes research in social history, labour history, political history, gender history and subject contents history. Seen in these terms, the history of arts and crafts, manual work, home economics, applied sciences and more largely technology education reveals what ‘gendered school knowledge’ (Rogers, 2007a) means. The analysis of contents of the textbooks I focus on in this chapter reveals clear gendered distinctions in sciences and technology for men or women. For example, in several 1920s textbooks, lessons about water provide boys with scientific notions (the element, its chemical composition, its distillation, its states) and their applications (the utility of water for the body and cooking, washing and cleaning). In contrast, these textbooks indicate that for girls the focus is on practical notions (general principles of washing water and the specificities of floor washing, as well as washing woodwork and window panes, laundry, ironing and cleanings of all kinds from dishes to toilets). This gendered differentiation of the same topic provides some key insights into the teaching of sciences and technology, particularly in relation to the didactic transposition of knowledge about social practices. The concept of didactic transposition refers to ‘the deconstruction and reconstruction of science knowledge, values or practices in order to make them teachable’ – and also learnable – by their target audience, a process which Achiam (2014: 1) points out may involve oversimplifications and mistakes.

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This chapter is centred on a historical exploration of French middle-school textbooks related to science and technology education mainly from the 1940s to the 1990s (Lebeaume, 2014, 2017), a period of particular importance pedagogically and didactically because it includes the extension of compulsory school to 16 years olds. It is also important socially because it includes the May 1968 revolt in France and its aftermath, which gave rise to new cultural formations in the relationships between men and women, their social roles, domains and activities. In order to put this into context, I here provide a brief overview of some key specificities of French schooling and its history: In France, the school is centralized: educational policy is defined by the State and the Ministry of Education. The National Curriculum is specified by a set of official texts which prescribe the contents to be taught and recommend the pedagogical means of their implementation. For each school subject, textbooks are written by teachers, inspectors or teacher educators. These textbooks are marketed by private publishers and are chosen and purchased by schools. They are loaned to pupils for each course. These pedagogical resources are books that lay out the contents of each lesson through texts and images or illustrations and usually with a few exercises and a summary. The school organization is defined by the pupils’ age and not by grades (K1, K2, etc.). The history of French education is marked by the evolution of the age of compulsory school: up to the age of 13 in 1882, 14 in 1936 and 16 since 1959. Thus in 1936 the primary education phase was prolonged. As in other developed countries, the expansion and democratization of education with the extension of compulsory school to the age of 16 resulted in the creation and organization of the middle school from 1959 to the mid-1970s. In 1959, the school was restructured to build a democratic education system without the previous dichotomy of secondary education for pupils from wealthy families and complementary or upper primary education for pupils from poorer and modest-income families. This organization was finalized in 1975 with the creation of the ‘collège unique’. Primary school ends at age 11 and Secondary school begins just after.

The construction of gender identities by school and textbooks At the beginning of the 20th century, as a result of widespread allegiance to hypotheses of biological and psychological difference between men and women, girls’ education in France was limited and their access to secondary and higher education was rare. These prohibitions remained despite their decisive role in the Great War of 1914–1918. The numerous home economics

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and domestic education textbooks promote traditional roles attributed to women, that is, those roles inspired by stereotyped notions in which the female figure is a mother, wife, educator, caregiver, guarantor of savings and non-expenditure as well as guardian of the family and its morality, with, in rural areas, the responsibility of the kitchen garden and small farms. During the period between the two World Wars and despite their labour as workers, employees or farmers, home economics remained an obligation in women’s basic or vocational education. The hygienist and pro-birth policies promoted under the government of Petain (1941–1944) maintained separate gendered roles assigned to men and women. This is specifically evident in the obligation of housework education for girls between the ages 14 and 17, which was designated as early as 1938 within agricultural schools and in 1942 for all other schools and post-school education. At the Liberation (1945), the legal right to vote was given to women and, in the post-war reconstruction of France, the majority of women were enjoined to take on the role of ‘technician of happiness’. Nevertheless, 30 years later discrimination against women became a political concern. In 1974 a State Secretariat for the Status of Women was created which was responsible in particular for promoting women’s access to different levels of responsibility in French society. This political shift was accompanied by the first International Women’s Day celebrated by the United Nations during the international year of women in 1975. Such events are significant in that they helped shift traditional gender roles, initiate a new understanding of gender norms and project possibilities for a new relationship between men and women’s gendered social status. These shifts contested stereotypes regarding girls’ education (de Fenelon, 1687) which, for many centuries, had been embedded in institutions mostly driven by men, and which had failed to take into account the legitimate claims of women, as is shown by Clark’s (1984) fine analysis of the contents and images of textbooks from this period. Such changes brought to the fore the need to fight against gender stereotypes and prejudices and to highlight the inequity of processes of tacit inculcation regarding the ‘domestication’ of women (Boltanski, 1969). In this context of cultural revolution and feminist demands, two pioneering studies denounced the dominant representation of housewives in school textbooks. In her book Papa lit, Maman coud (trans. Dad reads, Mom sews) Decroux-­ Masson (1979) indicates that the girls prefigure the character and the roles attributed to women: they play with the doll, help their mother and follow the initiatives of the boys. Textbooks convey the idea that women’s sexual role is more important than their professional role. On the other hand, men are valued because they appear as creative, initiators and managers. In the same vein, Mollo (1969) highlights gender stereotypes in children’s literature (Rignault & Richert, 1997). Several studies centred on linguistic analysis of the texts reveal the process of incorporation of the social norm and the ideological positioning of men and women within children’s story books or first

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school books highlighting the importance of informal education (Baker & Freebody, 1986; Smith, 2015) in promoting gender stereotypes. The research presented in this chapter focuses on two periods: the periods before and after the mid-1970s. It explores from a Subject-Didactics point of view the contents to be taught as presented in textbooks. The analysis includes girls’ and boys’ educations in order to point out the relative differences in gendered contents. It explores the reciprocal images of women and men, locates the double stereotype of masculinity and femininity, and explores how the values they represent are reproduced by textbooks. The analysis focuses on pictures, illustrations and figures in the interest of identifying the values and tacit contents, and so the hidden curriculum. As Choppin (1992) points out, values are implicit and textbooks convey stereotypes through text, para-text, but also through iconography such that socially constructed and gendered ways of doing, thinking and expressing oneself are presented as if they were ‘natural’. In what follows, then, the analysis focuses on images relating to the occupations of girls and boys to illustrate how gender differences are represented in the iconography of the textbooks.

A historical survey centred on applied sciences In France, ‘applied sciences’ is the label of science education. This school subject is related to arts and crafts, manual work or sewing – topics which are explicitly defined in a contrasting way for girls and boys. In France, these two versions of applied sciences are exclusively taught in the last courses of compulsory schooling (age 12–14). Applied sciences therefore constitute a particularly good school subject for the comparative investigation of knowledge and the gendered values implicitly included. Applied sciences for final-year courses The last primary school qualification, called the ‘extended schooling degree’, was introduced in 1936 when compulsory school was extended to age 14. It brings together pupils between 13 and 14 years old and enables them to leave school with an exam at the end of teaching term. The official instructions of 1938 specify the ambition of this terminal course to bring the school closer to life: All the subjects of reading, writing, dictation, calculation, science and practical work will be subjects only of the things of everyday life, in the family and in society, in the countryside and in the fields, the city and the factory. (Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts, 1938) The adjective ‘applied’ in ‘applied sciences’ – a course which is taken for 3 hours per week to a total of 30 hours – serves the aim of practical culture.

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From this perspective, the national and ministerial instructions propose that teachers compose a programme of study according to local needs and according to their own means, drawing from the three sets of lessons, as follows: The first set is composed of: 1 2 3 4

tools of the craftsman; installation of the house; driving force; hygiene.

The second set brings together rural subjects: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

soil; the plant; different cultures of the region; the trees of the orchard and the forest, the vineyard; farm animals; the farm; farm management; practical work.

The third set relates to domestic work with: 1 2 3 4 5

cooking; the household; clothing maintenance; hygiene; notions of childcare.

This programme organizes science education for urban boys’ schools (see first set above), rural boys’ schools (second set) and girls’ schools (third set). The law of the French State (15 August 1941) organizes these courses in primary education into two cycles with an exam at the end: The Certificate of Primary Studies. The teaching programme emphasizes the main lines of practical scientific teaching. It is particularly marked by the ideology of the Vichy government which values the development of rural Frenchmen and Frenchwomen with gendered roles and responsibilities. Applied sciences programmes for urban and rural girls’ and boys’ schools were slightly modified: for girls, cooking, household, clothing, hygiene, childcare and the vegetable garden and small breeding; for boys, according to their environment, farm installation, agriculture and horticulture, meteorology, farm management, hygiene or installation of the house, craftsman tools, crops. At the Liberation (1945) these official programmes are repealed.

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As indicated earlier, the years following the Liberation were marked by the expansion of education in France. There are three major dimensions to this expansion. The first is the Langevin-Wallon Plan (1947) which promoted the democratization of the school and provided for the extension of compulsory education up to the age of 16. The second is the vast increase in the number of pupils attending school which reached a peak in 1953. The third is the transfer of populations from the countryside to the cities due to economic development. On the one hand, the Ministry of Education (1953) anticipated and organized their reception in the middle school. On the other hand, the Ministry of Agriculture (cf. Ministry of National Education, 1955) supported the development of agricultural post-school education to promote a productive agriculture. In this context, the new official texts of 1953 concern only the rural schools and there are no changes in textbooks for urban schools. The major purpose of the new texts for boys and girls is to fight against the disaffection towards the agricultural professions. It is also to consolidate the basic scientific knowledge and the formation of the scientific mind that can be taken up and extended in post-primary education or secondary education. The general purpose, for boys and girls, was to progressively define a better science education, in order to form the mind, and to downplay those contents judged as too technical or too practical. One useful illustrative example in this respect concerns lessons devoted to chemical mixtures and physicochemical solutions which were seen as more high status and were preferred to those devoted to the applications of scientific laws or principles to cleaning, washing or cooking (which, as I indicated above, was the case with earlier textbooks).

Applied sciences in images During the implementation of the final courses, the authors and publishers of applied sciences textbooks adjusted the lessons and contents in accordance with changes in ministerial prescriptions. The major publishers (Bourrelier, Hachette, Hatier, Istra, Nathan, etc.) published collections of textbooks for the distinct girls/boys and rural/urban audiences until the end of the 1960s with the gradual extinction of these courses and the abolition of the primary school certificate. These textbooks keep track with political developments, particularly in the Government of the Vichy period, such as the collection Magnard listed below with title (italicized), subtitle and a short description of the gendered image in the front page of the textbook: ‘The School of Happiness. Total household education’ (Foulon-Leblanc, 1944). A textbook for girls’ schools. The front page presents an image of a mother with her baby. ‘Terre de France. Agriculture – Applied sciences’ (Braconnier & Theobald, 1941). A textbook for rural boys’ schools. The front page shows a farmer who sows wheat by hand.

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‘The Practical Life. Applied arts manual work’ (Braconnier & Theobald, 1941). A textbook for urban boys’ schools. The image of the front page is about a craftsman who forges on an anvil a piece of metal. These examples point out how textbook images in the 1940s differ for different pupils in different parts of the country and how applied sciences were inherently gendered. These textbooks also testify to the evolution of printing techniques as initially they were exclusively in black and white and then were produced in four-colour process (Choppin, 1992). They are also marked by more and more attractive compositions, notably with the presentation of lessons in double pages, large illustrations, and with colourized vignettes replacing written text. These developments in the textbook publishing industry sharply modified the balance of text and image over time, with the most recent ones having a 50% image:text ratio. Various analytical frameworks for the analysis of textbooks have been proposed. These include: •

• • • •

Choppin’s (1992) typology of illustration based on Moles (1967) descending iconicity scale which classifies images according to their degree of realism; it also focuses on their functions: motivation, decoration, information, reflection; Richaudeau (1979) who focuses on three main types of images: photographs, drawings and diagrams; Adam (1999) whose analysis focuses on sketches, their meaning and the relationship between diagrams and texts; Doulin (1996) whose interest is centred on the different technical graphics that represent artefacts, mechanisms, gestures, procedures, their meanings and their teaching-learning; Lignon et al. (2013) who propose a grid for the images of textbooks which enables each illustration to be analysed according to the genders represented in the image, the spheres of activity in which they appear and the presence or absence of stereotypes. The grid allows both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of each image in relation to its classification as stereotyped, un-stereotyped or against-stereotyped.

The characterization of the illustrations is important for the exploration of gender issues because the choice of a drawing, a diagram or a procedure can reflect the different intellectual capacities supposed of girls and boys, just as different pictures specifically represent different gendered characteristics. In the pictures of the girls’ textbooks and women’s journals, Brayet (2010) first identifies life stage drawings and prescriptive illustrations of reality, and, gradually, explanatory illustrations of how the devices work (for example about washing clothes, see Figure 7.1).

90  Joël Lebeaume The washing. Black and white reproduction of an oil painting by Jean - François Millet (1857). Allegorical image of a woman in the laundry, in front of the fireplace and in an atmosphere of water vapor (p. 129)

Description of the washing machine, its components and how it works. (p. 127)

Figure 7.1  Two types of images about washing clothes in ‘Home Economics’ textbook (Leblanc, 1913).

From the analytical frameworks outlined above, I have developed an original grid (see Figure 7.2) adapted to the applied sciences textbooks with several types of images but a very low number of images of women or men. Column 2 identifies six major functions: description, reference to daily life, documentation, scientific argumentation, technological or scientific explanation, practical advices or allegory. On the horizontal axis, each image is classified according to the following indicators: the type of illustration, its content, its function, the type of textual legend and some examples of other images of the same category. The replica of images inserted (column 3) gives an insight into the analytical use of this grid. A historical and comparative analysis was then conducted by using this grid with five collections of school textbooks edited by major publishers (Hachette, Orieux, Nathan, Istra, Bourrelier) for girls’ and boys’ schools over the period 1940–1960, i.e. when home economics education was growing and when the organization of women’s education was being structured in anticipation of the extension of compulsory school to age 16. The data are analysed by identifying all the illustrations (vignettes, drawings, diagrams, images, photographs) and by characterizing them according to the following themes: scenes of daily life, technical operations, gestures, artefacts legends. The major findings of the analysis are presented in the following two sections. The scenes of daily life and acts of women and men The comparison of textbooks mainly highlights scenes of women’s and men’s daily life and everyday actions. These textbooks were conceived as practical breviaries for life and there are no images which go against gender stereotypes. Images, thus, reinforce current norms of gender, as is clearly illustrated by the covers which represent young boys and girls within cities and rural areas as described in the following list: ‘Applied sciences’ for urban girls’ schools (Orieux et al., 1958). The front page presents an image of a young woman in the kitchen. She lowers a cake dough with a rolling pin.

Exploration of gender representations  91 Type of illustration

Function

Type of image

Type of textual legend

Examples of other type of images

Artefacts, Designation detail images and description of artefacts

“Household”

Descriptive vignettes of ventilation systems (n° of the textbook, page and lesson)

Breast pump, Growth curve

Scene of life

“On the shelves, Overview of products are the kitchen dusty” layout

Market scene

Document. Documentary Reference to information the technical, and opening scientific and industrial world.

“Textile centers in France”

Map of France producing regions lignite, coal, wood, peat heating

Installation of a pipeline

Experimental study; Experimental set-up (test tube...); Microscope view Diagram, drawings, sequential images of a gesture…

Scientific argumentation

“microscopic views of wool and cotton fibers”

Dissolution of soap in limestone or noncalcareous water

Technological or scientific explanation

“Sterilization of milk”

Battery installation: the short circuit makes the wire turn red Electric open oven, Section of electric kettle

Identification of usual situations

Image with Practical man, woman, advice; child… Allegory

“Breastfeeding”

4 vignettes, what to do or not to do: the housewife at work

Section of a washing machine (without explanation of the thermosiphon); Section of a washing machine Photograph of a smiling couple of farmers

Figure 7.2  T  extbooks’ analysis grid.

‘Applied sciences’ for rural girls’ schools (Orieux et al., 1959). The front page presents a smiling young woman in the yard of a farm. She gives seeds to hens. ‘Applied sciences’ for urban boys’ schools (Orieux & Everaede, 1959). The front page presents a young man in a room of the house with tools. He puts an electric plug. ‘Applied sciences’ for rural boys’ schools (Orieux & Everaede, 1959). The front page presents a young man who drives a tractor.

92  Joël Lebeaume

From a quantitative point of view, descriptive drawings are the most numerous, with the main function of designating with the right word, artefacts, ingredients, animals and plants. The contents are mainly about origin, use and manufacture of these things. Each of the textbooks presents the catalogue of usual objects, artefacts, things, devices and tools shown in use at home for young girls or at work for young boys (Figures 7.1 and 7.4). According to the traditional division of roles, men are outside and women inside the house; boys are associated with machines (for example car, tractor, agriculture devices), while girls are shown using more simple tools (for example brushes, electric iron, kitchenware). In addition, images of baby care are only represented in textbooks for girls (Chabanas & Augustin, 1943). The areas of action are also contrasted: electrical fixtures and housework for boys, cleaning and daily house maintenance for girls. The second category of illustrations is scientific or technical pictures. A few of them are drawings of experiments, such as microscopic views which show the scientific basis of the practices thus reasoned. Others are sectional views or perspective drawings which make it possible to understand how a siphon, an electric iron or an autoclave works. One of the rare stereotyped mixed images shows the young girl ironing and the young boy repairing an electric plug. The comparison of illustrations highlights, without any real surprise, the priority given in the textbooks to images of girls which aim at enhancing the joys of the family as real happiness, while for boys the images emphasize industrial machines and their functioning. On those occasions where artefacts and mechanisms are presented in the same way for boys and girls, then a distinction is made about their use in practical work. Thus, the gendered norms represented in the illustrations correspond to the gendered activity territories defined by the ministerial prescriptions regarding life-skills education (Figure 7.3). According to the pattern of the traditional family, these territories partly correspond to the duties attributed to women which, as enumerated by Laslett (1978), include: to collaborate with the household enterprises, to acquire and prepare the food (purchased at the market), gardening, breeding and gardening, having and raising children. At the same

Figure 7.3  Replicas of the type of images in textbooks for girls’ schools.

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time, male occupations that exclude household activities include farm work, household maintenance and the usual craft tools. The female and male gestures and scenes of life in the textbooks in the 1960s are illustrated in the following descriptions: ‘Applied sciences’ for urban girls’ schools (Orieux et al., 1958). The page presents a photograph of a mother swaddling her baby and five colour stepby-step drawings showing the baby’s position and the mother’s hands; a photograph to compare the dressing according to French or English methods; three colour drawings of the nursery furniture, a cradle, a bed and a storage, a park; two friezes representing the day of baby aged 2 months and 1 year: the first one indicates the bottles every three hours, the sleep and the walk outside; the second illustrates the moments of meal, rest, etc. ‘Applied sciences’ for rural girls’ schools (Orieux et al., 1959). The page presents four colour drawings of a girl cleaning parquet or tile floors, painted walls and linoleum coverings; several drawings of tools and products: foot brushes, iron straw, wax, electric polisher and its various brushes, detergents, etc.; a drawing of a girl washing windows with tools (squeegee, linen cloth) and a bottle of alcohol; two explanatory drawings of the cleaning of metal objects: aluminium stove, ladle in silver metal, cast iron plate of a stove, brass faucet. ‘Applied sciences’ for urban boys’ schools (Orieux & Everaede, 1959). The page presents photographs and drawings of some works in the house: sequential images of operations to fix a hook in a wall; photography of tools, hands and hammer; images of the execution of a sealing; drawings of some electrical assemblies: sequential images of the tasks to be done – mount the main line, connect the electrical wires, use junction boxes, install circuit breakers and fix the switch and the electrical outlet. ‘Applied sciences’ for rural boys’ schools (Orieux & Everaede, 1959). The page presents a perspective drawing of a car with interior view of parts: fuel tank, gear lever, battery, suspension, exhaust pipe, etc.; a diagram explaining the principle of the disc clutch; photographs of agricultural machinery: a man on a tractor equipped with a mower, a man on a tractor pulling a rake-tedder; a diagram explaining the drive mechanism of the blade of the mower; a diagram explaining the operation of a press. The distinction of territories of action takes place in the teaching of applied sciences for the final courses of primary school and thus for the end of schooling. Textbooks illustrate the practices of daily life in relation to two gendered spaces. They provide scientific principles and practical knowledge that encourage young boys and young girls to control their living environment and their identities in relation to prevailing gendered norms.

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Technology education Parallel to the separate applied sciences for girls and boys, manual works within technology education are also clearly differentiated along lines of gender. Traditionally, the activities of feeding and sewing were devolved to girls, working with wood and metal to boys. In 1975, within the new middle school setting of the ‘college unique’, in which male and female pupils learn together rather than separately, a new school discipline is set up – manual and technical education – which has an undifferentiated curriculum content for all pupils, irrespective of gender. This mixed schooling represents a significant shift and reflects the new cultural and political context I referred to at the beginning of this chapter. The fields of nutrition, sewing, housing and mechanics are provided to all pupils, boys and girls. In what seems like a radical move against traditional gendered representations, textbooks are characterized by

Sewing: A cloth balloon: overall picture

How to sew the balloon: manufactoring program

Cooking recipe of a pizza: flowchart diagram

Pressure cooker: its components Technical drawing with nomenclature

Mechanics: A pruner: nomenclature dismantling and reassembly

Functional analysis of the pruner

Figure 7.4  T  echnical contents and images within textbooks for technical and manual education (Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, 1977 [1983]).

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the exclusive presence of technical documents and without any illustrations with characters or social roles (Figure 7.4). Within the prescribed curriculum, this is a unisex education which has removed traditional representations of gender identity related to masculinity and femininity (Lebeaume, 1998).

Conclusion: from separate universes in pictures to undifferentiated school contents As in most developed countries, the end of the 1960s in France marked the gradual undifferentiation of technical and scientific activities at school, according to gender. The extension of compulsory education up to the age of 16 makes a decisive shift away from previous educational requirements of preparation for life according to traditional roles and functions. By responding to the new demands of modernity and society, it erases the contents and values associated with previously gendered social roles. The differential education of applied sciences, arts and crafts and manual work became obsolete. Textbooks were important in the period under investigation here in that, as didactic transpositional devices, they were a key means of dissemination of the ideological provisions around gender identities implicitly expected by schooling (Anstett & Célard, 2012; Chabaud-Rychter & Gardey, 2002). These hidden curriculum instruments are, at the same time, commercial products whose economic constraints of production require the optimization of illustrations. In this respect, the images change little over the re-­ editions of the pages of the same collection. This tends to maintain the division of the two territories of action over time and without integrating social and cultural evolution in gendered roles. Nevertheless, while the exploration presented above is a history told from textbooks and therefore different from real teaching practices, it is probably fair to presume that the transmission of gendered roles was supported and ensured by the teachers who used these textbooks and represented their contents and values in their teaching practices. One important contemporary issue with regard to contemporary textbooks concerns the lack of images about professional activities, where the tendency to ignore the social representations of gender relations may be particularly important in determining educational and vocational guidance. Teaching practices could constitute an essential lever in order to discuss these social representations and stereotypes. For example, teacher education programmes might offer ‘tips for practice’ for teachers to demonstrate curriculum materials which promote gender equality, for example, in boys and girls solving technical problems, performing technical operations, managing a project, analysing a market study, etc. For teachers’ initial and in-service education, the best advice is to get to know oneself in teaching relations with gendered publics.

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Paired dialogue: gender differentiation in craft and domestic education – contrasting national approaches Carrie Paechter I was struck by the extent that Joël Lebeaume’s chapter shows similarities to the historical situation in England and Wales. Similar approaches to the teaching of craft and domestic subjects can be found at the end of the 19th and throughout the first half of the 20th centuries. In particular, we see the emphasis on domestic training for working-class girls and crafts for working-class boys, with domestic subjects taking up a considerable proportion of the curriculum for girls. The way in which this emphasis was conveyed, however, was different. England and Wales have never had a system of compulsory textbooks, so their approach to gendered differentiation was conveyed more through guidance and, to a lesser extent, inspection. There was considerable local variation and some contestation. The overall effects were, however, similar. Formal educational equality was introduced into the UK at a similar period to France. However, given the lack even of a National Curriculum at that point, it was far harder to enforce equality of access to craft and domestic education. Single sex schools were not abolished, leaving some schools without the facilities to teach either craft or domestic subjects. Some schools formally offered these subjects to both genders but segregated them in practice. Although there was an extended debate at the turn of the 19th/20th century about the possibility of treating domestic subjects as an alternative form of science for girls, this was generally unsuccessful in the UK. This meant that even though domestic subjects were termed ‘domestic science’ during some periods, they never really had the applied science focus described by Lebeaume which is a key characteristic of the French schooling system. In the UK, craft subjects were not treated in this way at all. This meant that, with the introduction of universal secondary education after the Second World War, all children were taught the traditional sciences of physics, chemistry and biology (sometimes combined), and the domestic and craft subjects were placed in the realm of the practical disciplines. Because of this, teaching was generally practical and did not include the sorts of diagrams illustrated by Lebeaume. This remained the case until the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, at which point the new gender-neutral subject of Design and Technology was introduced. It was only at this point the traditional craft subjects started to be treated as forms of technology, and teaching might therefore include flow charts and diagrams of the kind listed in this chapter. Despite the National Curriculum provisions, however, actual teaching practice

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remains more varied, which means that it would not be possible to conduct a whole-country textbook analysis for the UK as Lebeaume describes with France. Attar (1990) and Penfold’s (1988) books offer interesting accounts of the gendering of home economics, and craft, design and technology as school subjects.

References Achiam, M. (2014). Didactic transposition: from theoretical notion to research programme. Paper presented at the biannual European Science Education Research Association Conference, 25–29 August, Kappadokya, Turkey. Adam, M. (1999). Les schémas, un langage transdisciplinaire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Anstett, É. and Célard, M.-L. (Eds.) (2012). Les objets ont-ils un genre? Culture matérielle et production sociale des identités sexuées. Paris: Armand Colin. Attar, D. (1990). Wasting Girls’ Time: The History and Politics of Home Economics. London: Virago Press. Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (1986). Representations of questioning and answering in children’s first school books. Language in Society, 15 (4): 451–483. Boltanski, L. (1969). Prime éducation et morale de classe. Paris: Mouton. Braconnier, R. and Theobald, N. (1941). La terre de France, Agriculture. Paris: Magnard. Brayet, A. (2010). L’image et la fée du logis, former des femmes à devenir de bonnes ménagères. In F. Laot (dir) L’image dans l’histoire de la formation des adultes. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 49–68. Chabanas, A., Chabanas, C. and Augustin, Mme (1943). Sciences appliquées. Écoles de filles. Paris: Hachette. Chabaud-Rychter, D. and Gardey, D. (Eds.) (2002). L’engendrement des choses. Des hommes, des femmes et des techniques. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines. Choppin, A. (1992). Les manuels scolaires: Histoire et actualités. Paris: Hachette. Clark, L. (1984). Schooling the daughters of Marianne, textbooks and the socialization of girls in modern French primary schools. New York: State University of New York Press. Decroux-Masson, A. (1979). Papa lit, maman coud. Paris: Denoël-Gonthier. de Fenelon, F. (1687). De l’éducation des filles. Paris: Aubouin, Emery et Clousier. Doulin, J.-R. (1996). Analyse comparative des difficultés rencontrées par les élèves dans l’appropriation de différents types de graphismes techniques en classe de seconde : option Technologie des Systèmes Automatisés. Unpublished doctoral Thesis. Paris: ENS Cachan. Foulon-Leblanc, Mme. (1944). L’école du bonheur. Paris: Magnard. Francis, B. (2006). The nature of gender. In C. Skelton, B. Francis and L. Smulyan (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Education. London: SAGE, pp. 7–17. Goodman, J. (2012). The gendered politics of historical writing in history of education. History of Education, 1: 9–24. Laslett, P. (1978). Le rôle des femmes dans l’histoire de la famille occidentale. In É. Sullerot (ed.), Le fait féminin. Paris: Arthème Fayard-France Loisirs, pp. 447–465. Lebeaume, J. (1998). La « techno », un enseignement unisexe. Enfances et Psy, 3: 115–118. Lebeaume, J. (2014). L’enseignement ménager en France 1880–1980. Sciences et techniques au féminin. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.

98  Joël Lebeaume Lebeaume, J. (2017). Les sciences appliquées des classes de fin d’études, en rose et bleu. Images, vignettes, illustrations … des manuels scolaires des années 1950. Revue GEF, 1, 49–62. Repéré à https://revuegef.org/. Leblanc, R. (1913). Enseignement ménager. Paris: Larousse. Lignon, F., Porhel, V. and Rakoto-Raharimanana, H. (2013). Étude des stéréotypes de genre dans les manuels scolaires. In C. Morin and M. Salle (eds.), À l’école des stéréotypes. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 95–113. Mayeur, F. (1981). De la Révolution à l’école républicaine, Histoire générale de l’enseignement en France. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France. Mayeur, F. (1988). L’éducation des filles en France au XIXe siècle: historiographie récente et problématique. In École française de Rome (Ed.), Problèmes d’histoire de l’éducation. Actes des séminaires organisés par l’École française de Rome et l’Università di Roma La Sapienza (janvier-mars 1985). Rome: Università di Roma La Sapienza, pp. 79–90. Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale. (1977 [1983]). Fiches documentaires. Éducation manuelle et technique (Manual and Technical Education). Paris: Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique. Ministry of National Education. (1953). Instructions du 30 juillet 1953, Classe de fin d’études, Programme de Sciences appliquées dans les classes ou sections de fin d’études des écoles rurales, BOEN n° 37 du 22 octobre 1953, pp. 2813–2817. Ministry of National Education. (1955). Instruction ministérielle du 1er juillet 1955 concernant les horaires et les programmes des cours complémentaires à orientation agricole, BOEN, n° 27 du 14 juillet 1955, pp. 1999–2011. Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts. (1938). Arrêté du 23 février. Plan d’études et programmes des écoles primaires élémentaires. Paris: Vuibert, p. 11. (Ministerial Order: February 28, 1938. In Curriculum and Syllabus for Primary Schools). Moles, A. (1967). Sociodynamique de la Culture. Paris: Mouton. Mollo, S. (1969). L’école dans la société. Psychosociologie des modèles éducatifs. Paris: Dunod. Orieux, M. and Everaede, M. (1959). Sciences appliquées. Écoles urbaines de garçons. Paris: Hachette. Orieux, M., Everaede, M. and Briand, M.J. (1958). Sciences appliquées. Écoles urbaines de filles. Paris: Hachette. Orieux, M., Everaede, M., Braillon, H. and Briand, M.J. (1959). Sciences appliquées. Écoles rurales de filles. Paris: Hachette. Penfold, J. (1988). Craft, Design and Technology: Past, Present and Future. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Richaudeau, F. (1979). Conception et production des manuels scolaires. Guide pratique. Paris: UNESCO. Rignault, S. and Richert, P. (1997). La représentation des hommes et des femmes dans les livres scolaires. Paris: La documentation française. Rogers, R. (2007a). L’éducation des filles, un siècle et demi d’historiographie. Histoire de l’éducation, 115–116: 37–79. Rogers, R. (2007b). The politics of writing the history of French girls’ education. History of Education Researcher, 80: 136–144. Smith, A. (2015). Letting down Rapunzel: feminism’s effects on fairy tales. Children’s Literature in Education, 46: 424–437.

8 Temporalities, pedagogies and gender-based violence education in Australian schools Susanne Gannon

Introduction This chapter examines two resource kits produced 20 years apart for Australian secondary schools: No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence (1995) and Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence (2016). It considers whether there is a ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender-based violence (Ligozat et al., 2015), and how this might be influenced by feminist pedagogies. The chapter opens with an account of how didactics, pedagogies and curriculum intersect. It then maps curriculum continuities and variations across time, through close analysis of the resource kits and sample classroom activities, identifying key didactic principles for learning about gender-based violence. In attending to curricular interventions with explicit intentions to reshape dispositions, behaviours and understandings of gendered violence, the chapter considers how this persistent social problem is approached through wide-scale curriculum interventions. For feminist educators ‘what counts as knowledge and who is authorized to produce it’ remains an ‘enduring and highly significant’ issue (Epstein & Moreau, 2017: 425). Classroom resources are important vehicles for realising feminist agendas, which are also always ‘sites for managing the conduct of teachers and students and for regulating new forms of identity and social relations’ (McLeod, 2017: 283). These curricular interventions imagine futures where gendered violence recedes as a societal and intimate problem and new kinds of citizen-subjects – those who will recognise and resist ­v iolence – are in formation. Comparative readings of government-endorsed educational materials at two pivotal points in time suggest shifts and continuities in curriculum location, disciplinary knowledge, learning and teaching, theoretical understandings and particular framings of young people and teachers. No Fear: A kit addressing gender-based violence (1995) was distributed nationally to every secondary school at the peak moment of feminist influence in Australian education, where a pedagogical assemblage of resources, experts, governments and

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policy reached into schools around the country. Two decades later, although national gender equity education policies have almost disappeared, Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping out against gender-based violence (Ollis, 2016, for Victorian Government) is also a system-wide resource, produced for Victorian secondary schools. Classroom activities draw attention to how lessons on gender-based violence aim to impact on ‘knowing and being’, how they pedagogically mobilise particular types of knowledge and privilege affective and relational learning. They assume that schools can contribute to a just and equitable society, and that the subjects of learning – both teenagers who work through the lessons, and teachers who choreograph the joint didactic action of meaning making (Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2015) – are committed to societal futures where gender-based violence is reduced. While the French didactique tradition requires close attention to classroom interactions, relations and knowledge construction, feminist curriculum scholarship also insists that these are also always political acts. Historical and comparative studies have neglected the influences of ‘the major social movements of the 20th century – feminism, anti-racism and post-colonialism’, whereas it is feminism that has ‘most strikingly’ addressed the question of ‘what kinds of citizens are being formed via curriculum’ (Yates, 2016: 371). Lessons anticipate citizens-in-formation who will be better equipped to recognise, avoid, resist and interrupt sexual assault in everyday life.

Didactics, curriculum and (feminist) pedagogies In Australia, ‘didactic’ is a pejorative term for an overly directive and inflexible teaching style, whereas ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’ imply more lively ways of thinking about teaching and learning. In his genealogy of didactics, Hamilton suggests that ‘didactics’ (European) and ‘pedagogy’ (Anglo-­ American) are used as if synonymous, but Anglophone curriculum studies have overemphasised ‘instructional content and classroom delivery’ and lost sight of ‘curriculum as a vision of the future’ (1999: 134). Feminist scholars have their own genealogies (e.g. hooks, 1994; Lather, 1991). Always already oriented towards social action and social change through praxis, feminist pedagogies emphasise the ‘epistemological validity of personal experience’, create conditions for students to connect their learning with their lives and aspire to non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian relations (Crabtree et al., 2009: 7). Paradoxically feminist teachers aim to create safe, inclusive and participatory classrooms, and also to provoke ‘didactic discomfort’ by triggering intellectual and/or emotional reactions (Pereira, 2012: 129). Feminist pedagogies include informal pedagogies, popular culture and explicit attention to emotions (Epstein & Moreau, 2017: 425). The two resource kits feature many of these characteristics. As McLeod points out, feminist curriculum in Australian schools emerging around the time of No Fear included ‘new constructions of the personal’ such as ‘“values clarification” exercises in which the personal became not only political

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but also pedagogical’ (2017: 284). Through the 1990s, feminist pedagogies focused on ‘identity and gender as a social construction’, and therefore ‘a category that is “made” and open to change’ (2017: 290). Pedagogies analysing processes and effects of gender construction could move students beyond the constraints of normative gendered identities. Feminist post-structuralism became foundational, and despite complexities that may be difficult to negotiate in practice, its influence continues (see Ollis, 2016). A didactic approach examines ‘knowledge transpositions’ between in and out of school contexts, and traces how bodies of knowledge change as they are packaged for teachers (Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2015; Ligozat et al., 2015). It examines the movements, practices, habits, disruptions and relationships between knowledges and how these are shaped by discipline-­ specific ‘learning epistemologies’ (Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2015). Didactic analysis attends to: (i) ‘epistemic and ideological pre-constructs’ on which teaching materials are based; (ii) ‘professional thought styles’ of teachers and (iii) ‘practical interpretative schemes arising from situated adjustments’ in situ in classrooms (Ligozat, 2011). It allows for comparative studies of teaching resources in different disciplines, sites and/or times (Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2015). Comparative didactics asks: how is knowledge organised? Into what topics/domains/semiotic forms? What specialised teachers, disciplines, bodies of knowledge or ‘praxeologies’ (techniques) is it associated with (Ligozat & Leutenegger 2015: 348)? How is an ‘illusion of unity’ (ibid, 2015: 349) between knowledge systems achieved? The practical work of knowledge transposition means that curriculum designers must address big social questions in fragmented ways, select ‘techniques, technologies, concepts and theories’ and reconfigure them into a cascade of ‘topics … chapters, sections, sub-domains etc’ (ibid, 2015: 348). As it is based on published ‘idealised’ curriculum materials, this chapter focuses on the epistemic and ideological dimensions that underlie the two resource kits. The structure of these ‘pre-constructs’, described in the following section, provides some insights into this curriculum cascade. As this chapter suggests, curriculum on gender-based violence slips and slides between disciplines and eras, and is reformed and reshaped as it moves in response to changing out-ofschool social and political agendas. Historical contexts and backgrounds No Fear (1995) circulated nationally around Australia, and Building Respectful Relationships (2016) produced for the state of Victoria, were both sponsored by wider government initiatives, developed through consultative processes and trialed in secondary schools. Advisory groups were integral to developing the resources. No Fear (1995) lists 94 individuals as direct contributors as consultants, gender equity advisers, members of state level working parties, ­designers, writers, researchers and editorial assistants. In a different policy era, Building Respectful Relationships (2016) names just one author, with other contributions acknowledged in conventional academic terms through

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footnotes and references. This demonstrates a major shift in policy formation from an earlier time when government was directly involved in resource production, collaboration and consultation, and employed project officers and curriculum developers, to the privatised and outsourced processes of the present. The documents are best understood as just two of many nodal points of the vigorous networks of feminist knowledge workers and policy actors across each state and nationally, some of whom moved over time from policy work into academic careers. The gender equity policy assemblages that these are part of are elaborate and multifaceted. No Fear (1995) coincided with the National Action Plan on the Education of Girls (1993) and was developed at the same time as Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997), and auspiced by the same federal government department (Gannon, 2016). It was funded by the national Gender and Violence Project. Twenty years later, the federal government’s National Action Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children describes respectful relationships education as a strategy for reducing violence. Only Victoria has comprehensively addressed this, with Building Respectful Relationships developed as as part of its state-wide Action Plan to address Violence against Women and Children.

Principles for gender-based violence education This section outlines some of the didactic principles that appear in the two resource kits, including approaches taken within classroom activities. These include: (1) the use of statistics, (2) integration with mandated curriculum, (3) the premise of gender as a social construct, (4) conceptualisations of risk, (5) commitments to social action and whole school approaches. The use of gendered statistics Statistics feature in some of the resource materials directed at influential adults (i.e. No Fear booklets– Teacher Professional Development, Leadership for Principals, Facilitators’ Guide; Building Respectful Relationships – notes for teachers). Establishing the urgency and scale of the problem of gendered violence is a crucial tactical move. Statistical evidence is irrefutable and is coupled with reminders about the legislative requirements that schools must respond to. All of the adult resources in No Fear cite the 1994 Federal government’s Sticks and Stones: Report on Violence in Australian Schools which found that sexual harassment and gender-based violence were endemic, systematic and often unrecognised as such in Australian schools, including violence against gay, lesbian and bisexual students. This in turn drew on the National Gender and Violence Project that identified routine harassment from boys and sometimes from teachers, towards girls, women and other boys. Acceptance of aggressive or ‘tough’ masculinity was normal, encouraged and described as ‘the most damaging behaviour’ in schools (Facilitator’s Guide, 1995: 7).

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Statistics are used to mobilise action (e.g. ‘In Western ­Australia, boys were suspended for physical assault 25 times more often than girls…’, 1995: 6). In contrast to current decontextualised and individualised notions of bullying, 20 years earlier, school violence was directly linked to gendered power differentials. Schools were seen as significant contributors to cultures that sanction violence. The rationale for the No Fear resource kit was explicitly linked to violence as a problem inside schools, while its resources extended into violence beyond schools. The civic and social justice responsibilities of schools were linked to broader aims to ‘educate the community and change attitudes about violence towards women and girls’ (Back cover). In the No Fear kit (1995), professional learning for teachers starts with a mingling activity called ‘Startling Statistics’. Teachers are persuaded that this is an urgent problem with ramifications throughout society. Legislation cited includes state-level Anti-Discrimination/Equal Opportunity Acts, and the national Sex Discrimination Act (1992) that recognised sexual harassment as a serious offence, applicable to schools and to young people aged 16 years and over. Twenty years later, Building Respectful Relationships is also underpinned by government policy and shocking statistics. Its opening pages link it to the Federal Government’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children 2010–2022. ‘Startling statistics’ on gender-based violence are provided in the Introduction (e.g. ‘One in three women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15; Almost one in five women have experienced sexual assault since the age of 15’, 2016: 7). While statistics in the earlier kit emphasised perpetrators of gender-based violence, the later kit emphasises victims and, signalling the neoliberal turn to economics as an explanation for everyday life, includes the economic costs of gender-based violence among the startling statistics that move us to pedagogic action. Integration with mandated curriculum These kits were circulated to all state secondary schools nationally (No Fear, 1995) or across the state of Victoria (BRR, 2016), but they were not mandatory. They could be seen as ‘extra’ by teachers concerned about curriculum intensification, or dismissed as an ideological imposition that can be resisted. Therefore, curriculum designers have carefully mapped both resource kits to mainstream curriculum areas. No Fear drew on the National Curriculum Statements and Profiles of the time. Eight Focus Areas describe potential learning activities for four Key Learning Areas: the Arts, English, Studies of Society and the Environment, and Health and Physical Education (HPE) (Table 8.1). Year levels are not designated but for each focus area, learning outcomes across what are called levels 4, 5 and 6 in secondary schools are identified. According to Yates and Collins, in this early attempt at a national curriculum, the ‘levels’ were ‘child-centred and developmentally mystical’ (2008: 10)

104  Susanne Gannon Table 8.1  No Fear: A kit addressing gender-based violence (Secondary) (1995) Focus area 1 Focus area 2 Focus area 3 Focus area 4 Focus area 5 Focus area 6 Focus area 7 Focus area 8

Construction of gender: a question of identity Histories of violence; histories of resistance In whose interest? Gender and the law Body works: physical activity and empowerment Visions and versions: representations of the body and violence No longer a secret: dealing with and preventing sex-based violence Breakin’ up is hard to do: expectations and issues in relationships True stories? Defining and creating meanings about violence

Table 8.2  Building Respectful Relationships (2016) Unit 1 (Year 8) Unit 2 (Year 9) Unit 3 (Year 10)

Gender, respect and relationships The power connection Gender, power and media

Eight sessions Eight sessions Six sessions

because young people in the same class might be located at different levels or, in Years 8–10, could be aged anywhere between 13 and 16 years. With No Fear (1995), teachers were expected to incorporate activities into their own planning in any curriculum area. Teachers had autonomy and were assumed to be adept at planning and adapting pedagogical materials. Each focus area includes detailed descriptions of learning activities and actions to be undertaken by teachers and students. Student resources in the form of an A4 pamphlet are provided for each focus area, incorporating narrative excerpts from magazines, fiction and non-fiction, and a sprinkling of definitions and statistics. Worksheets and information sheets are provided but teachers are encouraged to adapt materials to suit their own contexts. Twenty years later, despite an introductory comment that the activities might be flexibly adopted or integrated into curriculum areas such as English, media or drama (2016: 9), the implication is that Building Respectful Relationships is a resource intended for HPE. An online tool allows Victorian teachers to map activities to their HPE syllabus. Three units of work for Years 8, 9 and 10 (13–16 year olds) are described in meticulous detail. Explicit procedures, resources and rationales are provided, including more than 20 separate handouts or worksheets for students in each unit, with links to online video resources (Table 8.2). Learning activities in Building Respectful Relationships are more explicit and more linear in their sequencing than the earlier kit. Opening activities on the social construction of gender are revisited each year because students must acquire ‘key understandings about gender prior to looking at violence’ (2016: 79). There is minimal scope for teachers to modify lessons, with learning activities described in meticulous detail and carefully sequenced. This is a more scripted and strongly framed approach, characteristic of recent neoliberal curriculum reforms that tend to describe idealised learning in increasingly

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prescriptive and atomised ways. The introduction suggests that schools without ‘comprehensive health education or trained teachers may engage local community agencies to address aspects of this curriculum focus’ (2016: 8). This is a very different approach to that of the earlier resource, where training was conducted in house with a facilitator, and where teachers were assumed to be competent curriculum designers and agents of change within the institution. Gender as a social construct Despite the 20-year gap, both resources are underpinned by feminist theories that differentiate gender, sex and sexuality, and that understand gender as socially and culturally constructed within systems of domination. Violence arises within unequal relations of power, which have tended to privilege straight white men and to marginalise women and girls, men and boys who do not embody privileged masculinities, and queer, bi, trans or intersex subjects. In No Fear, in Focus area 1 students learn to define gendered differences as binaries between women/girls and men/boys through collaboratively analysing magazine images, toy catalogues, newspapers, books, favourite possessions and personal reflections (e.g. ‘What is your first memory of knowing you were a boy or a girl? What things/experienced signified that you were different?’, 1995: 17–21). The opening activity addresses ‘The difference between sex and gender’, a foundational understanding for feminist politics, and students distinguish between ‘biological’ and ‘behavioural’ differences, consider the historically shifting, culturally contingent dynamic notion of gender, and explore the implications of ‘dominant constructions’ of masculinity and femininity. Gendered violence is explored through drama activities (freeze frames, hot seats, still images) focusing on school life, and a range of suggested research topics (e.g. ‘male violence’ and ‘female violence’ in crime reporting, violence in sport, sexual assault and domestic violence) allow students to independently investigate gender construction (1995: 26). Twenty years later, Building Respectful Relationships also opens with a focus on the construction of gender in the early lessons of Unit 1: Gender, respect and relationships (for Year 8 students). These lessons are returned to and extended each year, to consolidate this underpinning premise of the resource kit. A note to teachers stresses that ‘analysis of gender is often missing in sexuality education programmes and is essential as the background to exploring and understanding the power dynamics of sexual relationships that can lead to violence’ (2016: 14). Teachers are provided with distinct definitions of ‘gender’ (‘characteristics of women and men that are socially constructed’), ‘sex’ (‘biological characteristics of males and females, determined by a person’s genes’) and ‘sexuality’ (‘how people experience and express themselves as sexual beings’) (2016: 20). Students distinguish between ‘biological, behavioural and social differences’ in an activity using ‘sex and gender cards’ to classify differences that pertain to girls, boys and both girls and boys. Students are

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moved from thinking about sexed bodies through to an understanding of masculine and feminine subjectivities (2016: 15). Binaried understandings of gender are pedagogically coded into lessons where students are often divided into boys’ and girls’ groups; however, in Unit 1 ‘Being a trans-man’ (Resource H11, 2016: 59), a first person account of being a young transperson, is introduced as a provocation for discussion beyond binaries (e.g. ‘How would society define this person? … Why? How does this person define himself? … What does it tell us about gender? …’, 2016: 23). Importantly, in this lesson as in many others in both kits, learning is achieved through narrative – ­engaging students with feelings, voice, the particularities of lived experience, and demanding empathy and affective responses – rather than alternative modes of ­k nowledge-building, such as science or factual information. Narratives are inevitably accompanied by small group and whole class discussions. Students feel and talk their way into new ways of thinking about gender, sex and sexuality. By Unit 2, the power connection, Year 9 students are required to keep a personal reflective journal to continue exploring issues raised in class (e.g. ‘I was surprised that I…; I learnt that others…’, 2016: 89). The social construction of gender is a key understanding that the logic of both kits relies upon, and that enables them to make explicit links between gender and violence. However, the assumption that recognising and understanding that connecting gender inequities, power and violence will lead to the desire to call out or give up some of that power may be naïve. This is where affective and relational dimensions of learning require attention, and where certain risks emerge. Conceptualisations of risk Risk takes many forms throughout the kits. There are many points where the ‘didactic discomfort’ (Pereira, 2012) associated with feminist pedagogies might arise. Risk is an inevitable consequence of learning about gender-based and sexualised violence, when this entails challenging unjust structures and trying to facilitate changes in behaviours and attitudes. Both kits address risks for teachers as well as for other students, from students (often assumed to be boys) who may be hostile or resistant. Background information at the beginning of the ‘Violence and Fear’ activity in No Fear (Focus area 6) guides the teacher through a strategy for ‘Challenging Homophobia’. Teachers are told that A common feature of boys’ discussions about fears is their fear of homosexuality. In the activities which follow, you might find that some students express homophobic attitudes. In order to facilitate a worthwhile discussion, teachers need to be prepared to deal with these attitudes. (1995: 75) Teachers are provided with a list of disruptive questions for the homophobic moment, ranging from highly personal and confrontational ‘What is it about

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homosexuality that you are afraid of?’ to broader ‘How are boys expected to prove they are men? What are the expectations placed on them about proving their sexuality?’ to violence-related questions: ‘[T]he perpetrators of sexual assault against boys are commonly someone they know who is publically heterosexual. Boys who are sexually abused often don’t report their experiences. Why?’ Students are directed to ‘Martin’s Story’ on the A4 Resource sheet where 17-year-old Martin describes his experiences as a 12-year-old of being groomed over time and sexually assaulted by the father of a classmate. Twenty years later, Building Respectful Relationships (2016) is overt about the likelihood of young people in schools being victims of gender-based violence. For example, a sequence of activities are organised around ‘Zoe & Sam’ (Resource H9, 2016: 89), a narrative about coercive sex and lack of consent between a boyfriend and a girlfriend at a party from two points of view. Teachers are advised to alert students of the content in advance because ‘This gives students who have been sexually assaulted an opportunity to make an informed choice about whether they want to explore the issue and listen to other people’s opinions’. Risks of disclosure of assault, abuse and sexual preference are also identified in the opening pages of the resource (2016: 12) and teachers are provided with reminders of legislative responsibilities, care and support (including from welfare staff ), and confidentiality. Commitments to social action In these curricular interventions into gender-based violence, students are positioned as social actors with agency and impact in the world beyond school. In the last activity for Focus area 1 of No Fear students write ‘scenarios about incidents that are common in school life’ (1995: 28) (or select scenarios from the resources), and work through a handout called ‘What can you do?’ (1995: 29). They evaluate a range of potential responses: conformity, resignation, avoidance, resistance, fighting, collective resistance, subversion (1995: 29). Collective social action is valorised and teachers are advised to draw parallels with ‘peace movements, environmental campaigns, campaigns against violence against women and Aboriginal struggles and resistances’ (1995: 26). A classroom panel discussion addressing ‘What can ordinary people do about major problems?’ is suggested (1995: 27). Individual ‘strategies for resistance’ are also investigated through discussion of individuals who have resisted ‘dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity’, sharing ways they have done this themselves, or moments when they have intervened in harassment or humiliation (1995: 27). Specific activities are suggested for ‘Working with boys’ (1995: 28) concluding in discussion of: ‘How difficult is it to confront the person responsible if you are part of the same group? What does it take to intervene?’. Strategies for responding to sexual violence are also emphasised in Focus area 6 with teachers reminded that students need to be ‘aware of many forms of collective and social action’ beyond the individual (1995: 79). Again, students examine a range of narrative scenarios (e.g. ‘You

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are a male student who is doing dance as a subject at school. Some of the other boys at school have been teasing you about it and calling you a “girl” and “gay”. One lunchtime you find a condom and pamphlet about AIDS in your lunchbox’, 1995: 80). They are asked to consider a range of responses (e.g. do nothing, personal confrontation, collective action, use of authority, accessing legal system) and to evaluate their likely effects. No Fear clearly positions students as social actors and citizens committed to a just world, with the obligation and capacity to call out violence and a preference for collective social action. Building Respectful Relationships (2016) also foregrounds student-led interventions and responses to violence, although – consistent with current educational policy – responses appear to be directed towards social and emotional well-being rather than wider social change. The final lessons of Unit 1 ask students to consider ‘How to help a friend’. Students work with a list of 17 possible emotional responses to violence (Resource H20, 2016: 73) including: ‘Powerlessness, Emotional numbness, Shock and denial, Guilt and shame, Loss of confidence’; and they examine the effects of these emotions on thoughts and feelings (e.g. ‘Fear – I’m constantly jumpy. A sudden noise, an angry voice, moving bushes, and I’m afraid’). Actions are described in terms of potential responses to disclosures ‘What can I do to help a friend?’ (Resource H21, 2016: 74), namely: Listen, Believe, Validate, No Blame, Ask, Shhh and Get help. These are applied to narrative scenarios detailing harassment and violence in schools (Resource H15, e.g. ‘Vincent, a year 9 boy, has been making sexual jokes about a new girl, Amy, to a mixed group of students in his class. Amy feels humiliated and wishes she could go back to her old school’, 2016: 68). Importantly, under ‘Get help’ the websites of community ­organisations – including CASA, the Victorian Centres for Sexual Assault – are provided. In Building Respectful Relationships (2016), students are again positioned as social actors; however – in keeping with contemporary times – responses tend to be more individualised, interpersonal, intimate and focused on feelings rather than political or collective action. Collective action is mentioned through the resource (e.g. ‘Unit 2: The power connection’, 2016: 77), but activities are not as explicit about collective interventions. Lessons utilising drama strategies such as scripted scenarios and role plays allow students to experiment together with ways they can ‘rewrite’ the script to change the outcome of a violent event (2016: 31). Bystander interventions and individual responsibility are both emphasised (‘What can we as individuals do to reduce the barriers and increase the enablers e.g. encourage friends to be respectful, challenge each other …’, 2016: 31). Arguably, however the orientation of the resource kit to social change – whether individualised or ­collective – is always in sight because it is coded into the full title of the resource kit: Building ­Respectful Relationships: Stepping out against gender-based violence. Social change is seen to impact on the whole school as a community. Both kits insist that the impacts of curricular engagements on gender-based violence cannot be quarantined within curriculum silos. Whole school strategies

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are necessary to address gender-based violence. While No Fear (1995) identified a range of subjects within which student learning about gender-based violence could be nested, the Professional Development booklet for teachers is explicit about the more expansive goal of the programme which is ‘creating safe and supportive school environments in which all forms of violence are considered unacceptable’ (1995: i). Four workshop sessions for teachers culminate in a ‘Whole School Plan’ for addressing violence, gender and power. Action research is recommended as a strategy for teachers to collectively audit, analyse, plan and monitor change as they investigate how issues of violence, gender and power impact on school life. Teachers are reminded that a whole school approach to change must include ‘Curriculum Programs, Teaching and Learning Practices, School Policies, Resources, School ­Organisational Practices and School Culture’; and must engage ‘All Key Learning Areas, All Year Levels, The Whole School (and broader) Community’ (1995: 98). The  introduction to Building Respectful Relationships also emphasises that a whole school approach is ‘the key to preventing gender-based violence’ (2016: 8). The whole school approach is articulated through a diagram with six wedge-shaped sections forming a circle: ‘School Leadership and Commitment, Professional Learning Strategy, Teaching and Learning, Community Partnerships, Support for Staff and Students, School Culture and Environment’. The kit stresses that ‘formal curriculum is only one element of a comprehensive approach’ (2016: 8). A more expansive approach will also attend to the ‘informal curriculum’ including ‘school ethos and culture’. A feminist ethos oriented to praxis and social change remains as important in Building Respectful Relationships as it was in No Fear.

Conclusion In addressing gender-based violence, curriculum interventions emphasise knowledge that is empirical, personal and collaboratively constructed. Classroom activities draw extensively on feminist pedagogies that make the personal both political and pedagogical. Active student participation is encouraged, and empathy and imagination are mobilised through narratives of personal experiences drawn from a range of fictional and factual sources, as well as students’ lived experiences. Diverse facets of social life and wider culture are drawn into the classroom for interrogation, ranging from media representations to statistics on gendered violence. Working through opinions, misconceptions and ambiguities through carefully structured activities is part of the pedagogic route that leads to an understanding of gender-based violence. The ‘joint action in didactics’ approach (Ligozat, 2011) is both pragmatic and theoretical, enabling analysis of the co-construction of meaning, knowledge and practice through interactions between teachers and students, curriculum resources and the influences of official curriculum and its ‘pre-constructs’. These are the subject didactics of gender-based violence, and they cannot easily be disarticulated from feminist pedagogies.

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Nor can learning about gendered violence and how to disrupt it be readily contained in classrooms. Knowledge from outside school will permeate teaching and learning and teachers’ didactic responsibilities mean that these must be put to work to reshape feelings, ethics and practices. Curriculum of this nature is always part of larger projects of social reform, which are unevenly supported by governments and other societal institutions. Despite early and vigorous feminist policy influence at the time of No Fear, the pedagogical and policy assemblages that supported curricular interventions into persistent social problems rapidly contracted with a conservative turn in government (Gannon, 2016). New evidence about the ubiquity and scope of sexual violence against young people (AHRC, 2017; COA, 2017) has drawn attention to the need for educational interventions. Despite the gap in time, and significantly different political, societal and policy contexts, there are didactic continuities that reinforce the importance of feminist pedagogies. This chapter has been restricted to published teaching materials, and therefore to ‘epistemic and ideological pre-constructs’ pertaining to gender-based violence. Further research would investigate didactics in practice, including teachers’ accounts of their thinking about the materials and pedagogy for addressing gender-based violence (their ‘thought styles’) and the pragmatic ‘situated adjustments’ that are made in classrooms (Ligozat, 2011). This would develop better understandings of paradoxes and slippages between idealised lessons and the complexities of interactions among teachers, students and bodies of knowledge (Ollis, 2017). Vague directions to teachers to adapt the materials to suit their classes – such as in No Fear – and explicit instructions – such as in Building Respectful Relationships – that are inevitably transposed in sites of practice could then be more carefully mapped. Between these two resources, there has been an increased reliance on external professionals, more directive instruction and more explicit links to mandated curriculum, which may inadvertently reduce the impact of school-based interventions into ­gender-based violence. What is certain is that education about gender-based violence is as urgent and necessary as it has ever been in Australia, and insights into how to do it inclusively and effectively are essential.

Paired dialogue: towards an articulation of the two layers of didactic transposition Chantal Amade-Escot Reading Susanne’s chapter through my own tradition of French didactique research was thought-provoking in terms of comparing Australian and French policies related to gender-based education in the light of a dialogue between our two research traditions. My reflections on these political and theoretically entangled issues lead me to advocate that there would be value in using the two approaches to bring further

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developments on ‘didactic transposition’ (for definition, see Chapter 4, paired dialogue from Florence Ligozat) when analysing gendering in education. I suggest their articulation because knowledge transpositions are always embedded in the broader anthropological systems which subject didactics belong to (Chevallard, 1989). Consequently, didactic transpositions relating to gender education will always reflect a compromise between social expectations, social issues and the reconstruction of this knowledge into specific pedagogic contexts. Susanne’s analysis shows that particular historical moments are important to understanding how education on gender violence is recontextualised into schools. The first national report from the French Ministry of Education concerning gender violence and sexism in schools occurred in 2001 but no pedagogical materials were produced. This was in stark contrast with ‘No Fear: A kit addressing gender-based violence’ (1995) in Australia. In France, the 2013 publication of ‘ABCD de l’Égalité’ saw practical steps taken towards an innovative educational programme to ‘fight against sexism and gender stereotyping’. ­Resources were developed to address gender equality through teaching and learning in primary schools (Rogers, 2016). At the same moment, ideological controversy arose from ‘Le mariage pour tous’ (the ‘marriage for all’ law) and the most reactionary catholic pressure groups in France embarked on a joint ‘crusade’ against the (so-called) ‘Theory of Gender’ in education. It was argued that this theory ‘pervad[ed] the primary school system and destroy[ed] the image of a true family’ (Fassin, 2016: 176–177). Feminist pedagogies, like the ‘gender-based violence education kits’ in Australia and the ‘ABCD de l’Égalité’ in France, always face obstacles from social-political contexts and wider anthropological systems of belief. Consequently, as the concept of didactic transposition suggests, two layers of gendered analysis are needed. The first layer, as illustrated by Susanne in her chapter, explores the epistemic and ideological dimensions that underlie the resource kits. The second layer of analysis should explore how teachers’ and students’ joint actions in the class produce gendered knowledge (Amade-Escot, 2017; see Chapters 3 and 11). A two-pronged analysis that incorporated the Anglo-Saxon post-structuralist analysis of pedagogical materials and discourses and the Francophone didactique research into classroom transactions could be complementary. Both traditions question the binary categories which limit and constrain the teaching and learning of school subjects across various gendered dimensions and pedagogic sites: in disciplinary knowledge, curriculum, pedagogical artefacts and didactical transactions. They also share the ability to see critical and anthropological issues as situated in contexts, practices and sociocultural events involving (Continued)

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bodies, materials, spaces and power relations. However, there are also important distinctions between the two traditions. Fine-grained analysis of gendered knowledge and the enactment of curricula in class appear to be the landmark of the French didactique approach. The ­A nglophone approach questions how gendered discourses of knowledge affect schools and the wider political implications. Bringing these together would result in stronger epistemological and political perspectives that would more firmly underpin feminist pedagogies.

Acknowledgement This research is supported by Australian Research Council Discovery grant ‘Gender Matters: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Practices in Australian Secondary Schools 2019-2021’ awarded to Susanne Gannon and Kerry Robinson.

References Amade-Escot, C. (2017). How gender order is enacted in Physical Education: the didactique approach. In G. Doll-Tepper, R. Bailey & K. Koenen (Eds.), Sport, Education and Social Policy. The State of the Social Sciences of Sport. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, ICSSPE perspectives, 62–79. Australian Human Rights Commission. (2017). Change the Course: National Report on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment at Australian Universities. www.humanrights. gov.au/about/publications/. Chevallard, Y. (1989). On didactic transposition theory: some introductory notes. In proceedings of the International Symposium on Selected Domains of Research and Development in Mathematics Education. Bratislava, 51–62. http://yves.chevallard.free.fr/ spip/spip/article.php3?id_article=122. Commonwealth of Australia. (2017). Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Final Report. www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au. Crabtree, R., Sapp, D. & Licona, A. (Eds). (2009). Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Epstein, D. & Moreau, M.P. (2017). Feminism, power and pedagogy. Editor’s introduction. Gender and Education, 29 (4), 425–429. Fassin, E. (2016). Gender and the democratic problem of universals. Catholic mobilizations and sexual democracy in France. Religion and Gender, 6 (2), 173–186. Gannon, S. (2016). Kairos and the time of gender equity policy in Australian schooling. Gender and Education, 28 (3), 330–342. Hamilton, D. (1999). The pedagogic paradox (or why no didactics in England?). Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 7 (1), 135–152. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education and the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (1991). Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern. New York: Routledge. Ligozat, F. (2011). The determinants of the joint action in didactics: the text-­action relationship in teaching practice. In B. Hudson & M.A. Meyer (Eds.), Beyond

Temporalities, pedagogies  113 Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe (pp. 157–176). Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Ligozat, F., Amade-Escot, C. & Ostman, L. (2015). Beyond subject specific approaches of teaching and learning: comparative didactics. Interchange, 46, 313–321. Ligozat, F. & Leutenegger, F. (2015). Teaching resources in early school grades: a comparative approach to the teacher’s interpretative space in three subject areas. Interchange, 46, 345–367. McLeod, J. (2017). The administration of feminism in education: revisiting and remembering narratives of gender equity and identity. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (4), 283–300. Ollis, D. (2016). Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out against Gender-Based Violence. State of Victoria: Department of Education and Training. Ollis, D. (2017). The power of feminist pedagogies in Australia: vagina shorts and the primary prevention of violence against women. Gender and Education, 29 (4), 461–475. Pereira, M.D.M. (2012). Uncomfortable classrooms: rethinking the role of student discomfort in feminist teaching. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19 (1), 128–135. Rogers, R. (2016). From the French Republican educational reforms to the ‘ABCD de l’égalité’: thinking about change in the history of girls’ education in France. In M. Depaepe & P. Smeyers (Eds.), Discourses of Change and Changes of Discourse. Dordrecht and London: Springer, 137–151. Yates, L. (2016). Europe, transnational curriculum movements and comparative curriculum theorizing. European Educational Research Journal, 15 (3), 366–373. Yates, L. & Collins, C. (2008). Australian curriculum 1975–2005: what has been happening to knowledge? Conference paper, Annual conference of Australian Association of Research in Education, QUT Brisbane, December 2008.

9 Butterflies for girls, tornadoes for boys Primary school science teaching in France and Geneva1 Isabelle Collet Introduction According to UNESCO (2018), all over the world girls and women still face multiple challenges that compromise their science, technology, engineering and mathematics (hereafter STEM) education and consequently STEM careers, wherein they account for less than a third of employees globally (28.8% for world, 39.5% for Europe, and only 27% for France and 33.5% for Switzerland). The gender stereotypes in STEM resonate with a societal representational system and fuel discrimination strategies that specifically exclude girls and women from science. In this chapter, I revisit the links between STEM and gender. I consider gender as a system of norms continually produced by broader social relations which ranks the masculine higher than the feminine (Collet, 2016) and which, in turn, helps us understand how the sociosexual division of knowledge has arisen (Mosconi, 1999). I argue that despite political pressure in both France and Switzerland to encourage boys and, more specifically, girls to pursue scientific studies, the proportion of STEM lessons is still too low in primary school for the representations resulting from educational practice to supplant those produced by conventional social practices. I raise the question as to why science, a major and highly selective discipline at the end of schooling, is a minor, even incidental discipline in primary school. My central argument is that if we are to improve girls and women’s STEM careers then we need to look towards transforming science primary education.

Women in STEM in Europe In Europe, the proportion of women in STEM increased significantly over the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, following the spread of gender diversity throughout higher education, which coincided with the massive influx of women into the labour market. According to Eurostat (2017), women are slowly closing the gender gap in STEM and made up more than a third (40.1%) of scientists and engineers in the EU member countries, an increase of more than 20% since 2007. But, women are scarce in high-tech sectors: women are just 32.2% of those employed in high-tech manufacturing and

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knowledge-intensive high-tech services in 2016. In fact, during the 2000s, there has been a stagnation in many STEM fields (except biology and related fields) and even a significant decrease in the number of women in computer technology (Abbate, 2012; Collet, 2011). In France, women were originally barred from enrolling in engineering schools but have gradually entered all areas of science (Marry, 2004). However, parity has rarely been achieved. With the exception of life sciences, where the proportion of women is 59%, the figure is only 28% in engineering schools overall and less than 20% in the leading engineering schools (Blanchard et al., 2016). Not only have these figures remained more or less unchanged over the past 10 years, but in mathematics (Broze & Lizan, 2009) and computer science (Collet, 2011) the percentage of women is in fact declining to reach 16% in 2017. In Switzerland, the number of women in university programmes has increased since the beginning of the 1980s, including in scientific fields. But while the improvement over the period 1980–2007 is clearly apparent in the life sciences (rising from 34% to 50%), it is less evident in physics and mathematics (an increase from 14% to 19% only) and in mechanical and electrical engineering (from 3% to 11%) over the same period (Pagnossin, 2008). In Switzerland, women make up 15.6% in manufacturing and knowledge-intensive high-tech services (Eurostat, 2017).

Constructing knowledge to exclude women The supposed incompatibility between women and science was historically based on the tradition of excluding women from scholarly knowledge. In particular, it underpinned their prohibition from attending institutions for the production of scientific knowledge in the 19th century (Noble, 1992). An appeal to ‘nature’ has been frequently deployed to exclude girls from culture (Ortner, 1998) and it has been instrumental in justifying a social order that confines women to the domestic sphere. For example, the engineering of tools and weapons that enable people to overcome their bodily limitations has been an area of production and manufacture deemed unsuitable for women and has been instrumental to the exercise of control, power and dominance via wars, conflict and the maintenance of a particular version of world order (Tabet, 1998). Likewise, the disciplines of STEM have become constitutive of hegemonic masculinity, resulting from a ‘configuration of gender practice that embodies the solution at a given moment to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy’ (Connell, 1995: 77). From Fénelon’s Treatise on the Education of Daughters (1687), advocating that girls should display ‘a modesty with regard to science almost as delicate as that inspired by the horror of vice’, through to the ousting of midwives to the advantage of male obstetricians on the pretext that women cannot use tools (Knibiehler & Fouquet, 1980), the history of girls’ education reveals a ruthless selection process in relation to scholarly knowledge. This is especially so with regard to STEM, in that the relationship to such knowledge is primarily, and increasingly, a relationship to power.

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These power relations gave rise to the sociosexual construction of knowledge (Mosconi, 1999), historically instituted in society and reproduced by schooling: there were some skills and knowledge that were apportioned according to gender and social class, and others that were transgressive or even taboo and disgraceful. The selection of knowledge to be taught to women was based on an understanding of the social utility of the knowledge transmitted to those whose role it was to perform domestic tasks. By making it their destiny to care for others, especially the sick, children and the elderly, a specific connection was constructed between women and the discipline of biology. With the arrival of women in higher education, in the 19th century some women became nurses and in the second half of the 20th century some became doctors. The disciplines of biology, medicine and paramedical studies were thus designated as appropriate fields for women, unlike other STEM disciplines, which were more oriented to the public than to the private domain. This sociosexual division of knowledge has always been present, often unbeknownst to the teachers, in the day-to-day workings of the classroom.

The making of gender throughout schooling Schools are often held responsible, together with other sites of socialization such as the media, the family and the work environment, for girls’ lack of interest in STEM – these sites, it is argued, reproduce gendered stereotypes in relation to science and maths and do not enable girls to occupy their rightful place in learning these disciplines. In their review of the literature, Solga and Pfahl (2009) analyse the different stages of this phenomenon, from nursery school through to employment. Although the number of women taking STEM steadily decreases as they progress through their studies or learning pathways, it is not because of any lack of aptitude on their part. West and Zimmerman (1987) speak of gender-based practice – of ‘doing gender’ – in everyday life, and note how the institutional traditions, norms, habits and rules, which are reproduced by men, women and schooling, confirm the view of technology as essentially aligned with representations associated with masculinity. More recent analyses of French (CHA, 2012) and Swiss (Collet, 2016) school science textbooks and scientific documentary books (Collet, 2008; Detrez, 2005) provide reminders of the continuity of this situation. From the standpoint of teachers, Stanat and Bergann (2009) report that teachers tend to notice girls’ setbacks in STEM more than boys’, which can influence girls’ sense of competence and their interest in these subjects. This diminished sense of personal efficacy on the part of girls also emerges from the PISA 2006 results (Schwantner, 2009). These insights are echoed by Huguet and Régner (2009) who draw attention to the phenomenon of ‘stereotype threat’ (Steele & Aronson, 1995): in primary school, girls do better at a given task when it is described as plastic art than when it is described as geometry. Another factor liable to damage girls’ sense of competence and their motivation in

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STEM is the imbalance between boys and girls in terms of oral participation. ­Duru-Bellat (1990) cites various studies on this topic, showing, for example, that girls between the ages of 6 and 14 receive 36 hours less attention in mathematics than boys, and there is a similar disparity in physics. However, while these research findings are indisputable, they are in no way limited to STEM. With regard to speaking in class, Jarlégan (2009) for primary schooling in France and Collet (2015) for secondary schooling in Geneva show that these imbalances occur regardless of the discipline concerned. Furthermore, while women are absent from science textbooks, they are also absent from history textbooks (CHA, 2011), a discipline in which female students are in the majority. In elementary school, they are also ­under-represented in books for learning how to read (CHA, 2015) and in the reading albums recommended by the French National Education system (Brugeilles et al., 2009). Despite this, girls still do better in reading than boys (Plumelle, 2013). In short, while schools replicate and reinforce gender stereotypes with regard to STEM, they also do so in other disciplines. But in the case of STEM, these stereotypes resonate with a societal representational system that specifically excludes girls from science. Thus, while it is essential that education for girls and boys be egalitarian, both in terms of content and teaching practices, it is also important to promote science for all children at all ages, and also when the basics are taught, that is, in primary school. In addition, in primary school, girls and boys are more willing than teenagers to accept transgressive behaviours and attitudes according to gender roles. This means they can more easily build a positive relationship with science at this stage. Later, when students must choose between disciplines, the expression of their gender identity will tend to influence their declared taste for school subjects. Vouillot interestingly expresses this issue as follows: Through his/her choice of orientation, the person shows to the look and judgment of others the image she/he has of her/himself. Since the training courses and professions are hierarchical and gendered, the project situates the subject’s level of ambition, what he/she believes him/ herself to be worth, his/her tastes, but also his/her degree of conformity or eccentricity toward social norms and expectations that are addressed to him/her according to his/her social status and gender. (Vouillot, 2007: 93)

Science in primary school: comparison of France and Geneva Both in Geneva, in line with the Plan d’études romand, and in France, in accordance with the Official Bulletin of the National Education system, mathematics and the sciences (mainly biology, followed by physics, chemistry, earth sciences and to a very limited extent computer science) are on the primary

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school curriculum. In Geneva, as in France, the scientific approach is valorized: ‘Observation, questioning, experimentation and argumentation […] are essential; this is why knowledge and skills are acquired in the framework of an investigative process that develops curiosity, creativity, critical thinking and interest in scientific and technical progress.’ The same is true of the Genevan educational system’s objectives: ‘Scientific activity (observation and experimentation) allows reality to be opened up, questioned and confronted; it stimulates the faculties of adaptation and creation; it helps to discern a reality that is often hidden.’ Both education systems allocate time each week for this teaching: a minimum of 2 hours 30 minutes per week in France, and two periods of 45 minutes in Geneva. Each system makes available easily accessible resources, including online, through the National Education Authority in France and the Intercantonal Conference of Public Education of French-speaking Switzerland Romande and of Ticino. These resources are supplemented by other curriculum-based tools developed by STEM specialist trainers.2 In reality, however, it seems that the hourly provision falls far short of what is advocated by the programmes. In France, the time allocated to experimental sciences and technology appears to be only about 1 hour 40 minutes (Bérard et al., 2005). Lafosse-Marin (2010: 46) views the situation even more pessimistically: ‘in disadvantaged schools, teachers are forced to return to what some people call the basics of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” and their pupils do little or no science.’ Indeed, in her sample, 90% of children from disadvantaged backgrounds had not done any science at school, compared to 50% of students from privileged backgrounds, at the time of her survey. In Geneva, although the practices vary considerably, it seems that the actual amount of teaching is closer to a single 45-minute period. Some teachers even admit to never teaching science (Dubois, 2010), which is perceived as being in competition with history and geography, since the programmes allocate these disciplines to the same group or to the same hourly slot. Dubois reports that many teachers acknowledge favouring history and geography over science, and Bérard et al. (2005) reveal that this preference is also found in France. In a questionnaire sent to future elementary teachers regarding the science lessons given during their placement (Collet, 2016), they are surprised by how little time is given to science in the weekly timetable. One student, N., writes: ‘On the basis of my five placements in middle divisions […] I have very rarely seen science teaching sequences. Only once for an 8P.’ (Primary school in Geneva lasts 8 years, from 1P (age 4) to 8P (age 12). The middle division is for children aged 8 and over.) Another teacher trainee, V., points out that there were science lessons largely because she took responsibility for them, and a third, M., says that the teacher took advantage of trainees by unloading science teaching onto them. The amount of time spent on teaching science is reduced because the teachers say that class time allocations reflect the emphasis given to those subjects which are taken into account in the cantonal assessments, namely French, mathematics and then German, which determine the groupings by

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level and influence whether a student moves up to a higher class. In France, as in Switzerland, science is only assessed at the end of primary school. Nadia says: ‘I asked a teacher, with whom I was carrying out a 4-week placement, why he was not teaching science. He told me: “It’s not the most important thing. It’s more French, maths and German, and science is mainly taught in high school.”’ These observations are corroborated by Dubois (2013), who notes that in three and half months of fieldwork, only 20% of the student respondents had experienced more than four science lessons.

The alliance of gendered social practices and gendered science Outside school, social practices leave little room for girls to engage in science: gender stereotypes, the lack of socially visible career scientists and scientific identities for females (role models), the representation of scientific activities as being focused on socially male concerns and so forth, all appear to constitute a closure of opportunities and possibilities for girls. As they become teenagers, many girls experience a loss of self-confidence, a low sense of self-efficacy and a growing sense of illegitimacy in their relations to science. At school, given the limited time available for these disciplines, teachers make a drastic and apparently rational choice among the topics in the programme. Consequently, representations from social practices (at work, in leisure activities and in the media) through which gender stereotypes are widely propagated cannot be challenged and replaced by representations derived from egalitarian educational practice. In the context of her Master’s thesis, Schnyder (2014) asked 141 pupils (66 girls and 75 boys) aged 8 or 9 years enrolled in public schools in Geneva to choose among scientific activities that they might do in class. The choices made by girls and boys regarding the following propositions are made below: Question 1

Girls (%)

Boys (%)

1 Tornados and earthquakes The behaviour of a polar bear with her cubs Manufacture of a perfume The operation of mobile phones

24 35 30 11

63 15  4 19

Question 2

Girls (%)

Boys (%)

2 Disassembling a computer (to see how it is constructed), then reassembling it Observing in class the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies Creating a miniature volcano Changing the colour of water by mixing it with different liquid and solid substances

 7

24

33

 8

30 29

57 11

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Girls (%)

Boys (%)

3 How does a locomotive work? How does our digestive system work? How do I forecast the weather? How does a computer work?

 6 42 35 17

20 17 34 28

These are fictitious activities – the children therefore make a choice based on the representation they have of the activity and not the activity itself. The examples presented draw on representations from standard social activities, which are not usually very mixed in terms of gender. This does not mean that children of both genders, who do not choose an option, think the activity is uninteresting. Asked to make an exclusive choice, they are obliged to eliminate activities that they know less about or are less spontaneously attracted to. We can then observe avoidance choices, largely influenced by gender stereotypes. The girls predominantly do not select ‘disassembling a computer’, ‘the operation of mobile phones’ or ‘the operation of a locomotive’ but choose activities that seem more familiar to them. They would have little reason to choose ‘disassembling a computer’, since nothing in their day-to-day world makes them think that the subject could interest them: multiple messages link interest in computers to social practices that are little valued or inappropriate for them (Collet, 2011). Choosing the unfamiliar and possibly daunting ‘computer’ activity would oblige them forgo other activities that they find more attractive and interesting and that in any case conform to feminine norms. Perfume, associated with the world of cosmetics, and butterflies, associated with fairy wings, are increasingly found in cultural activities designed for girls (especially in association with creative leisure activities). The boys predominantly do not select ‘observing the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies’, ‘manufacturing perfume’ or ‘colouring water’. These activities may seem too threatening to boys’ perceptions of their gender role: being a ‘real’ boy is above all not being a girl, that is, not looking like they enjoy so-called ‘girls’ activities. A boy’s fear of being seen by his peers as too feminine may be at risk of being labelled homosexual, the infamous insult that induces boys to adopt various multiple strategies to guard against it. On the other hand, when they mostly choose to work on tornadoes or earthquakes, boys express a masculine habitus by indicating their taste for danger and for manifestations of colossal and spectacular forces. Later, these early gendered strategies may also come into play in relation to choosing a course of study. As reported by Vouillot (2010: 61): Whatever the level of the orientation level […] I find the same phenomenon: what is attractive for one gender is repellent for the other. In fact, the overwhelming presence of one gender in a subject is usually due to its avoidance by the other gender.

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However, at the school level, one cannot speak of a choice for one discipline over another, in that the different disciplines are not yet named or identified – but there is clear evidence to indicate that, given choices among fictitious scientific activities, the children use commonly held gendered representations to rule out activities that are less familiar to them or less spontaneously attractive. Perhaps a compounding factor here is the primary school teachers’ lack of training in gender issues in education, which may subtly undermine work done with girls to promote a positive orientation to STEM subjects. At that age and with proper gender-sensitive science lessons (or at least more science lessons), there is the possibility that children could develop personal, social, emotional and identity connections to STEM and at least have a chance to build a basis for resilience to resist gender stereotypes with regard to subject choices at school and to other choices beyond school.

Conclusion: putting science (back) into culture Given the need for France and Switzerland to train more scientists in response to economic challenges, it is essential that education policies find solutions for making science more attractive and appealing to previously side-lined social groups, especially girls. Baillargeon (2011) highlights the importance of this need for solutions, and cites C. P. Snow’s well-known 1959 lecture on the ‘two cultures’ – humanist culture and scientific culture – which form ‘two isolated continents whose inhabitants do not maintain any communication with each other’ (Baillargeon, 2011: 33). Baillargeon (2011) takes this point up and contends that what is called general culture is not usually considered to include science, and he notes that a cultivated person can shamelessly declare ‘I don’t understand mathematics and science’, and even take pride in doing so (Baillargeon, 2011: 37). The evidence in this chapter – and these broader observations – leads us to suggest that STEM are not considered to be part of the prevailing literary and humanist general culture. Perhaps this is why primary school teachers prefer to focus on history or geography when teaching ‘basic’ knowledge, leaving to secondary school teachers what they view as a specific culture. It is for this reason that the physicist and philosopher of science Lévy-­ Leblond (2008) argues that science should be reinserted into general culture. This is not only a matter of sharing scientific knowledge among men and women, but – more importantly – it is primarily a matter of sharing power. This is a crucial observation and one central to the argument posed in this chapter: wanting to become involved in science entails ‘feeling [that I can] shape its development, choose the directions of research, exercise [our] decision-­making power over the development of science and technology’ (Lévy-­Leblond, 2008: 8). Putting STEM back into culture is, though, not by any means a straightforward task. STEM is strongly aligned with hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) and with the generation of knowledge-making practices that legitimize

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men’s dominant position in society and justify the subordination of women. But, also, science practices are involved in subordinating and marginalizing other non-dominant ways of being a man. Boys whose identities are shaped in relation to such non-dominant subaltern masculinities are also placed in inferior positions in gendered hierarchies and do not have access to science in any straightforward sense. Putting science (back) into culture is thus fundamental to pedagogic efforts to redistribute both knowledge and scientific power in more equal ways. It is our contention that any redistribution of knowledge/power with regard to STEM requires STEM to be integrated into basic school knowledge in the same way as other disciplines, and at the very least at the minimum level of what is stipulated by the curriculum of primary education. In Geneva, these shifts are beginning to happen. New teaching methods have been developed for primary school: methods which are more modern, concrete, linked to everyday life and which emphasize an investigative approach in pedagogy and learning. Since the introduction of these methods in 2016, the proportion of pedagogical sequences observed by male and female trainee teachers in placements has altered considerably and is now closer to the official recommendations. However, it is still too early for an overall assessment of these changes. Alongside this, though, if we really want to have greater parity in advanced education in STEM, we will have to pay much greater attention to manifestations of gender bias in the teaching of school subjects at all levels. We have to challenge the myth that views physics, technology and computer science as purportedly male domains; and we have to train teachers to become more aware of the role played by social representations, stereotypes and discrimination in reinforcing gender inequalities.

Paired dialogue: Pokemon, dragons and dinosaurs – a narrative of gender and science in/exclusions and why tackling them matters Sara Tolbert The author of this chapter raises several important points: (1) exclusionary practices in society and STEM fields limit and marginalize the participation of women in STEM; (2) science is not well integrated into the primary school curricula (and this is even more the case in economically disadvantaged schools); (3) the reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles starts in early childhood, is exacerbated in schools and continues to increase throughout adolescence (and adulthood). Primary school teachers do not have much training, if any, on gender and education. I focus my response on these three key issues, how they play out in the United States, drawing from my daughter’s experiences, and my experiences as her mother, during primary school.

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My daughter has always been very interested in science, nature and scientific problem solving, even from an early age. In preschool, her teachers were highly skilled in both encouraging scientific exploration and deconstructing traditional gender boundaries. For example, my daughter had one friend who was exploring their gender identity, identifying sometimes as a boy, sometimes as a girl and sometimes as somewhere in between. Their preschool teachers constantly reinforced the idea that some people do not fall neatly into one gender category. The students were socialized to understand gender fluidity, even at age 4, and were in fact quite comfortable with it, under the guidance of these two caring and socially conscious teachers. All students were encouraged to develop their unique interests, and to respect each other’s as part of their community guidelines. My daughter’s interests, at that time, were dinosaurs and Marvel superheroes, and later to include dragons and Pokemon – which is surprisingly scientific! As my daughter entered primary school, things changed. First, she was identified as a struggling reader (in Kindergarten!). They wanted to place her in a special reading intervention programme. I refused these services. To remediate her reading ‘challenges’ she was sent home with picture books about kids playing in the snow, intended to improve her literacy skills (though she had little experiences with snow having grown up in the Sonoran Desert). Meanwhile, at night I would read aloud to her from very technical books about dinosaurs, because that is what she wanted to read. She herself was a walking encyclopedia of paleontology. (I told her not to worry about those picture books.) Gender socialization became particularly severe at her school. After she cut her hair short, she was told she was in the wrong bathroom when she would go to the girls’ room. At her birthday party, another parent told me that her daughter had been very specific about what gift to bring for my daughter: ‘Mom, she does not like girly things! She likes science-y stuff!’ By third grade, she started to experience some degree of social exclusion, sitting by herself at lunch and playing alone during recess. At her school, like so many others, tested subjects (math and reading) are emphasized. As my child’s teacher recently stated, they (she and her other teachers) honestly do not do a lot of social studies or science because at my child’s grade level (primary 3), students take a state achievement test that is largely focused on math and reading that if they do not pass, they are not promoted to the next grade level. Teachers are held accountable for students’ success on these high-stakes exams. While my daughter has become an avid reader, despite all the forces working to label her as ‘struggling’, the reduced focus on science has the effect of marginalizing her in school overall. In so many rigid dimensions of schooling, from gender, to disciplinary foci, she does not see herself. (Continued)

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My goal in telling this story is to underscore and humanize the case presented in the author’s chapter, to illustrate the very real effects of the inequities they point out. We need to better understand (and destabilize) the forces working to limit teachers’ inclusion of science in the primary school curriculum, provide support for its inclusion, and better prepare teachers to implement progressive non-essentializing feminist pedagogies. This is a daunting task, but given the contexts the author describes, it certainly remains a global one!

Notes 1 A partial version of this article appeared in the journal Tréma (Collet, 2016). Translation by Michael Westlake. 2 The resources can be consulted on the following websites: www.fondation-lamap. org, www.eduscol.education.fr, www.ciip.ch, www.plandetudes.ch/msn, www. education.gouv.fr/bo/2008/hs3/programme_CE2_CM1_CM2.htm.

References Abbate, J. (2012). Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. ­Cambridge: MIT Press. Baillargeon, N. (2011). Liliane est au lycée, Est-il indispensable d’être cultivé? Paris: Flammarion. Bérard, J.M., Claus, P., David, J., and Loarer, C. (2005). Sciences expérimentales et technologie, histoire et géographie. Leur enseignement au cycle III de l’école primaire. Rapport à monsieur le ministre de l’Éducation nationale de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche. 2005(112), Paris: Inspection générale de l’éducation nationale. Blanchard, M., Orange, S. and Pierrel, A. (2016). Filles + sciences = une équation insoluble? Enquête sur les classes préparatoires scientifiques. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm. Broze, L. and Lizan, V. (2009). En France, les mathématiques attendent plus de femmes. Matapli, 89, 29–35. Brugeilles, C., Cromer, S. and Panissal, N. (2009). Le sexisme au programme? Représentations sexuées dans les lectures de référence à l’école. Travail, genre et sociétés, 1 (21), 107–129. Centre Hubertine Auclert (CHA). (2011). Histoire et égalité femmes-hommes: peut mieux faire! La représentation des femmes dans les manuels d’histoire de seconde et de CAP. Paris: Centre Hubertine Auclert. Available at www.centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/sites/ default/files/images/etude_la_representation_des_femmes_dans_les_manuels_­ histoire_de_2nde_et_cap_cha.pdf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Centre Hubertine Auclert (CHA). (2012). Égalité femmes-hommes dans les manuels de Mathématiques, une équation irrésolue? Les représentations sexuées dans les manuels de mathématiques de Terminale. Paris: Centre Hubertine Auclert. Available at www. centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/sites/default/files/fichiers/cha-etude-manuels-mathweb_1.pdf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Centre Hubertine Auclert (CHA). (2015). Manuels de lecture du CP: et si on apprenait l’égalité? Étude des représentations sexuées et sexistes dans les manuels de lecture du CP.

Butterflies for girls, tornadoes for boys  125 Paris: Centre Hubertine Auclert. Available at www.centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/ sites/default/files/fichiers/cha-etude-manuels-cp-web.pdf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Collet, I. (2008). Il expérimente, elle regarde. Alliage, 67, 69–77. Collet, I. (2011). Effet de genre, le paradoxe des études d’informatique. TIC & Société, 5(1), Available at http://journals.openedition.org/ticetsociete/955; doi: 10.4000/ ticetsociete.955. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Collet, I. (2015). Faire vite et surtout le faire savoir. Les interactions verbales en classe sous l’influence du genre. Revue internationale d’ethnographie, 4, 6–22. Collet, I. (2016). Des papillons pour les filles, des cyclones pour les garçons. Les enseignements de sciences à l’école primaire genevoise. Tréma, 46, 63–76. Connell, R. (1995). Masculinities. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Detrez, C. (2005). Il était une fois le corps…. la construction biologique du corps dans les encyclopédies pour enfants. Sociétés contemporaines, 3 (59–60), 161–177. Dubois, L. (2010). Enseignement des sciences: entre confusions et clarifications! Résonances, 8, 10–12. Dubois, L. (2013). Revalorisation des sciences. Documentation interne à destination du comité de programme de la formation pour la formation des enseignants de primaire de la Section des sciences de l’éducation. Université de Genève. Duru-Bellat, M. (1990). L’école des filles: quelle formation pour quels rôles sociaux? Paris: L’Harmattan. Eurostat. (2017). Tertiary Education Statistics, Eurostat: Statistics Explained. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Tertiary_education_ statistics. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Fénelon. (1687). Traité de l’Éducation des filles. Available at http.//athena.unige.ch/ athena/fenelon/fen_fill.rtf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Huguet, P. and Régner, I. (2009). Counter-stereotypic beliefs in math do not protect school girls from stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1024–1027. Jarlégan, A. (2009). Pratiques enseignantes et normes de genre à l’école. In H. Lhotel and E. Prairat (Eds.), L’école et ses transformations. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, pp. 61–75. Knibiehler, Y. and Fouquet, C. (1980). Histoire des mères du moyen-âge à nos jours. Paris: Montalba. Lafosse-Marin, M.O. (2010). Les représentations des scientifiques chez les enfants, filles et garçons. Influence de la pratique des sciences à l’école primaire. (PhD), Université Paris Nanterre. Available at https://bdr.u-paris10.fr/theses/internet/2010PA100071. pdf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Lévy-Leblond, J.M. (2008). (Re)mettre la science en culture: de la crise épistémologique à l’exigence éthique. Courrier de l’environnement de l’INRA, 56. Available at www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=­s&source=web&cd= 1&cad=r ja& uact=8& ved=2ahU K Ew jU4q3el M Hg A hUpxcQBHc5N B74 QF j A Ae g QI A R A B & u r l=ht t p s% 3A% 2 F % 2 F w w w.r e se a rch g at e.net % 2 Fpublication%2F282298033_remettre_la_science_en_culture_de_la_crise_­ epistemologique_a_l%27exigence_ethique&usg=AOvVaw2eglsVG_pd0I8b SNQ2tv5V. (Accessed: 16 October 2019) Marry, C. (2004). Une révolution respectueuse: les femmes ingénieurs? Paris: Belin. Mosconi, N. (1999). Femmes et savoir. La société, l’école et la division sexuelles des savoirs. Paris: L’Harmattan.

126  Isabelle Collet Noble, D. (1992). A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ortner, S. (1998). Is female to male as nature is to culture. In J. Landes (Ed.), Feminism: The Public and the Private. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–45. Pagnossin, E. (2008). Évolution des choix disciplinaires des étudiant.e.s des hautes écoles universitaire suisses. Cahier du cerfee, 25, 111–131. Plumelle, B. (2013). PIRLS 2011. Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres, 62, 16–19. Schnyder, M. (2014). L’intérêt pour les disciplines scientifiques chez les filles et les garçons. (Master degree) Université de Genève. Available at https://archive-ouverte.unige. ch/authors/view/54275. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Schwantner, U. (2009). Die Motivation der Jugendlichen in Naturwissenschaft. In C. Schreiner and U. Schwantner (Eds.), PISA 2006. Österreichischer Expertenbericht zum Naturwissenschaftsschwerpunkt. Graz: Leykam, pp. 266–282. Solga, H. and Pfahl, L. (2009). Doing Gender im technischnaturwissenschaft-lichen Bereich. In J. Milberg (Ed.), Förderung des Nachwuchses in Technik und Naturwissenschaft. Berlin: Springer. pp. 155–219. Stanat, P. and Bergann, S. (2009). Geschlechtsbezogene Disparitäten in der Bildung. In R. Tippelt and B. Schmidt (Eds.), Handbuch Bildungsforschung. Wiesbaden: ­Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 513–527. Steele, C.M. and Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5 (69), 797–811. Tabet, P. (1998). La construction sociale de l’inégalité des sexes: des outils et des corps. Paris: l’Harmattan. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2018). Women in Science. Fact Sheet, 51. Available at http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs51-women-in-science2018-en.pdf. (Accessed: 26 October 2018). Vouillot, F. (2007). L’orientation aux prises avec le genre. Travail, genre et sociétés, 18 (2), 87–108. Vouillot, F. (2010). L’orientation, le butoir de la mixité. Revue française de pédagogie, 171, 59–67. West, C. and Zimmerman, D.H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society, 1 (2), 125–151.

10 Playing, teaching and caring Generative productions of gender and pedagogy in/through early years assemblages Nikki Fairchild Introduction In England, the continuing expansion of neoliberal thinking is affecting and influencing expectations within early childhood education and care (ECEC). Provision is driven by a statutory curricula framework (Df E, 2017a) which is delivered to children between the ages of birth and five years. Children from birth to the September after their fourth birthday may attend non-­ compulsory ECEC where provision is split across a range of diverse settings including private day nurseries, children centres, nurseries attached to schools and childminders. The required qualification to work in these types of settings is a vocational accreditation which is equivalent to exit-level high school certificates, although academic qualifications have developed to postgraduate level in recent years. Once the child passes the September after their fourth birthday they enter compulsory schooling for the Reception Year which is generally led by qualified teachers who hold either an undergraduate or postgraduate teaching qualification. Debates have been ongoing as to the purpose and function of ECEC particularly where curriculum frameworks promote school readiness, positing early childhood as a preparatory phase for compulsory schooling (Df E, 2017a; Moss, 2013). In addition, there has been deliberation between academics, policymakers and practitioners around the suitability of the workforce (Df E, 2013). These have centred on the gendered nature of ECEC which sees the sector positioned as deficient in key teaching skills performing a role akin to mothering (Ailwood, 2008). Policymakers have attempted to redress this perceived deficiency by trying to engage more men in the workforce under the guise that this will increase the external view of professionalism and provide a less feminised view of teaching (­Roberts-Holmes and Brownhill, 2011). The chapter is structured into two parts. The first part will chart the development of the ECEC practitioner and will analyse how gendered notions of expected professional roles have developed in England. In this chapter I use the term of practitioner holistically to signify those working in ECEC. At  this juncture, I do not separate out those with vocational or academic qualifications as this reinforces some of the dichotomous thinking that

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surrounds ECEC professionalism. Historical dialogues on gender formation and construction in classrooms will then explain the differing perspectives of sex-role socialisation and post-structural theories of how gender is expressed and mediated. In addition, current views of both the ECEC profession and how gender is circulated in classrooms will be juxtaposed with debates over play-based or more formal aspects of children’s learning. Building on some of the features of feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994; Lather, 1991; Luke and Gore, 1992), I detail how post-human thinking can generate new ways to explore gendered engagements in ECEC. Posthumanism allows for a re-viewing of the human subject which decentres agency and subjectivity revealing a different vision of the human within both social and material worlds, and this has been employed both theoretically and empirically in educational research (Taylor and Hughes, 2016). In the second part of the chapter, I theoretically argue that post-human feminist pedagogy is rooted in other feminist traditions in learning and teaching such as transgressive schools (hooks, 1994), and feminist pedagogy in neoliberal universities (Revelles-Benavente and Gonzáles Ramos, 2017). I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage and Braidotti’s (2011) nomadic theory to provide alternative visions of post-human feminist pedagogy which affirms a move beyond binarised choices to an expansive, generative view of playing, teaching and caring in ECEC. The concept of the assemblage denotes the mechanism by which bodies are connected and in relations with each other. These bodies coalesce around an event and what is produced within these constellations is just as important and the individual assemblage components. Braidotti’s (2011) nomadic theory considers how relations between social and material worlds can provide a re-imaging of gender and essentialism, without the erasure of locational and historical emancipatory projects for/with women. Post-human feminist pedagogy is then explored empirically via two vignettes which illustrate how material and social relations reveal how gender is produced, enacted and mediated in ECEC classrooms.

Professional roles for ECEC practitioners Women’s work The prevalence of gender hegemony is reflected in historic and contemporary views of ECEC. This stems from biological perceptions of childhood and sociocultural understanding of gender roles. Historical discourses have reproduced patriarchal power in ECEC promoting the view of ‘caring (paid and unpaid) as naturally women’s work’ (Roberts-Holmes and Brownhill, 2011: 120). This mirrors the challenge of the wage penalty for mothers attributed to their domestic and childrearing roles (Buding and England, 2001). These notions have ensured that working in ECEC remained primarily female employment as settings were/are perceived as extensions of the home

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(Ailwood,  2008). The limited value placed on the nature of the work has been replicated in the remuneration structure with Roberts-Homes and Brownhill arguing ‘in a patriarchal society female nursery workers levels of pay can become justifiable and naturalized’ (2011: 120). Interestingly decreasing gendered wage inequality has been a primary focus for European and UK policymakers (­European Commission, 2012), but these impacts have yet to be felt in ECEC. The gendered and deficit notions of the status of ECEC and its workforce have persisted today, coupled with the continuing view of the construction of young children as immature where childhood developmental needs are perceived as relatively simple. Development of ECEC qualifications As maternal employment increased in the 1990s ECEC settings developed two distinct routes, the growth of the voluntary sector and the playgroup (covering birth to three) and the growth of full day care (covering three to five) via nursery schools and private childminders (Pugh, 2010). These age ranges mirrored the outcomes available for children with the discourse of care pervading birth to three early years’ provision and the discourse of school readiness encompassing the three to five sectors (Moss, 2013). ­Interestingly this historical position still reflects the current diversity of the contemporary ECEC sector which is composed of private providers, schools and childminders (Wall et al., 2015). The split in outcomes caused the separation of vocational and academic routes towards qualifications and professional identity. This resulted in those working with older children more likely to hold graduate qualifications (Ranns et al., 2011) even though the requirement to practice remained a vocational accreditation (Df E, 2017a). The caring nature of ECEC work and reinforcement of its gendered low status revealed most practitioners as working-class women influenced by vocational habitus (Skeggs, 1997). This has also been reflected in a range of ‘hair or care’ discourses surrounding ECEC vocational training which reinforced outcomes for women school leavers with limited qualifications (Vincent and Braun, 2010). English government policy has done little to overcome the deficit discourse applied to practitioners. Since 1997 successive policy development reinforced the split system of vocational and academic routes. However, these still did not provide parity with other teaching professionals. It has been argued that the reason for not providing parity was the desire not to over professionalise the highly feminised workforce (Canella, 1997). Policymakers have tried to encourage more men to enter the ECEC workforce by promoting gender diversity and early years teaching as a less feminised career choice (Df E, 2017b). Research has focused on men providing a more balanced view of gender roles (Mulholland and Hansen, 2003) or as role models replacing absent father figures (Skelton, 2002). However, this has been countered by suggestions that hegemonic masculinity is reproduced reinforcing traditional

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gender roles (Carrington and Skelton, 2003). Therefore, the debates on more men in ECEC are not conclusive with Roberts-Holmes and Brownhill (2011) reiterating that overarching patriarchal discourses see men out of the home as breadwinners which is at odds with the feminised view of ECEC. Conflict between perceptions of ECEC work and value placed on children’s education The development of the ECEC practitioner reinforces binary thinking; for example, the split between vocational and academic training notes the distinction between the theory and practice binary. In addition, the deficit model of the workforce reinforces gendered perceptions and the lack of value placed on caring for young children. This has been problematised by Lenz Taguchi who noted that power relations may promote ‘academic knowledge (that is predominantly theoretical and masculine), is more highly valued than (motherly feminine) pre-school-practices’ (2007: 279). Furthermore, Canella (1997) has argued that the professionalisation of education (and ECEC) has resulted in patriarchal power over both women and children due to the regulatory discourses surrounding practitioners. These notions of regulation increased in England as provision of government funding saw the implementation of measures designed to monitor and sanction ECEC providers if key indicators were not met (Ofsted, 2015). All these debates point to the neo-liberal dichotomy that ECEC work is not valued, yet society is dependent on young children as educated potential future workers. These wider discussions can be linked to theorisations of the different ways gender is expressed in ECEC classrooms particularly as the drive to employ more men is prominent in policy (Df E, 2017b).

Gendered debates in classrooms Sex-role socialisation and post-structural debates The development of gender in young children has been extended from the views of sex-role socialisation (MacNaughton, 2006). This is premised by the notion that children play out gender based on their biological differences which reinforce and categorise gender roles (Davies, 2003). These heteronormative positions drive children to think and act in gendered ways where societies need for acceptable gender roles permeates ECEC classrooms (Blaise, 2006; Davies, 2003). Blaise (2006) notes how children self-police expected gendered norms and are quick to correct those who stray from heteronormative expectations. In addition, the work of feminist post-structuralists has highlighted a different view of gender as socially and culturally constructed being mediated by circulating gendered discourses. These views are a means to challenge and critique sex-socialisation theory and its associated stereotypical views, and to explore gender as relational and interdependent

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(Walkerdine, 1997). Children can construct and position themselves within masculine and feminine discourses available as part of wider social and cultural practices. The dynamic interplay between fluid gender performances can be influenced by wider societal discourses which can reproduce heteronormativity (MacNaughton, 2006). Although children can be active agents in the construction of their gendered positions, the influence of practitioners can challenge or reinforce these expected norms (Chapman, 2016). This becomes doubled by the feminised nature of the workforce which is already under pressure from patriarchal domestic assumptions. Both sex-role socialisation and post-structural debates have provided important ways to theorise gendered positions in classrooms. More recently scholars have looked to posthumanism to explore how material and human worlds are co-implicated in these debates. Gendered childhoods and posthumanism Post-human theorising is being applied to productions of gender in ECEC to mobilise generative new ways to explore young children’s enactment of gender. This work has developed from 2010, which was coupled with the wider emergence of new material feminisms (see Coole and Frost, 2010). These theoretical applications note the involvement of the non-human in exploring and producing gendered subjectivities. Osgood (2014: 197) argues that post-human theories ‘offer opportunities to think differently about young children and their enactments, performances and resistances in early childhood’. Some examples of ECEC post-human gendered engagements include Renold and Mellor (2013), who consider subversive acts of gendered play with a range of objects where heteronormativity is either expressed or transgressed. The work of Jones (2013) reveals how clothing and role play disrupt and influence performative notions of gender. Similarly, Osgood and Scarlet/ Guigni (2015) detail how gendered performances can be disrupted where clothing (a tutu) can enfold outdoor space challenging traditional readings of gender. Finally, Lyttleton-Smith (2017) analyses how resources in the ECEC classroom ‘home corner’ intra-act with children and can break apart heteronormative narratives as objects and children flow between different performances of masculine and feminine.

ECEC pedagogy Play based versus formalised pedagogy ECEC pedagogy has emerged from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience, with pedagogy being described as the interactive processes between the practitioner and child in the learning environment (Wall et al., 2015). Lenz Taguchi (2007) suggests the Cartesian separation of mind and body in pedagogy can be played out in the binarised view of child-centred

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play (feminine) versus adult-directed learning (masculine) which could be linked to normative gender assumptions. Teaching in ECEC has a legacy of play-based, child-centred pedagogies which form the foundations of engaging in playing, teaching and caring for/with young children. These have developed from earlier pioneers (such as Susan Issacs and Maria Montessori) and still represent an intrinsic part of contemporary pedagogy and practice (Brooker et al., 2014). Play is also reflected in the EYFS (English early years foundation stage) curriculum, which notes how ‘planned, purposeful play’ (Df E, 2017a: 9) should be delivered as a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activity. These views reveal the inherent tensions of a child-centred approach where children’s agency can be undermined by the influence of adults on play outcomes (Wood, 2013). However, recent policy direction has seen a trend for a more formal pedagogic strategy, framed as preparation for transitions to compulsory schooling (Df E, 2017a). The move to a more adult-led pedagogy, coupled with proposals for baseline assessments on school entry, sees concerns raised about the outcomes-based datafication of ECEC (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury, 2016), where test results become a predictor for future attainment leaving little room for acknowledging wider pedagogical interactions. An ECEC feminist pedagogy The tensions between ECEC pedagogical expectations can provide sites where feminist pedagogy can challenge and disrupt policy and practise grand narratives (Lather, 1991; Luke and Gore, 1992). A feminist pedagogy can be employed to rethink gendered subjectivities and situated knowledges (­Haraway, 1988) which can provide emancipatory and transformative potentials for women (hooks, 1994). However, it is important to note that pedagogy is never a neutral process and the act of emancipation can be contested as it is bound up in conflicting power relations and intersections which are not always transformative for all (Langford, 2010). The fluid positions of a play-based, child-centred and adult-led pedagogy are cognisant with fluctuating pedagogical power relations. These can produce situations where more formal academic knowledges are valued over relational experiences (Burman, 2008; Osgood, 2014). However, it should be acknowledged that academic knowledge and scholarship on gender inequalities have provided opportunities for wider emancipatory projects (see Davies, 2003; Blaise, 2006; ­MacNaughton, 2006; Paechter, 2007).

Post-human feminist pedagogy Theorising a post-human feminist pedagogy Building on the theorisation of feminist pedagogy and the tensions in its enactment (hooks, 1994; Lather, 1991; Luke and Gore, 1992) allows a move

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beyond the humanist pedagogical project. The post-human turn in education is not about discarding past contributions which have brought about important changes to democratic and emancipatory projects. As Carlson notes post-human education might ‘carve out a third space of critique and reconstruction’ (2015: x). It is within these spaces that new pedagogies can be explored and imagined which reveal radical and experimental connections between humans and non-humans (Snaza and Weaver 2015: 10). These views are echoed by Braidotti (2011) who proposed nomadic theory to explore the material and discursive nature of subjectivity which is distributed across both human and non-human relationality. These relations can be conceptualised as part of an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) within which human and other non-­human bodies (material, social or abstract entities) connect together. These productive responses to human and non-human connections chart what happens when bodies interact and can provide alternative visions of a post-human feminist pedagogy. Post-human theorising moves away from the nature: culture dualisms that are offered from anthropocentric understandings of human interactions. Braidotti (2011) has employed a monist world view to move beyond binaries and essentialist understandings of woman. She argues the only way to move beyond the dualist subject of woman is to dissolve the structures which support hegemonic phallocentrism to provide an ‘affirmative or transformative vision of woman’ (Braidotti, 2011: 30). A post-human feminist pedagogy acknowledges feminist histories and politics of location, paying attention to situatedness and power fluctuations within and through assemblages. These connections produce new ways to re-image gendered pedagogical interactions. Furthermore, these transformations can ‘empower creative [gendered] alternatives’ (Braidotti, 2011: 33) where flows push gendered bodies to the limits, blurring physical boundaries during constant encounters with bodies. Methodologically the nomadic subject is part of the challenge to essentialism and othering which undoes ‘the dominant model of subjectivity’ (Braidotti, 2011: 34) displacing it with an emergent process. Ethically this displacement is neither linear nor sequential but a transformative flow as assemblages provide new potentials for co-related bodies. In this chapter the concept of the nomadic subject is activated in the vignettes below which explore gendered classroom relations. Enacting a post-human feminist pedagogy The following vignettes present data from my doctoral inquiry into the ways in which ECEC practitioners and children interact with the non-human ­environment, and how their gendered subjectivities are distributed across human and non-human productions and relations (Fairchild, 2017).

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Vignette 1 – Rose The first vignette occurs in a preschool which is open to children between the age ranges of two and half and five years. In this excerpt one of the practitioners (Rose) is sitting at the table with a girl and a boy who are playing with paper and hair accessories: Rose is sitting at a table with a girl who has some light purple paper and pink and purple hair clips/hair bands and accessories. The girl is making a ‘pass-the-parcel’ for a role play game and places one of the hair clips between each layer. Rose and the girl work together to fold, stick and build up the layers. The girl tapes a hairband on the side as a decoration. She is intent at pulling and holding the tape and building up the relevant layers. A boy sits down at the table and places one of the metal hair clips in his hair, there is a small mirror on the table and Rose places a clip in her hair and they (she and the boy) take turns to look at their hair with the clips in. The boy uses the mirror to add another clip to the other side of his hair and Rose helps the boy to use further hair clips. Rose brings the tablet over to take a picture of him, she then moves away…the boy continues to use the hair clips and the mirror. This excerpt notes the affective nature of the hair clips and accessories and how they are part of the gendering process where the respective table becomes a gendered site within the assemblage. Mikuska (2018) argues that affective embodied emotionality should be acknowledged; otherwise, the embodied nature of human action can be lost. Rose is bound up in these affective embodied responses as she supports the play of the girl and the boy who are both performing more feminised roles (wrapping presents for role play and dressing hair). In addition, MacNaughton (2006) has theorised how sociocultural discursive constructions of gender can occur with objects. In this excerpt the material production of gendered subjectivities is focused on non-human objects (table, hair clips and accessories, and a mirror) and human (Rose, a boy and a girl) relations as gender circulates through and across bodies. Lyttleton-Smith explores how block play can provide ‘liminal space’ where ‘continuous (re)configurations of gendering relations of power that affect…boy-bodies and girl-bodies entangled within’ (2017: 9). These similar relations are present in the above excerpt as the boy uses hair clips and a mirror. The consequence of these actions could reveal a blurring of the boundaries of the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990) between normative masculine and feminine understandings of dressing hair. Vignette 2 – Hannah The second vignette is based in a reception classroom in an all-girls private school; there were six girls in the class with an age range between four and five years. On my second visit to the school Hannah (the practitioner) had

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staged a hairdresser’s salon. An area of the classroom had been set up as a salon with real resources such as towels, hairdryer, a piece of shower hose with an attaching shower head, hairbrushes and accessories: Hannah sits on the chair and the girls put a towel around her neck and start to brush her hair. There are three girls attending to her and putting hair bands in her hair. One girl discusses money with Hannah ‘If I have 5 coins what is one more than 5?’ they count the coins together to get the answer. Hannah talks to the other three girls about only using small amounts of water. One girl had used the sponge on Hannah’s hair without wringing it out, Hannah asked her to wring it out before she used it again. The two girls continued to put parts of Hannah’s hair into ponytails and one girl is working with the money. Hannah asks, ‘If I have 6 coins and take one away how many are left?’ again they discuss this. In the salon one girl has the clipboard and is writing appointments. Hannah is reading a magazine with another girl brushing her hair. In the magazine there is a photo of the Eiffel Tower, they talk about going on holidays and Hannah mentions Paris. ‘Can you remember your French – you have been learning it for 2 years! In French how do you say my hair and eyes are brown? (Mes cheveux et mes yeux sont bruns!)’, one of the girls said to Hannah ‘Oh you look fabulous!’ Two girls bring baby dolls into to the salon, the girl with the clipboard says, ‘No babies in the hairdressers today, we only have space for one baby!’ As Hannah takes the hair clips/decorations out of her hair the two girls play with babies in the ‘crèche’ part of the salon. From the second excerpt it would be easy to suggest that the girls and Hannah are playing out heteronormative assumptions of femininity. The role plays with hairdressers and babies replicating the multiple classed and gendered encounters for working-class women as employees and middle-class women as customers (Skeggs, 1997). Interestingly this is juxtaposed by the middle-class expectations of the career paths for alumni of the private school which split between wives/mothers and career-oriented women. These discourses have also been played out in ECEC practice where hairdressers salons become the focus for heteronormative play (Hyvönen, 2008) which can be reinscribed by practitioner’s perceptions of, and positioning towards, normative gendered play (Chapman, 2016). This excerpt acknowledges some of the challenges of planned purposeful play (Wood, 2013). It could be an example of the way in which child-centred pedagogy becomes a means by which female ECEC practitioners reproduce and enact expected gendered subjectivities in classrooms (Canella, 1997), which are also manifested as the school is single sex. A potential disruption to these expected gendered subjectivities could link to policy drivers to employ more male practitioners in ECEC settings and schools; however, caution should be applied to this assertion as it could also reinforce normative gender roles (Carrington and Skelton, 2003).

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When engaging with post-human feminist pedagogy it is important to move beyond the psychological and essentialist views of children’s gender development, and to employ a more post developmental logic through which gender is being enacted (Blaise, 2006; Burman, 2008). For example, moving beyond discursive readings of gender to focus on bodies within the assemblage explores how human and non-human bodies become reordered to reveal child: practitioner gendered power relations (Blaise, 2013). The water in this excerpt momentarily reveals how power flows through the girls as the practitioner is a customer in the salon. Even though the curriculum, money, maths and French reverse the power flows and try to cement Hannah as practitioner, the water becomes the point through which power oscillates. An alternative reading of this excerpt reflects the historically limited career roles for women linking to the deficient, gendered notions of ECEC practitioners with vocational routes to ‘hair or care’ courses (Vincent and Braun, 2010). It should be noted that post-human theorising is not necessarily an emancipatory process. When bodies connect and collide in assemblages the result can be a sedimentation of normative assumptions or the release of new potentials – in this case they can reinforce expected gendered norms present in wider society. This reading highlights how post-humanist theorising does not always provide an alternative to gender hegemony and shows the importance of acknowledging the historical positioning of women (Braidotti, 2011) which can temporarily enforce binary gendered identities.

Conclusions This chapter explores how developmental and social constructions of gender can reveal the influence of patriarchal and heteronormative discourses to provide certain gendered positions for practitioners and children. This is linked to the positioning of the predominantly marketised feminised ECEC workforce as deficient, in a caring role, with limited status and low pay. Policy has done little to counter this positioning and has in fact reinforced stereotypical views of practitioners further binarising the split between vocational and academic pathways to professionalism. These gendered debates have continued into classrooms where pedagogies and interactions can reinforce the dominant heterosexual matrix (see also Chapters 3 and 11). Policy and curricula reforms have caused tensions between playful, child-centred pedagogy and testing and accountability which monitors children’s educational outcomes. Research has noted the ways in which practitioners can have more fluid pedagogical strategies. However, these classroom tensions reflect the dilemmas and challenges of adopting a feminist pedagogical approach of emancipation and transformation, when critiques note that not all feel emancipated or transformed. By enacting a post-human feminist pedagogy it is possible to work in the third space which acknowledges current and historical gendered positioning but moves beyond the discourses of sex-role socialisation and post-structural sociocultural constructions of ECEC gendered practitioners and childhoods.

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Braidotti (2011) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) provide theorisations to acknowledge the importance of human and non-human bodily connections and the responses which are produced. The two vignettes presented detail how the non-human material world provides the starting point for gender and power relations to flow within and between human and non-human bodies. The interaction of the material objects and relations is momentary and complex revealing how gender is produced, enacted and mediated in ECEC classrooms. These relational moments link to previous iterations of feminist learning and teaching discussed in the introduction and can move beyond binary views of playing and teaching as situated material feminist post-human pedagogical experiences are explored. Here different gendered distributed subjectivities are taken up as connections are made, dropped and remade in a continuous cycle, and employing a post-human feminist pedagogy provides generative new ways to view the production of gender in ECEC.

Paired dialogue: humanities, pedagogy and didactics – the tacit dimensions of early childhood education Anja Kraus Nikki Fairchild’s chapter reflects on policy and curricula reforms in the field of ECEC in the UK and is theorised from a feminist materialist perspective on teaching and learning. The chapter applies Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, and Braidotti’s nomadic theory to shows how, in two case studies, gender practices in ECEC become fluid when material things come into play. My response to Nikki’s chapter is framed by my background in the German tradition of humanities, pedagogy and didactics, and, in this dialogue, by the tacit dimensions of pedagogy. The latter concerns atheoretical, experiential and practical knowledge, routines and power structures that are established in commonly lived and actively shaped practices, in which they are learnt and dynamically modified. In brief, the Humanities Pedagogy tradition assumes that there are deep differences between the governmental perspective, the different aspects of society, curricula/pedagogical strategies and the practices of children in the educational field. These differences are especially important in considering gendering processes which, from a governmental perspective, are conditioned by the rationality of (quality) management but which also derive their meaning from the various ideas about quality held by different social groups. While curricula or pedagogical strategies submit materials, gendering and self-reflection to learning, the practices of children do not naturally follow adult logics. Moreover playing, desire and exposedness govern the child’s dealing with material, as well as (Continued)

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their gendering and self-reflection. To give an example of my own time as teacher at a primary school in Berlin city: when going with the third graders to the forest in order to show them the difference between coniferous and deciduous forest and all the different plants, they started looking for a corpse. We had to go home. Gender questions will not be taken seriously by them in an adult way either. Nikki’s analysis interests me, and resonates with my own work, in that it highlights the role of material learning conditions. From my perspective, these material conditions can be regarded as tacit dimensions of teaching and learning. I want to focus on two interesting aspects from Nikki’s chapter. The chapter shows that gendering is not only part of our acting but a material process and practice that has a momentum of its own. Fairchild illustrates this with two vignettes, both about children acting in classroom situations. For me, the examples show that children do not naturally follow adult logics, and this undermines socially determined gendered and exclusive roles and rules. The second aspect of the chapter which interests me is the exploration of knowledge as contextualised. Fairchild shows that hegemonic masculinity is reproduced by gender mainstreaming and proposes to move beyond binarised thinking to a more expansive and generative view of playing, teaching and caring in ECEC. She proposes a post-human perspective for doing this. From my own positioning in Humanities Pedagogy, I would not skip the human and social perspective, because of its analytical potential that I have sketched out above and in my own chapter in this book.

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140  Nikki Fairchild Lyttleton-Smith, J. (2017). Objects of Conflict: (Re)configuring early childhood experiences of gender in the preschool classroom. Gender and Education. 1–18. doi:10.1080/09540253.2017.1332343 MacNaughton, G. (2006). Constructing Gender in Early Years Education. In Skelton, C., Francis, B. and Smulyan, L. (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Education. London: Sage, pp. 127–113. Mikuska, E. (2018). Embodied Emotionality in Teaching and Researching in Higher Education. Modszertani Kozlony, 7 (1). ISSN 2217-4540. Moss, P. (2013). The Relationship between Early Childhood and Compulsory Education. In Moss, P. (ed.) Early Childhood and Compulsory Education. Reconceptualising the relationship. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 2–50. Mulholland, J. and Hansen, P. (2003). Men Who Become Primary School Teachers: An Early Portrait. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 31 (3): 213–224. Ofsted (2015). The Common Inspection Framework: Education, Skills and Early Years. Ofsted: Crown Copyright. Osgood, J. (2014). Playing with Gender: Making Space for Post-Human Childhood(s). In Moyles, J., Payler, J. and Georgeson, J. (eds.), Early Years Foundations: Critical Issues. Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp. 191–202. Osgood, J. and Scarlet, R. R./Guigni, N. (2015). Putting Posthumanist Theory to Work to Reconfigure Gender in Early Childhood: When Theory becomes Method becomes Art. Global Studies of Childhood, 5 (3): 346–360. Paechter, C. (2007). Being Boys, Being Girls: Learning Masculinities and Femininities. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Pugh, G. (2010). The Policy Agenda for Early Childhood Services. In Pugh, G. and Duffy, B. (eds.), Contemporary Issues in the Early Years, 5th ed. London: Sage, pp. 3–20. Ranns, H., Mathers, S., Moody, A., Karemaker, A., Graham, J., Sylva, K. and Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2011). Evaluation of the Graduate Leader Fund: Evaluation Overview. UK Government, Department for Education. Available at https://assets.­ publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/181484/DFE-RR144d.pdf Renold, E. and Mellor, D. (2013). Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards and Ethnographic, Multi-Sensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings. In Coleman, R. and Ringrose, J. (eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. ­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 23–41. Revelles-Benavente, B. and Gonzáles Ramos, A. M. (eds.) (2017). Teaching Gender: Feminist Pedagogy and Responsibility in times of Political Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge. Roberts-Holmes, G. and Bradbury, A. (2016). The Datafication of Early Years Education and Its Impact upon Pedagogy. Improving Schools, 19 (2): 119–128. Roberts-Holmes, G. and Brownhill, S. (2011). Where Are All the Men? A Critical Discussion of Male Absence in the Early Years. In Miller, L. and Cable, C. (eds.), Professionalization, Leadership and Management in the Early Years. London: Sage, pp. 119–132. Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skelton. C. (2002). The “Feminisation of Schooling” or “Re-masculinising” Primary Education? International Studies in Sociology in Education, 12 (1): 77–96. Snaza, N. and Weaver, J. A. (2015). Introduction – Education and the posthumanist Turn. In Snaza, N. and Weaver, J. A. (eds.), Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14.

Playing, teaching and caring  141 Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C. (eds.) (2016). Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vincent, C. and Braun, A. (2010). ‘And Hairdressers are Quite Seedy…’ The Moral Work of Childcare Training. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 11 (2): 203–214. Walkerdine, V. (1997). Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wall, S., Litjens, I. and Taguma, M. (2015). Early Childhood Education and Care Pedagogy Review: England. Paris: OECD Publications. Wood, E. A. (2013). Free Choice and Free Play in Early Childhood Education: Troubling the Discourse. International Journal of Early Years Education, 22 (1): 4–18.

11 Students’ gendered learning in physical education A didactic study at a French multi-ethnic middle school in an underprivileged area Ingrid Verscheure and Claire Debars Introduction In this chapter we focus on gender issues in physical education (PE) with the aim of examining the extent to which gender is addressed at the level of the knowledge taught and learned and how the gender order is enacted in a multi-­ ethnic coeducational class located in an area of low socio-economic status (SES). We consider that gendered practices are shaped by social, cultural and economic inequalities, which produce differing educational outcomes. The didactical analysis carried out in this study uses intersectionality as it pertains to the various systems of discrimination within multiple groups to explore the interplay of student’s gendered positioning understood as a knowledge-­ specific concept, which relates students to classroom and gendered knowledge in a particular way (see Chapter 3), and students’ cultural/ethnic backgrounds. Recognising the importance of social class, ethnicity and gender in the schooling experiences of girls and boys, we mainly focus, in this chapter, on the interplay of gender and ethnicity in a middle school located in a very deprived district. In the French tradition of research in social science, the term ‘race’ is not used because it is considered philosophically as a nonsense: there is a single human people. We use the term ‘ethnic backgrounds’ or ‘ethnicity’ in this chapter when referring to the intersectional dimensions of this study. Over the years, an increasing volume of research in physical education (PE) has recognised that pedagogical practices participate in the social construction of gendered bodies and minds through the curriculum. In the case of multi-ethnic schools in areas of low SES, this task is made harder as teachers have to maintain discipline and combat sexism in ways that allow peace to reign in the class (Larsson et al., 2009; Öhrn, 2009). Research literature has shown that, in this kind of school, teachers have to deal with the difficulty of maintaining both conceptual learning and engagement. Students’ engagement is often formally obtained by using simple, closed tasks. This favours immediate achievement and disciplined behaviour but may lower the quality of learning because such tasks are not related to exacting knowledge content (Debars and Amade-Escot, 2006; Kherroubi and Rochex, 2004). The case

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study research reported here revisits this issue in the light of gender and students’ cultural/ethnic backgrounds. Within the French didactique tradition, it focuses on how teacher-student interactions and students’ peer-to-peer relations participate in the production of gendered learning (Verscheure and Amade-Escot, 2007). We first sketch out the conceptual framework and then outline the design of the case study research, which is based on three nested temporal scales of didactical analyses related to how the content is delivered to girls and boys: a macro-scale analysis aimed at identifying, over the unit, whether there are differences in the progression of the knowledge taught; a lesson-timescale analysis to investigate how the teacher’s verbal supervision differs according to whether it concerns girls or boys; and a micro-scale analysis of specific episodes, which pays special attention to participants’ gender positioning during transactions related to knowledge construction. The findings highlight how differential gendered learning is gradually established through the three scales of analysis, taking account of students’ cultural/ethnic backgrounds. The chapter ends with some implications for pedagogical practices.

Investigating student gendered learning in PE through the joint action in didactics framework The joint action in didactics ( JAD) conceptual framework assumes that gendered learning emerges through didactical transactions (see Chapter 3; Verscheure and Amade-Escot, 2007). Subject-specific knowledge and know-how are co-constructed in action by teacher and students and/or among students within a learning environment that is irreducibly conceptualized as cultural, institutional, material and social (Ligozat, 2011). In this study, the social and cultural dimensions of learning environments are related to the context of a multi-ethnic middle school located in a low SES district. The JAD framework gives a descriptive, situated frame for studying the enacted curriculum by grasping students’ learning experiences and the differential meanings constructed through these experiences. During classroom practices, the teacher gives the students directions that expose what counts as knowledge and appropriate ways of practising in a specific social activity. But teachers and students may not share the same goals or same agendas, particularly in this type of school. Negotiations and transactions occur: some of them related to the gendered facets of each particular piece of content, others to students’ social relations in the class. Two major concepts sustain the approach. Differential didactic contract The concept of didactic contract concerns the transactional dynamics underpinning any teaching-learning process which begins with students encountering education through an initial learning environment (the ‘primitive didactic milieu’). The primitive didactic milieu, designed by the teacher, is

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defined as a system of tasks that encompasses material, symbolic and semiotic objects. It evolves through teacher’s and students’ joint action and it changes continuously during the predominantly implicit transactions that specifically concern the knowledge content at stake (Ligozat, 2011). Schubauer-Leoni states that the didactic contract is not implicitly negotiated with all the students of the classroom but with some groups of students having diverse standings in the classroom. These standings are related to diverse hierarchies of excellence and are partially attributable to students’ social backgrounds (Schubauer-Leoni, 1996: 160, our translation and emphasis) Verscheure (2005) demonstrates that gender, as a social and cultural construction of habits, plays a major role in the differential evolution of the didactic contract among girls and boys in a class. The need to pay attention to how students in their diversity (gender, attitudes, experiences, abilities, etc.) interpret the primitive didactic milieu set by the teacher, as well as her/his actions throughout the flow of interactions, has been pointed out (Amade-Escot et al., 2015). Thus, the dynamics of the differential didactic contract (DDC) is unique to each student observed. In investigating the intersection of gender and cultural/ethnic backgrounds in a multi-ethnic class, we aim to shed new light on how slight inflexions or radical differences in student learning can be informed by in-depth analyses of the DDC during didactical transactions. Student epistemic gender positioning Inspired by the ‘positioning theory’ of Harré and van Langenhove (1999), the concept of gender positioning helps to understand how gendered contents are enacted in classrooms. Students’ participation in PE classrooms is constrained by the traditional and the prevailing forms of sport practices associated with gendered social norms. Previous research in didactics has pointed out that students’ epistemic gender positioning evolves through the many interactions they have with peers, the teacher and the successive learning environments in which they act (Amade-Escot et al., 2015; Verscheure and Vinson, 2018). That is why positioning changes from one moment to the next, depending on how students draw meaning from the interactions. Assuming that students’ participation in PE is plural and accounts for the transactional dynamics of day-to-day classroom life, the research purpose is to describe the differential construction of PE students’ gendered learning. To summarise, this chapter focuses on how teacher’s and students’ didactical joint action produces students’ gendered learning in a multi-ethnic class. This didactic study has links with work in the Anglo-Saxon tradition that studies gender issues in PE using an intersectional approach that considers that social categorizations, such as ethnic backgrounds, social class and gender, should be regarded as interconnected since they function as overlapping,

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interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage (Azzarito, 2009; Stride, 2014). By integrating gendered and ethnic analysis and considering their combined effects, this chapter contributes to a better understanding of the interconnection of gender and ethnicity in the dynamics of the DDC.

Materials and methods The research design – a case study at a deprived working-class middle school – combines video and audio recordings of lessons, and interviews with the teacher and students, to which parents had given their consent and the university ethics committee its approval. Since it includes a focus on both gender and students’ cultural/ethnic backgrounds, it comes within the scope of observational qualitative research using intersectionality as an analytical strategy. Research setting, participants and data collection The research was conducted in a suburban multi-ethnic middle school located in a low SES district of a southern French town with high levels of unemployment. The school, comprising 14 classes, belongs to a government pedagogical programme sustaining education in underprivileged areas: 71% of students hold scholarships from the French government. The school has a high level of academic failure and student dropout. Most students live in the nearest working-class district, which is known for its high rate of youth delinquency. The school mainly serves Muslim students from various African migrant backgrounds (96%). Nearly all were born in France and speak French, and some also speak their family’s first language at home. A teacher, Pierre – all names are pseudonyms – and 27 students (16 girls and 11 boys, 13–14 years old) were observed during 8 lessons of a unit devoted to handball, a game widely taught in French secondary schools. It is worth noting that, in this class, male students always want to play football. Nevertheless, Pierre, who is an experienced teacher but not a handball expert, privileged this game because he says ‘handball is easier to teach in co-ed classes than football’. Handball is a team sport that values muscularity and strength less than football does (Griffin, 1985; Skelton, 2000). The data collected were drawn from: (i) an initial interview with the teacher about his pedagogical values and objectives; (ii) teacher’s pre-lesson and post-lesson interviews; (iii) video and audio recordings of all lessons; (iv) short, in-task interviews with students. Data analysis Three analyses were performed using different timescales successively. The first identified the content of learning environments over the unit in order to characterize the progression of the knowledge taught to girls and

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boys. The second concerned the content development through the teacher’s verbal supervision in each lesson. The third pinpointed the evolution of the DDC on a micro-didactical scale, paying special attention to participants’ epistemic gender positioning during specific episodes of didactical transactions. According to the principles of a didactical investigation, we first performed an a priori analysis of the primitive didactic milieu of each episode to characterize in detail what the knowledge content embedded in the milieu provided by the teacher was. Then, didactical transactions were systematically analysed. To provide a narrative of the teacher’s and students’ joint action, we described their embodied actions as contained in the video recordings and all associated verbal utterances. To document participants’ gender positioning, we triangulated the teacher and students’ discourse during the ongoing classroom interactions, the discourse from interviews and participants’ actions. Sport sociologists have shown that ways of performing traditionally associated with femininity or masculinity pervade sport practices and sport discourses (Whitson, 1994). ‘Dominant discourses of fitness, health and sports are institutionalized in schools and function to “normalize the body” by promoting (…) ideals of the feminine body associated with thinness (…) and ideals of masculinity linked to muscularity and strength’ (Azzarito, 2009: 21). The themes driving the analysis were thus connected with the following questions: are sex stereotypes, as traditional ways of performing in games, valued and promoted by the participants (or not)? Do students (girls and boys) engage (or not) gendered forms of performing? To what extent are these forms of engagement influenced (or not) by any cultural/ethnic backgrounds? If gendered facets of knowledge are involved which does the teacher privilege? To sum up, the three successive scales of data analysis were aimed at identifying the evolution of gendered learning across time and the interplay of epistemic gender positioning and ethnicity in this process.

Enactment of students’ differential gendered learning through the three scales of analysis Learning environments and content delivery over the handball unit Each of the eight lessons of the unit was organized in three phases: (i) a warm-up phase of 5–10 minutes; (ii) a learning phase of two to three tasks, lasting between 15 and 20 minutes; and (iii) a series of handball matches of 20–30 minutes. Over the unit, we observed various forms of student groupings. Most often, during the second learning phase, the teacher let the students choose their groups freely. In that case, students always chose to work in single-sex groups. However, Pierre sporadically imposed mixed groups (lessons 2, 3, 4 and 5). During the phase of handball matches, he always chose the teams: sometimes mixed (lessons 3, 4, 5 and 8), sometimes single-sex (lessons 1, 2, 6 and 7). Through Pierre’s interviews, we found that coeducational

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working groups are not easy for him to set up, particularly in this multi-­ ethnic middle school: In addition, the relationship between girls and boys here [in this school] … is very complicated. Umm … when I make them sit down [to listen to my instructions] the girls sit together, the boys sit together. In sport activities where there is body contact … like judo, it is blatant: boys do not want to work with girls. So … it’s age-related [I think] but … it’s also related to … I would say … culturally a bit complicated [both in terms of bodily norms and power relationships]: the place of the girl, the place of the boy here [in this multi-ethnic school] (Teacher’s prior interview) Concerning lesson 4, when Pierre made up mixed teams for the matches for coeducational purposes, he said in the post-lesson interview: ‘I wanted to favour mixed teams, but boys see this assignment as a sanction if I ask them to play with girls’, whereas, in lesson 5, he felt happy to have imposed mixed teams on them: ‘It works pretty well, as the game goes on … they’re [boys and girls] caught up in the game’ (post-lesson 5, teacher’s interview). Although students’ groupings were not the same over the unit, this scale of analysis suggests minor differences in terms of the learning environments provided to girls and boys. All stated tasks were the same for all students; most were related to exacting tactical and technical knowledge and knowhow aligned with Pierre’s gender-aware pedagogical purpose: ‘girls and boys can play games together’. Pierre is not a teacher who has the same ‘passion for football’ as the two male teachers described by Skelton (2000) and sport hegemonic masculinity is not publicly celebrated in his class (Whitson, 1994). For example, the objective of the unit ‘reach the goal area collectively in good tactical conditions’ (teacher’s prior interview) does not privilege power shots but looks at how to create open spaces, a tactical purpose that can be achieved using different forms of practice less marked by muscularity and power. Most of the learning environments privilege collective knowledge and value wisdom over individual strength. The focus on tactical knowledge aims to empower girls (and boys) in ways less traditionally associated with dominant masculinity in sport (Skelton, 2000; Whitson, 1994). Nevertheless, over the unit, the analysis showed differentiated achievements among students in terms of learning trajectories. Some girls and boys did not improve much in their practice. They were often disengaged from the task, staying away from collective actions in bystander roles. Certain boys evolved little in their competencies. Among them, the most highly skilled continued to systematically perform inefficient power shots whatever the tactical conditions, whereas less skilled boys avoided the learning (as we will see below with Adel). Abir was the student who progressed the furthest in tactical content over the unit. According to the teacher, she needs to ‘improve technically to gain in efficiency and to stabilize her learning in handball’ (post-lesson 7, teacher’s interview).

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How did the teacher and students co-construct these differentiated learning trajectories? To document this question, we need the second and third scales of analysis, which delve into the details of the content taught in a particular lesson. We choose lesson 7 as an illustration of the gendered interactions observed during the unit because it exhibits significant patterns that characterize the functioning of this didactic system. Gendered content embedded in the teacher’s verbal supervision This second time scale of analysis gives some understanding of how unbalanced and gendered content delivery is in relation to the teacher’s supervision in a lesson. It focuses on the knowledge content conveyed through Pierre’s utterances to boys and girls, particularly during the learning tasks related to the overarching objective of the unit. In this part of the lesson, students spontaneously chose to work in single-sex groups. Two tasks consisting of handball play-practices with a goalkeeper were set up successively: three players versus one defender (3vs1), then three players versus two defenders (3vs2). Pierre’s intended knowledge content in these tasks concerns how to play collectively to reach the goal in good tactical conditions. When supervising the single-sex groups, he first maintains two ideas in the content delivered: ‘go forward if no defenders’ (tactical instruction), and hints on ‘how to shoot’ (technical instruction). These instructions are balanced among boys or girls. Nevertheless, the tactical notion of ‘pass the ball if no defender’ is more frequently addressed to boys than girls at the end of the first task. During the post-lesson interview, Pierre says that in this multi-ethnic school boys need ‘to be supported and appraised in their performances to keep them engaged in the tasks’. Moreover, when interacting with the boys, Pierre puts more emphasis on speed (five occurrences versus only one for the groups of girls) and active defence (four occurrences for boys and two for girls), thus publicly celebrating these forms of masculinity. Pierre’s supervision indicates what counts for boys as appropriate masculine ways of playing this game. It is noteworthy that ‘speed’ as a facet of the knowledge taught is less privileged for girls. Later, in the second learning task with two defenders, Pierre provides spatial clues to girls. He asks them to distribute their group over the play area. He never gives such instructions to boys, who, collectively, do not appear to distribute themselves more widely over the space than girls do. Conversely, this marks what counts as appropriate knowledge for girls even though Pierre is not aware of his stereotyping of girls’ spatial abilities in games. His supervision shows how gender ‘inequalities [are] re-embedded within the space of classroom’ (Taylor, 2013: 689). In addition, this analysis gives an example of how, over time, the tactical dimension of the knowledge taught, which was the core aim of the course, faded for both boys and girls, while the teacher’s expectations evolved towards simple, closed feedback, favouring gendered forms of bodily actions like ‘speed and defence’ for boys and ‘better use of space’ for girls.

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Variations and resistance in the enactment of gendered learning Because of length limitations, the third, micro-didactical analysis focuses on only three participants (Pierre, Abir and Adel) during an episode of the 3vs1 play-practice. Pierre considers Abir as a high achieving female student and Adel a low achieving male student: ‘Abir has a good level, she is very willing, but … not always successful … she can miss her shot, she can miss her pass […] but on the other hand, she is very willing’. According to Pierre, Adel encounters difficulties in being included by his classmates: ‘Adel is low skilled in PE, he also has poor academic results […] he is a lonely little boy’ (teacher’s interviews). These two students, whose handball learning experiences are the focus of this section, have family roots in South Morocco. Their grandparents arrived in France in the 1960s for economic reasons. Like most students of the class, Abir and Adel are embedded in ‘cultures of hybridity’ (Stride, 2014) in terms of social class positioning, degrees of religiosity, new forms of ethnicity and common teenage behaviours, all of which intersect and produce heterogeneity within the class. These dimensions need to be taken into consideration when analysing didactical transactions. The analysis begins after Pierre has asked the students to get into groups of three people and has set up the 3vs1 play-practice. As students have chosen to group in single-sex teams, he distributes the groups outside the handball half-court sidelines: all-girl groups on the left side of the court, all-boy groups on the right. Pierre’s assignment at the beginning of the task is the same for all groups: ‘When in possession of the ball, go forward if no defender; if defender present, find a partner to pass the ball to … so he can reach the goal area line to take a shot’. The a priori analysis of this primitive didactic milieu points out the combination of tactical and technical knowledge required as: get away from defence and collectively create open spaces, create advantageous position to shoot by passing to the open player or going into open spaces. Girls and boys work alternately on the same play area under Pierre’s supervision. Pierre launches each attack calling alternately ‘girls’ then ‘boys’. It is the signal for Adel, who chooses to stay in the role of the passer, to perform the baseline throw-in for each work-group attempt. At the same time a defender (girl or boy depending on which team is playing) enters the court at the freethrow line. In the excerpt below, we report the teacher’s and students’ joint actions in terms of what they say and how they act in relation to the content at stake. We particularly focus on the didactical transactions involving Adel as a passer and Abir. The episode concerns all five attempts of Abir’s team, during which a girl volunteers to be goalkeeper. 1 On the first attempt, Abir and her teammates, Anissa and Iptissame, move forward into the court. Adel throws the ball in the direction of Iptissame. Another girl, the defender at the free-throw line, runs towards Iptissame while Anissa comes closer to receive the ball. Abir takes the opportunity of the open space to move forward towards the goal area. Anissa dribbles

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2

3

4

5

and makes a two-hand long pass to Abir. Pierre tells Abir: ‘you have to score now’. Annissa’s pass is not accurate enough and the ball is lost. Pierre comments: ‘lost-ball’. Then, turning his head to the boys who are playing, he shouts: ‘faster … more speed please’. One of the boys shoots on the goalkeeper, he calls out: ‘Hey, guys, when a girl [is goalkeeper] you should shoot toward the ground … as I have already told you’. Then, to the next girls’ team ‘Come on! … Keep on playing!’ During the second attempt by Abir’s team, Adel deliberately throws the ball on Iptissame’s feet, without any comment from Pierre. Adel never does this when initiating the baseline throw-in to any group of boys. While Iptissame cannot catch the ball rolling between her feet, Anissa says loudly enough to make Adel grasp her comment: ‘Him too, he’s a weak player!’ At the same time, a girl defender moves to Abir trying to prevent her from receiving the ball. The defender succeeds in intercepting Iptissame’s pass to Abir. Adel initiates the third attempt by throwing a slow bounce pass towards the three girls. Anissa catches it, dribbles and passes to Abir. The girl defender does not move closer to the ball carrier but stays between the two girls, near Abir, with the purpose of intercepting the ball again. Abir receives a fair ball from Anissa. Pierre to Abir: ‘Go! Go! Pass and then shoot!’ Abir dribbles to find a path to the goal area: she cuts around her defender, and thus gets into the open, which permits her to perform a nice shot. Her action is tactically relevant even though the ball hits the horizontal beam. Pierre’s comment goes to the female defender: ‘Let’s get defending!’ On further attempts, Adel disengages from the task of passer. He runs slowly to pick up the balls and no longer performs proper baseline throw-ins. He stays far from the groups, throwing balls inappropriately, particularly to girls. Pierre comments only on boys’ actions telling them to play ‘faster’, ‘with more speed’. As for Abir, she plays the role of defender against other girl teams. Then, before their fourth attempt, Abir, Anissa and another girl exchange on the strategy for good collective play while Pierre is supervising a boy: ‘when defending you should raise your arms’. On her fifth attempt, Abir receives the ball from Anissa. She lets the defender come to her, allowing the third teammate to become an open player in a very good tactical position as the only defender is behind her. Afterwards, Abir gives her an assist, allowing her to shoot and score a goal. Pierre appraises the team ‘Good job, girls’. A few seconds later, he closes the current task to set up the 3vs2 learning task.

This episode highlights that students’ learning opportunities differ depending on how they are physically and discursively involved in the didactic contract and how the teacher’s and students’ gender positioning contributes to this process. Adel, who deliberately chooses to stay in the role of

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passer over time, does not enter into the didactic contract. Notwithstanding, he is somewhat ‘protected’ by Pierre who never asks him to participate in collective work. Over the episode, Adel’s social relationships with his peer students progressively evolve: his baseline throw-in privileges long and fair balls to boys, and ‘offloading’ unfair balls to girls (second attempt). What is significant here is how Adel seeks to exclude girls from handball success by giving them poor passes. Adel’s positioning is more than less marked by some salient features of gendered habits. During the short interviews with the second author of this chapter he was evasive about how nicely he played and if he succeeded. ‘I don’t know’ he repeated. Adel’s bodily actions during the task completion and his near silence or evasive answers during interviews support the interpretation of his frustration at not being recognized by his male peers as a good player despite his efforts to pass them ‘good balls’. Paradoxically, Adel, who plays football outside school, says he ‘prefers to play in mixed groups [in PE]’ confirming his feeling of being marginalized by the boys of the class, as pointed out by Pierre. Conversely, when playing with girls, he feels gender-demoted in his traditional masculine identity – even more so when Anissa resists, saying quite loudly that not only girls are poor at games (second attempt). Finally, as Adel cannot be clearly identified as a relevant teammate by either side of the court, he progressively goes off-task (fourth attempt), while the teacher gives him no feedback to re-engage him in the work. As for Abir, who progresses significantly during the unit despite the little content-based feedback she receives from the teacher, she decodes the implicitness of the didactic contract through her successive attempts. She relies on the situational context to construct tactical knowledge, such as creating open spaces, attracting the defender to help her teammate become an open player, cutting around the defender and so on. The micro-­ didactical analysis points out how Abir’s and, to a lesser extent, Anissa’s epistemic gender positioning resist Pierre’s expectations in terms of appropriate knowledge and benevolence to girls (Larsson et al., 2009). Abir gives examples of being active as a resourceful player in her team. She plays the different roles assigned (player, defender, goalkeeper). She likes to ‘work collectively with a team’ (Abir’s interview). Her positioning and repositioning throughout the transactions with her peers allow her to construct independence with respect to the symbolic masculine hierarchy of excellence that implicitly underlies didactical transactions and peer relationships. An altercation with Adel (monitored by Pierre in lesson 4) about her role as goalkeeper shows that she resists being reduced by Adel to a ‘girly player’: Pierre:  ‘What did you say Adel?’ Adel:  ‘Nothing’ Abir:  ‘Nothing? Take responsibility

for what you just said … I’m gonna break your teeth if you speak to me [like this] again’.

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This altercation, within the cultures of hybridity of these Muslim teenagers, shows what it means to be a male or a female student in the context of coeducational PE in this multi-ethnic school. Despite all this, Abir finds a path to empowerment in terms of embodied knowledge construction through disciplinary engagement and incipient feminist resistance. These student narratives show that girls’ and boys’ social relations are tightened up within didactical transactions in which gender positioning and repositioning concern both the content to be learnt and the construction of identities that may be conflictive. In these contexts, unlike Anissa and Abir, not all students have the capacity to find enough resources to construct embodied forms of game practices that challenge ordinary sexism and the gender order in the class.

Doing and undoing gender in multi-ethnic PE class: discussion The purpose of this chapter has been to use a didactic study to scrutinize how gendered learning in PE emerges as a by-product of classroom interactions at various timescales. Over the longer time span of the unit, the analysis suggests that differences among girls and boys are minor, thanks to the special attention the teacher pays to the setting of mixed and single-sex groups and of learning environments aimed at delivering the same content to all students. However, the other two timescales, one focusing on the teacher’s verbal supervision in a lesson, and the other at the micro-scale of an episode, highlight unbalanced, gendered learning trajectories due to the differentiated ways in which didactical transactions evolve. The holistic contents tend to fade away as the teacher’s supervision privileges power and speed for boys, while being less precise and more benevolent concerning what is expected from girls. In the context of a multi-ethnic school, where the teacher has to struggle with boys’ disengagement, off-task behaviour and sexism, and difficulties in the social relations between students, it is certainly not easy to maintain high-quality PE and it is probably easier to obtain peace through straightforward strategies (Debars and Amade-Escot, 2006; Kherroubi and Rochex, 2004; Larsson et al., 2009; Öhrn, 2009). Even within the limits of this case study, it is clear how the three layers of analysis highlight the need for fine-grained investigation of teacher’s and students’ transactions and the social relations between peer students to account for the co-construction of differentiated academic expectations that (re)produce the dominant gender order in the class. On the other hand, gendered learning among students, girls and boys alike, goes through a complex process that intersects participants’ epistemic gender positioning with their cultural/ethnic backgrounds through micro-social interactions related to particular curricular contents within a particular context. The fine analysis reveals that not all girls are dominated when playing games, and not all boys reinforce hegemonic masculinity in the class. Each student occupies a specific niche in relation to the

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meaning she/he gives to the teacher’s expectations and how she/he negotiates the meaning of her/his practice within the peer group. Finally, our study suggests some implications in terms of feminist emancipatory pedagogies, particularly for schools located in underprivileged areas. Student grouping is not a single, straightforward norm but a pedagogical means that should not be reduced to a way to establish peace in the class. Another issue for in-depth consideration is the time required to obtain real enhancement of students’ learning without neglecting the interplay of gender and the various cultural hybridizations of teenagers’ ways of life in multi-­ ethnic schools (Larsson et al., 2009; Stride, 2014). The design of holistic learning environments deserves some thought because simple, closed tasks produce the illusion of enhancing immediate achievement while maintaining disciplined behaviours through body control, most often at the expense of the construction of emancipatory contents. This issue is critical, as it engages the epistemological dimension of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. That is why a teacher’s awareness of her/his own contribution to student learning through the dynamics of the DDC can enhance inclusive pedagogies that offer gender sensitive forms of knowledge construction, respectful of various students’ positioning. All students, girls and boys, high and low achievers, need constructive emancipatory knowledge, not only benevolent support!

Paired dialogue: sport, physical education and gender – analysing complex pedagogic encounters Andrea Abbas The analysis of the PE class presented in this chapter provides valuable insights into the way that gender inequalities are produced through complex mechanisms. The empirical focus on phenomena that operate over different timescales gives a rich sense of the multi-textured and contradictory processes of gendering in multicultural contemporary contexts. The illustrative examples bring this to life. I appreciated the way that the approach focused on practices and discourses that both contested and reinforced prevailing gender and ethnic stereotypes in the process of trying to counter them. The chapter relates to several lines of literature in the Anglophone tradition that I am familiar with. One of the authors I have added to the bibliography (Weiler, 2000) has explored how the contradictory processes of curriculum in the schools play out in the lives of thirty young working-class young women from five different ethnic groups who attended a school for ‘at risk’ pupils. Where I would see this US-based study as representing something that I think is distinctive (Continued)

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to critical sociological approaches is that it bases its understanding of pedagogy and curricula in the context of the students’ wider lives and connects the analysis and findings to the social structures of society. This allows the author to use focused analysis like Ingrid’s and Claire’s to understand what aspects of injustice are best tackled in the classrooms by teachers and which aspects require broader social policy changes. The critical sociological approach also encourages researchers to specify what social justice is envisaged by the author, which I think provides a strong ethical orientation to the work. Weiler (2000) uses several theories to explore the intersecting influences of class, gender and ethnicity (which tends to be termed race in the USA and variably race and ethnicity in the UK). Ingrid and Claire are also grappling with the sticky problem of intersectionality. I pursue this line, drawing on Basil Bernstein, in my own chapter for this book (Chapter 6). The second reference I have added, then, relates to the sociological theorising of pedagogy and curricula, inspired by the work of the sociologist Basil Bernstein (2000). This body of work is interested in what ways pedagogy and curricula contribute to inequalities and their potential to interrupt these processes. Interest in ‘interruptions’ appears to be a key feature of work in both the Anglophone and didactic traditions. More broadly, this research connects well with things that I, as a critical sociologist with an interest in social justice, have valued in terms of good pedagogic research in the Anglophone education literature. For example, I found the way that theoretical tools were developed and used to produce insights into practices for increasing social justice to be of particular interest. I liked the use of the DDC to analytically separate what the teacher provides from what the students get. I aspire to do this in my own work in higher education. The need to orient pedagogy to social justice reminded me of some of the work by American feminist pedagogues, such as Patti Lather and bell hooks who have explored these processes through their own attempts at teaching focused on emancipation. In this context, readers might find Sarah Amsler’s (2015) work on efforts to generate pedagogic and curricula approaches to increase democracy interesting. I would be interested to hear from Ingrid and Claire about how their own very detailed pedagogical research that works to generate equality through teaching and learning fits within this longer tradition of radical education and to engage with them in debates around intersectionality within this context.

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References Amade-Escot, C., Elandoulsi, S. & Verscheure, I. (2015). Physical education in Tunisia: teachers’ practical epistemology, students’ positioning and gender issues. Sport, Education and Society, 20 (5): 656–675. Amsler, S. (2015). The Education of Radical Democracy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Azzarito, L. (2009). The panopticon of physical education: pretty, active and ideally white. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 14 (1): 19–39. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised edition, Oxon: Rowan and Littlefield. Debars, C. & Amade-Escot, C. (2006). Enseigner le badminton à une classe de primo arrivants: l’incidence du contexte ZEP sur la pratique d’intervention. Revue eJRIEPS, 9: 35–43. Available at http://www.fcomte.iufm.fr/ejrieps/ejournal9/ Debars%20(f )eJ9.pdf Griffin, P. S (1985). Boys’ participation styles in a middle school physical education team sports unit. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 4: 100–110. Harré, R. & van Langenhove, L. (1999). Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell. Kherroubi, M. & Rochex, J. Y. (2004). La recherche en Éducation et les ZEP en France. Apprentissages et exercice professionnels en ZEP: résultats, analyses et interprétations. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 146: 115–181. Larsson, H., Fagrell, B. & Redelius, K. (2009). Queering physical education. Between benevolence towards girls and a tribute to masculinity. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 14 (1): 1–17. Ligozat, F. (2011). The development of comparative didactics & joint action theory in the context of the French-speaking subject didactiques. Paper presented at ECER, Berlin, 1–16 September. Available at http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:75023 Öhrn, E. (2009). Challenging sexism? Gender and ethnicity in the secondary school. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 53 (6): 579–590. Schubauer-Leoni, M. L. (1996). Etude du contrat didactique pour des élèves en difficulté en mathématiques. Problématique didactique et/ou psychosociale. In Raisky C. and Caillot M. M. (eds.), Au-delà des didactiques le didactique: débats autour de concepts fédérateurs. Bruxelles: De Boeck, pp. 159–189. Skelton, C. (2000). ‘A passion for football’: dominant masculinities and primary schooling. Sport, Education and Society, 5(1): 5–18. Stride, A. (2014). Let US tell YOU! South Asian, Muslim girls tell tales about physical education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 19 (4): 398–417. Taylor, C. A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25 (6): 688–703. Verscheure, I. (2005). Dynamique différentielle des interactions didactiques et co-construction de la différence des sexes en Education Physique et Sportive. Le cas de l’attaque en volley-ball en lycées agricoles. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier, France. Verscheure, I. and Amade-Escot, C. (2007). The gendered construction of physical education content as the result of the differentiated didactic contract. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 12 (3): 245–272. Verscheure, I. and Vinson, M. (2018). Effets de l’action didactique conjointe des professeurs et des élèves sur la construction différentielle des « positions de genre » en EPS. In Brière-Guenoun, F., Couchot-Schiex, S., Verscheure, I. &

156  Ingrid Verscheure and Claire Debars Poggi,  M.  P.  (eds.), Analyses didactiques et sociologiques de la construction des inégalités d’accès au savoir dans les pratiques d’enseignement et de formation en EPS en France. Besançon: PUFC, pp. 77–92. Weiler, J. (2000). Codes and Contradictions: Race, Gender Identity, and Schooling. Ithaca: State University of New York Press. Whitson, D. (1994). The embodiment of gender: discipline, domination and empowerment. In Birrell, S. & Cole, S. (eds.), Women, Sport and Culture. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp. 353–371.

12 Beyond binary discourses Making LGBTQI+ identities visible in the curriculum Carrie Paechter

Introduction: gendered curriculum forms In this chapter I am going to consider different discourses and priorities in gender and education throughout the 20th century and today. I will argue that changes in wider social understandings of gender and sexuality, including the increased acceptance and legal recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex1 and other (LGBTQI+) identities and relationships, along with changes in discourses around gender, require major changes across the curriculum. In particular, an increase in the number of children, young people and adults identifying in different ways, such as transgender, require us to make significant changes in the curriculum to include LGBTQI+ parented families, and LGBTQI+ children and young people, fully into school communities. I will focus mainly on England and Wales. I will argue that in order to include LGBTQI+ people in their communities, schools need to reflect LGBTQI+ lives across all appropriate areas of the curriculum. After an explanation of the historical debates about gender and education in the UK, I will examine some of the underlying assumptions about gender and schooling. After this, I will discuss some of the findings from a mixed methods study of LGBTQI+ parented families and schooling, carried out with Anna Carlile (Carlile & Paechter, 2018). This research included an examination of the large number of school policies that have a potential bearing on LGBTQI+ parented families, a media survey, interviews with parents and children, and an evaluation of a programme of interventions into English primary and secondary schools. I will mainly focus on the research on school policies, though I will also mention some of the findings from our interviews. It is important to note here that ‘curriculum’ is generally used by UK scholars to refer to both the overt, taught curriculum and what is termed the ‘hidden curriculum’. The overt curriculum may or may not be written down, and focuses on what is taught, rather than how this takes place (this is generally seen as ‘pedagogy’). The hidden curriculum is concerned with more covert and often unacknowledged messages conveyed to students

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through the schooling process. In this, what is not included in the overt curriculum is as important as what is, and such things as teacher attitudes also play a part. In this chapter I will focus mainly on the overt curriculum, and, in particular, what is included, though I will also argue that the exclusion of LGBTQI+ people and, in particular, parents is an important aspect of the hidden curriculum in English and Welsh schools.

Historical debates about gender and education in England and Wales The Education Reform Act of 1988 was an important marker in curriculum provision in England and Wales. Arising out of ideas in the previous ten years around the importance of an ‘entitlement curriculum’, giving children and young people the right to study a full range of subjects, the Act introduced for the first time a compulsory National Curriculum for those age 5–16 in state education. The National Curriculum, then, as now, specified what should be taught: both the subjects that children must study and the content of those subjects. Teaching methods remained in the control of schools, and there are no compulsory textbooks. Although the provisions have been considerably reduced since then, and never applied to children in non-maintained schools, the National Curriculum represented a turning point in English and Welsh approaches to gender and education, with effects that continue today. Although the provisions in the National Curriculum were not explicitly intended to address gender issues, they did have a strong gendered effect (as I discuss below), possibly, and paradoxically, by ignoring the previous century’s debates about gender and education. These debates were strongly binary with respect to gender, and, to some extent, to social class (Paechter, 1998). Discussion about what might be a suitable curriculum for girls had been ongoing since the establishment of girls’ secondary schools in the mid-19th century. Girls’ school pioneers had to consider whether it was better to provide a curriculum that had originally been devised for men, or one that was adapted for the perceived needs of women, but which would then necessarily be considered inferior (Fletcher, 1984). These debates continued through much of the 20th century. For mainly middle-class girls in selective secondary education, they were framed by assumptions about women’s social roles as focused around a choice between domesticity and long-term professional spinsterhood (Dyhouse, 1977; Summerfield, 1987). In the context of a ‘marriage bar’ which excluded married women from several areas of work, including teaching and the Civil Service, until well into the 20th century, this was a dilemma facing many educated women. At elementary school level in the early 20th century, such pressures led to a curriculum for girls which was overwhelmingly focused on domesticity. This was in preparation either for wifehood and motherhood or for domestic service, to the extent that girls were frequently taught needlework while the boys studied elementary arithmetic (Attar, 1990; Turnbull, 1987).

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Central to these early 20th-century debates was the place of science, and, in particular, whether it would be better to have a specifically female-­ oriented science, ‘domestic science’ taught to girls in place of physics and chemistry. While this was resisted by heads of the elite girls’ schools, who thought their students should receive an equal education to boys, domestic subjects of one kind or another persisted, particularly in schools with largely ­working-class intakes. Indeed, girls could, right up to the introduction of the National ­Curriculum, make curriculum choices which left them spending up to half their time in the last two years of compulsory schooling in what was by then called Home Economics, comprising studies of food, textiles and child development (Attar, 1990). Grafton et al. (1983) also note that even as late as 1972, 50% of 587 secondary schools surveyed offered a gender-specific curriculum, with the most common reason given for the exclusion of girls from ‘boys’ subjects’ being teachers’ refusal to have girls in their classes. The introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 prevented this overt discrimination. Many schools, however, continued to offer craft subjects to boys and domestic subjects to girls, interpreting the Act to require them only to make exceptions in response to specific requests (Attar, 1990). The introduction of the National Curriculum cut across these debates and biases by making the study of ten subjects compulsory for all children up to age 16 (from age 11 for modern foreign languages). Over the course of the few years in which it was introduced, young people who had previously expected to give up subjects along strongly gendered lines found that they had to continue them to examination level. Although the requirements (and particularly the subject breadth) have been considerably watered down in the intervening years, this has not led to a substantial move back to gender segregation pre-16. Nevertheless, boys remain less likely to continue with a modern foreign language or English, and girls to persist with mathematics (especially further mathematics) and physics beyond this ( Joint Council for Qualifications, 2017). Vocational subjects remain strongly gendered, with the Women’s Engineering Society (2016: 2) reporting that ‘in 2013/14, women accounted for only 3.8% of Engineering apprenticeship starts and 1.7% of Construction Skills starts’.

Underlying assumptions about gender and schooling In reflecting on these shifts in curriculum, we must consider the underlying assumptions about both gender and schooling. Most obvious is the binary understanding of gender differences as being between males and females as coherent and completely different categories. In the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, this division was discussed in terms of biological differences between two distinct binary sexes. Curriculum provision was tailored to what were perceived as men’s and women’s future roles. This was influenced by social class: working-class girls were not considered to require the level of education that middle-class girls did, even if both groups were mainly expected

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to become wives and mothers. Furthermore, girls’ overall lower levels of performance, for much of this period, in subjects such as mathematics and science (Askew & Wiliam, 1995), were treated as arising from innate differences in ability, and therefore remained unquestioned. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, feminist moves to separate sex, as being about the body, from gender as pertaining to the social, led to changes in emphasis, including attempts to encourage greater female take-up of, and attainment in, mathematics and science. Nevertheless, gender as a concept remained tied to sex, and consequently to bodies, and much of the work on gender and education carried out in the late 20th and early 21st centuries assumes close correspondence between sex and gender, even when gender is treated as socially constructed (Francis & Paechter, 2015). Except in a few cases, a female body is associated with a female gender identity, presentation and expected role (Butler, 1990). Because it is assumed that there are two and only two sexes (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000), it is also assumed that there are only two genders. This has led discussions around gender and curriculum, and gender and education more broadly, to be couched almost entirely within a sex-based gender binary. Butler (1990, 1993, 2004) and Wittig (1980/1992, 1989/1992) have argued that binary genders are constructed within a presumption of heterosexuality. Such heteronormativity is strongly implicated in many formal social structures which have only recently been broadened to include LGBTQI+ people. Education remains heteronormative in many ways, although, as we shall see below, there has been some change with regard to school policies and inspection practices (Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Schools, 2014). Within wider British society, however, there has been a gradual unpicking of the heterosexual assumption over the last 20 years, with increased statutory protection for LGBTQI+ people, legalization of gay marriage, availability of reproductive technologies and adoption to LGBTQI+ people, and the increased visibility of LGBTQI+ people in the community, including as parents. This move away from heteronormativity is leading to a parallel undermining of the gender binary. Once heterosexuality is no longer a taken-for-granted requirement for participation in fundamental social institutions such as marriage and family life, the necessity for the two binary genders that make up the heterosexual couple is also brought into question. The increased visibility of LGBTQI+ people, and the gradual loss of force of stereotypes concerning how they should live and behave (Weeks, 2007), has led to a broadening of possibilities for life more generally. It is also gradually leading to wider acceptance of the whole range of LGBTQI+. Assumptions not just about sexual orientation but also about gender are being questioned, contested and undermined. This suggests that educational discourses about gender and curriculum need to move from earlier preoccupations about what boys and girls should study and achieve, to considering how we can include these more recently recognized gender identities and sexualities. This may require a shift as radical as the introduction of the National Curriculum.

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Schooling and heterosexuality Despite these changes in wider society, it remains the case that schools are overwhelmingly heteronormative institutions (Carlile & Paechter, 2018). Heterosexuality is treated as the norm both in curriculum provision and in how schools work with children and young people. This affects how gender has been, and remains, an issue within schools. In the late 20th century, the heteronormativity of mainstream schooling was reinforced in Britain by the introduction of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which ruled that: A local authority shall not: Intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; b Promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. (Her Majesty’s Government, 1988) a

Although this only applied to local authorities, and not to schools themselves, it was widely interpreted as preventing schools from discussing or supporting LGBTQI+ students or families at all. This section of the Act was repealed in 2003. However, its effects continue. Some schools did little or nothing to change their policies on the issue (Carlile & Paechter, 2018). There is also considerable evidence that, until recently, homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (HBT) bullying has gone unchallenged in many schools, and the use of ‘gay’ as a generic playground term of abuse remains common (Bradlow et al., 2017). This suggests that, in these respects, schools may have a way to go to catch up with broader social trends. One way to consider how schools acknowledge LGBTQI+ people within their communities is to examine how they are portrayed in school policy documentation, including policies regarding the curriculum. The discourses found in such documents give an insight into the extent to which a particular school is heteronormative in its approach to who is included in school life and the curriculum and how it is likely to react to the presence of a trans or non-binary student or parent. As part of my multi-­method research with Anna Carlile (Carlile & Paechter, 2018) into ­LGBTQI+ families’ relationships with their children’s schools, I analysed the websites of all non-private schools in two contrasting local authority areas: a mainly rural county in Eastern England and an English West Midlands metropolitan authority. For each of the 169 schools in these two areas, I examined the equality policy, any policy for sex and relationship education (SRE) and any policy concerning bullying. When I could not find these, I examined the behaviour policy. These policies are generally about how the school as an organization behaves towards staff, students and parents, and what is expected of them in return, although SRE policies

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usually specify what should be taught and at what age, and anti-bullying policies usually define different kinds of bullying and lay down procedures and sanctions for dealing with it. My intention was to consider the discourses with which schools talk about LGBTQI+ individuals and families and the extent to which LGBTQI+ people are visible in the curriculum and in school life more generally. In this respect, SRE policies were frequently the most illuminating, especially when they specified what would, and what would not, be taught. The presence of policies does not, of course, guarantee engagement with the people and ideas on whom those policies are focused (Ahmed, 2012; Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2011). What appears on school websites is related to the national policy and legal context (Braun et al., 2011), which, in the UK, includes the Equality Act 2010, which protects people from discrimination on the basis of eight ‘protected characteristics’, including gender reassignment and sexual orientation. Schools are also subject to the Public Sector Equality Duties, which require that they ‘actively promote equality’ (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2014), and they are inspected in relation to this. It is therefore important to consider not just the discourses to be found in the policies themselves but, where it is apparent, their origins and the extent to which members of the school community have been involved in their development, maintenance and execution. This is especially the case when we consider that the British LGBTQI+ campaigning organization Stonewall found that out of 3,713 LGBT young people aged 13–19 who responded to an online questionnaire, 45% had been bullied at school for being LGBT, and that only 29% of these said that teachers present during a bullying episode had intervened (Bradlow et al., 2017). The pressure on UK schools to have policies on a wide range of issues seems to result in widespread reliance on templates, particularly for equality policies, supplied by local authorities, campaigning organizations and other schools. While this is fine where a school then fully engages with adapting a policy to its own situation, many of those I looked at had not. Several schools had not replaced sections from model policies in which they were expected to add their own particular features, or say what steps they had taken so far: in many cases these were simply left blank or with the original wording and/ or highlighting indicating this. It is unlikely that schools which take such minimal steps to comply with their legal obligations in this respect will understand, let alone implement, the need for greater inclusion within the curriculum or the everyday life of the school. These model policies also tended to be so generic that they simply listed all the protected characteristics, without considering how addressing the different areas might differ, or, indeed, the extent to which they would be likely to apply to their students (several nursery policies, for example, claimed not to discriminate against pupils on grounds of pregnancy). Specifically written or fully adapted policies, on the other hand, often drew attention to particular features of their local area, such as the SRE

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policy from one school in the metropolitan authority which mentioned the above national average teenage pregnancy rate. Church schools appeared to be more likely to have internally written or adapted policies, which often reflected their religious ethos. Mainly this resulted in an increased stress on fostering marriage and family life through the curriculum, though there was little indication that this was anything other than heteronormative. Some schools used the opportunity to emphasize particular inclusions or exclusions. At one extreme was a Roman Catholic primary school whose ‘Family Life Policy’ was aimed at ‘the formation of right attitudes in our children’ and which stated specifically that homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, contraception, abortion and rape would not be ‘discussed in detail’. Given that homosexuality is sometimes equated with sexual activity, and that some children are already aware of their sexual orientation at primary school, this could result in the complete curriculum excluding LGBTQI+ issues and individuals (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2011). At the other extreme were church schools whose specially written policies explicitly included LGBTQI+ people and, in one case, families. One Roman Catholic secondary school stated at the start of its Family Life Education Policy that ‘sexuality is essential to our personal identity and is God’s gift to us’, and said that ‘sexual identity’ was taught to older students. A Church of England primary school’s SRE policy not only covered same-sex relationships in the curriculum for older students, but also explicitly claimed to teach ‘how do families with same-sex parents have babies’. Given that some of the children in our wider study of LGBTQI+ parented families and schools complained of ignorance on this latter question among their primary school peers (Carlile & Paechter, 2018), this is something that should be taken up more widely. One thing that several church primary schools appeared to be struggling with was striking a balance between inclusivity and not wanting to teach explicitly about sex. This is reflected in the Church of England’s policy document Valuing All God’s Children (The Church of England Education Office, 2017: 20), which states that: It is not appropriate that a primary school’s strategy for combatting HTB bullying should focus on any aspect of differing sexual practices (i.e. what people do with their bodies sexually, although human reproduction may be an element of the science curriculum). An exploration of differing sexual activity would serve to counter a primary school’s responsibility to safeguard the latency of childhood. While it is understandable that any school would be reluctant to thrust explicit details of adult sexual activity on younger children, those at or approaching puberty at the older end of a primary school may well be exposed to considerable (mis)information from elsewhere, particularly around non-­ heterosexual sex. This therefore amounts to an abdication of responsibility

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on the part of the Church of England, particularly given that children in our study were asked explicit questions about their families and how they themselves came to be conceived. Most ten year olds are aware, at least to some extent, of how babies are conceived in heterosexually parented families, and a refusal to discuss the ways in which children in LGBTQI+ parented families are differently conceived does little to include the latter. Nevertheless, the bespoke nature of church schools’ policies could have some benefits: it was striking, for example, that they were the only schools to mention ‘love’ in a policy title. I found when going through the school websites that schools that might have a relatively basic model-based equality policy could have an extremely well thought out ones for specific other things, such as Gypsy and Traveller children, young carers, refugees or separated parents. It appears that where a school identifies a need for a particular policy, they may go to some trouble to devise one that fully suits their circumstances. This suggests that it is only when a school has to deal explicitly with a particular kind of student, family, or set of circumstances that it devises or amends policies so that they are inclusive and work effectively in practice. Unfortunately, this ‘after the fact’ approach gives no reassurance to LGBTQI+ parents or students that schools will take their concerns seriously or include them in the curriculum. Stonewall’s survey (Bradlow et al., 2017) found that 45% of LGBT pupils who experience HBT bullying never report it to anyone, and, of those, 39% gave as a reason that they thought teachers would do nothing about it, and 59% were afraid that it would ‘out’ them as LGBT. This suggests that the lack of a well-publicized and properly designed policy inhibits LGBTQI+ students from being out at a particular school, making it, as part of a vicious circle, less likely that the school will carry out the work needed to devise and implement a strong and inclusive approach to LGBTQI+ people, including full curriculum inclusion. The almost complete invisibility of trans and non-binary people from all the SRE policies I analysed also suggests that schools are not including any teaching of gender identities in the curriculum. While teaching regarding same-gender relationships is gradually coming into schools, education about LGBTQI+ identities does not appear to be making much headway. The discourses found in school policies regarding LGBTQI+ students and families construct the ways in which these groups are perceived (Maguire et al., 2011). School policies regarding LGBTQI+ issues position LGBTQI+ people in particular ways, which will have different effects in terms of both their visibility as members of school communities, and how they are regarded. The discourses of the documents found in schools in the two local authority areas I examined positioned LGBTQI+ parents and students either as invisible or as victims. Most of the policies had their main emphasis on LGBTQI+ students, more rarely on staff, and hardly ever on parents. This is quite possibly due to the use of model policy documents focusing very directly on legal obligations, but it

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does nevertheless reflect the overall invisibility of LGBTQI+ parented families in school contexts, and therefore in the curriculum. A school might have an SRE policy that is inclusive of same-sex love when considering students’ current or potential relationships, but which discusses family life in such vague terms that teachers are not prompted to include LGBTQI+ parented families when teaching. SRE policies might, therefore, refer to such things as ‘why families are special for caring and sharing’ or state that they would ‘emphasize the role and value of family life’, but say nothing about how those families are constructed (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2011). This sort of indirect statement may give an illusion of inclusion where none exists in practice ( Jones & Hillier, 2012). Indeed, many SRE policies were vague about the extent to which a school taught or encouraged a positive attitude to LGBTQI+ identities and relationships, leaving a gap between the content of their equality policies and what they claimed to cover in the classroom. There was no suggestion, for example, that students should be taught about LGBTQI+ historical figures, or that teachers should mention the LGBTQI+ status of a poet whose love poems are being studied. The second discourse surrounding LGBTQI+ students and families focused on them primarily as victims, within anti-bullying documentation. Given the continued prevalence of HBT bullying in schools (Bradlow et al., 2017), this is clearly needed, but it is hardly a positive portrayal, and could be seen as a hidden curriculum of victimhood. In contrast to their invisibility in sex and relationships education, members of LGBTQI+ parented families did sometimes appear in anti-bullying documentation. Most of the anti-bullying policies, where they mentioned particular categories of bullying, included homophobic bullying, usually in the context of protecting LGBTQI+ students or combatting homophobic language, particularly the use of ‘gay’ as a term of abuse. Generally, however, policies focused on students being bullied about their own sexual orientation and rarely mentioned that students might have LGBTQI+ parents or other family members. Furthermore, if the only place that LGBTQI+ people feature in school policies is in lists of people with ‘protected characteristics’ under the Equality Act or as potential victims of bullying, this presents a picture of LGBTQI+ life as problematic, painful and in need of special protection, rather than as another variant of human identity, sexual orientation and/or living arrangements. This discourse in which children from LGBTQI+ parented families are presented as victims arises in part from the heteronormative world of the school. This means that they only appear at all in relation to LGBTQI+ students defined as requiring protection or being bullied, rather than as people in their own right. Because there is good evidence that LGBTQI+ students are frequently the victims of bullying, and because casual use of homophobic language remains an ongoing problem in schools, children from LGBTQI+ parented families are assumed, by association, to be both closeted about their parents and victimized because of their parents’ LGBTQI+ status. This is not

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something that was borne out by our study: only one parent (a woman of trans history) said that her child’s school did not know of her status, and only one child (whose parent was a different woman of trans history) said that they had been bullied. Most children were open about and proud of their families, some even gaining kudos among their peers from having LGBTQI+ parents (Carlile & Paechter, 2018). This acceptance should be reflected in much greater inclusion in the curriculum. Evidence from the Stonewall survey (Bradlow et al., 2017), furthermore, suggests that, policy inclusion notwithstanding, trans (including non-­ binary) students in particular are not well supported in schools. Problems reported by trans young people include: not being allowed to use their preferred name and pronoun in school, not being given access to preferred toilets or changing rooms, not being protected from anti-trans bullying, not being allowed to play on the sports teams with which they feel comfortable, not being allowed to wear a school uniform in line with their gender identity. While this is likely in many cases to be due to ignorance on the part of schools, increases in children and young people identifying as trans or non-binary (The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, 2016) mean that such ignorance is likely to cause problems to increasing numbers of students. Schools’ lack of understanding of trans issues and the invisibility of trans people within SRE policies also suggests that well-­ informed teaching about the fluidity of gender, for some people, or about the possibilities of a disjunction between bodies and identities, is likely to be extremely rare.

Conclusions and implications The introduction of the National Curriculum from 1988 brought about a transformation in curriculum expectations and provision around gender. It removed, at least for students age 5–16, a set of divisions between young women and men which had left many working-class students in gender-­ segregated classrooms being taught domestic or craft subjects for a considerable proportion of curriculum time, and girls opting out of studying sciences, boys of modern foreign languages, from age 14. Despite many changes since, the resulting improvement of girls’ uptake of, and success at, mathematics and sciences beyond compulsory education has persisted, and we have a much more equal curriculum offer and experience. We now need to have a similar revolution with regard to curriculum provision around non-heteronormative, and especially non-binary, understandings of gender and sexual orientation. In our study of LGBTQI+ parented families and schools (Carlile & ­Paechter, 2018), Anna Carlile and I found that parents did not generally feel that their families were included in the school curriculum. While they themselves were almost always visible in the school community, taking and collecting younger children, attending parents’ evenings, taking up membership of governing bodies and parent-teacher associations, they

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complained of a lack of books and images reflecting their families in primary school classrooms, a lack of acknowledgement of the contribution of LGBTQI+ people to society and a focus on penis/vagina sex to the exclusion of all other forms in SRE. A teenager in our study complained that while lesbian and gay orientations were discussed in secondary school, bisexual ones were ignored; young people in the Stonewall survey (­Bradlow et al., 2017) reported a lack of information in lessons about safer sex, consent or violence in the context of same-sex relationships. It is clear from these accounts that the presence in school policies of LGBTQI+ people and families only as potential victims of bullying has ongoing effects in terms of inadequate curriculum provision. Echoing the previous approaches of campaigning groups encouraging girls to engage with and succeed at mathematics and science, we need a new drive towards a fully inclusive curriculum that includes an informed discussion, across the curriculum, of gender, sexual orientation and heterosexuality. We need to introduce curriculum provision that supports children, in age-­ appropriate ways, to understand the ways in which gender is socially constructed, that some people do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, or, indeed, with any specific gender, and that families come in a wide variety of forms. This will require primary schools to have books about a full range of family forms available for children to look at, read and discuss, and to teach children about conception through a range of different methods, including donor insemination and IVF. It will require secondary schools, and the older classes in primary school, to acquire and use materials about sex and relationships that reflect the full diversity of our society, and to ensure that young people are fully informed about identities and sexual orientations beyond a taken-for-granted heteronormativity. Such changes may seem radical, but they have been taking place in some schools for some time (Barnes & Carlile, 2018) to varying degrees. Some parents in our study (Carlile & Paechter, 2018) pointed out, for example, that simply having LGBTQI+ inclusive posters in entrance halls and corridors made them feel more welcome and less invisible. Although such informal strategies are an important aspect of the hidden curriculum, developing the overt curriculum must go way beyond this if it is to be fully inclusive. The No Outsiders Project, research which focused on introducing a more ­LGBTQI+ aware curriculum into English primary schools (Cullen & Sandy, 2009; DePalma & Atkinson, 2009), did considerable work in this area, including compiling a list of inclusive story books, and various campaigning groups have produced a wide range of resources for schools to call upon. What now needs to happen is for all schools to take inclusivity seriously, to understand that including LGBTQI+ people is not just about preventing bullying and to work to reflect the entire school community across all appropriate areas of the curriculum, including sex and relationships education and education about identities. We need, in many ways, a new National Curriculum for inclusivity.

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Paired dialogue: why some bodies matter more than other bodies – a post-humanist/new material feminist perspective Nikki Fairchild I read this chapter from my own post-human and new material feminist positioning which ontologically presumes that humans are relationally entangled in material and social worlds. These theorizations differ from discourse and social constructionism in aiming to fracture binary dualisms such as mind/matter, nature/culture and self/other and, in doing so, suggest new ethical and political possibilities. I find this chapter particularly interesting as it resonates with my own discipline of early childhood where young children are marginalized as developmentally needy and practitioners’ work is ‘othered’ as part of maternal caring discourses. Even though there is an age phase difference, there are similar themes present in this chapter and mine (Chapter 10). For example, both chapters focus on the work done by the overt and hidden curricula, by heteronormative positioning of identity and gender, and on policymakers’ attempts to either overcome these gendered positions or fix dominant normative forms of identity. Carrie’s chapter provides clear insights into how patriarchal assumptions serve to maintain the status quo of male and female bodies in ways which lead to ‘othering’ of non-confirming bodies (Grosz, 1994; Braidotti, 2011). The homogenization of the student population which Carrie explored in both policy and education practice produces the separation of LGBTQI+ students which positions students and their families as the ‘other’. When I read this chapter I am drawn to Snaza who proposed that the ‘aim, for humanists, is to produce responsible, rational citizens’ (Snaza, 2015: 19) and this dominant (humanist) view of education produces an ‘educational regimen of “humanization”’ (Ibid: 20). The ontological positioning of education as a humanizing process, although appearing an inclusive practice, reproduces ‘systems of thought that regard the oppressed as less than human, as beings who are not afforded that “­inalienable” rights of humans’ (Ibid: 25). This statement aptly describes the othering process Carrie discusses in her chapter which encourages us to question why some bodies matter more than other bodies. From my own post-human perspective the question of the body is more diffused: bodies are not just human (gendered) bodies but include bodies from a number of realms such as material, policy and social practice. Posthumanism and new material feminisms also aim to move beyond binarized modes of thinking where minds and bodies are separate and where gender is defined by biology, towards where the discrete and autonomous body is challenged (Grosz, 1994). Carrie’s account of more overt inclusive practices for LGBTQI+ students and families reminds

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me of the ethical possibilities of an assemblage of bodies where identity is distributed across a range of assemblage components. Although this view is different to Carrie’s consideration of how discourses produce ‘othered’ bodies, the LGBTQI+ assemblage might be conceptualized in post-human thinking as a constantly changing entity based on ­moment-to-moment expressions of curriculum, policy, teachers, students, parents and schools. This helps me think of LGBTQI+ identities as a more fluid, affirmative and situated form of embodiment and, in thinking of this, I am drawn to Braidotti’s (2011) Nomadic Subjects and Grosz’s (1994) Volatile Bodies as both of these reveal how different (post-human) notions of embodiment can be explored and valued.

Note 1 I am treating intersex as a gender identity. This reflects the fact that some people who are biologically intersex identify as male or female, while others identify as intersex. This distinction is important because those who identify as male or female prefer to be treated as such in all but very specific medical contexts, and those for whom intersex is also a gender identity prefer to have this recognized.

References Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Askew, M., & Wiliam, D. (1995). Recent Research in Mathematics Education 5–16. ­London: HMSO. Attar, D. (1990). Wasting Girls’ Time: The History and Politics of Home Economics. ­London: Virago Press. Barnes, E., & Carlile, A. (2018). How to Transform Your School into an LGBT+ Friendly Place: A Practical Guide for Nursery, Primary and Secondary Teachers. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Bradlow, J., Bartram, F., Guasp, A., & Jadva, V. (2017). School Report: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans Young People in Britain’s Schools in 2017. London: Stonewall and University of Cambridge. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braun, A., Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Hoskins, K. (2011). Taking context seriously: towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school. Discourse, 32(4), 585–596. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Carlile, A., & Paechter, C. (2018). LGBTQI+ Parented Families and Schools: Visibility, Representation and Pride. New York: Routledge.

170  Carrie Paechter Cullen, F., & Sandy, L. (2009). Lesbian Cinderella and other stories: telling tales and researching sexualities equalities in primary school. Sex Education, 9(2), 141–154. DePalma, R., & Atkinson, E. (Eds.). (2009). Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Dyhouse, C. (1977). Good wives and little mothers: social anxieties and the schoolgirl’s curriculum 1890–1920. Oxford Review of Education, 3(1), 21–35. Equality and Human Rights Commission. (2014, December 18). Public Sector Equality Duties. Retrieved from http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/ public-sector-equality-duties Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993, March/April). The five sexes: why male and female are not enough. The Sciences, 33(2), 20–24. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fletcher, S. (1984). Women First. London: The Athlone Press. Francis, B., & Paechter, C. (2015). The problem of gender categorisation: addressing dilemmas past and present in gender and education research. Gender and Education, 27(7), 776–790. Grafton, T., Miller, H., Smith, L., Vegoda, M., & Whitfield, R. (1983). Gender and curriculum choice: a case study. In M. Hammersley & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), Curriculum Practice: Some sociological case studies (pp. 151–169). Lewes: Falmer Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Her Majesty’s Government. (1988). Local Governmnet Act 1988. London: Her ­Majesty’s Stationary Office. Joint Council for Qualifications. (2017). GCE Results Summer 2017. London: Joint Council for Qualifications. Jones, T. M., & Hillier, L. (2012). Sexuality educaton school policy for Australian LGBTIQ students. Sex Education, 12(4), 237–254. Maguire, M., Hoskins, K., Ball, S., & Braun, A. (2011). Policy discourses in school texts. Discourse, 32(4), 597–609. Martino, W., & Cumming-Potvin, W. (2011). They didn’t have out there gay parents they just looked like normal regular parents: investigating teachers’ approaches to addressing same-sex parenting and non-normative sexuality. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(4), 480–501. Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Schools. (2014). Inspecting Equalities: Briefing for Section 5 Inspection. Manchester: Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Schools. Paechter, C. (1998). Educating the Other: Gender, Power and Schooling. London: Falmer Press. Snaza, N. (2015). Towards a genealogy of educational humanism. In N. Snaza and J. A. Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 17–29. Summerfield, P. (1987). Cultural reproduction in the education of girls: a study of girls’ secondary schooling in two Lancashire towns 1900–50. In F. Hunt (Ed.), Lessons for Life (pp. 149–170). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. The Church of England Education Office. (2017). Valuing All God’s Children: Guidance for Church of England Schools on Challenging Homophobic, Biphobic and Transphobic Bullying. 2nd ed. London: The Church of England Education Office.

Beyond binary discourses  171 The Tavistock and Portman NHG Foundation Trust. (2016). Gender Identity Development Service statistics. Retrieved from https://tavistockandportman.nhs. uk/about-us/news/stories/what-does-a-doubling-in-referrals-to-our-gender-­ identity-development-service-mean-about-how-societys-view-of-gender-isshifting/ last accessed 17th February 2019. Turnbull, A. (1987). Learning Her Womanly Work: The Elementary School Curriculum 1870–1914. In F. Hunt (Ed.), Lessons for Life (pp. 83–100). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Weeks, J. (2007). The World We Have Won. London: Routledge. Wittig, M. (1980/1992). The straight mind. In M. Wittig (Ed.), The Straight Mind and Other Essays (pp. 21–32). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Wittig, M. (1989/1992). On the social contract. In M. Wittig (Ed.), The Straight Mind and Other Essays (pp. 33–45). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Women’s Engineering Society. (2016). Statistics on Women and Engineering. Retrieved from http://www.wes.org.uk/sites/default/files/Women%20in%20 ­Engineering%20Statistics%20March2016.pdf

13 In conversation Debating gender and feminism in learning, teaching and didactics Carol A. Taylor and Florence Ligozat

Dialogue Carol:  This

final chapter is a dialogue, a conversation to wrap up the main arguments and lines of inquiry in the book and, also, to look forward. Florence:  This book is really going to make a strong impact in the community for both Didactics research and feminist pedagogy. It deals with scientific and also political questions so I think that our conversation needs to be anchored in both particular examples and scientific references. Carol:  That is fine. We’ll get this transcribed and then we’ll send it to you and at that point if you want to add anything in you can do. I agree with you about the book. Andrea, Chantal and I have discovered as we’ve been pulling things together that this book does a lot of really good work but only begins to cover the ground – there are still gaps for us to think about and work to address. So, you have been Convener, and Deputy Link Convener before that of the Didactics Learning and Teaching Network for about seven or eight years, and you’ve got a huge knowledge of the field. I want to get your perspectives on the kind of historical landscape of Didactics learning and teaching in relation to gender, but also ask you about what you think are some of the contemporary issues in the field. I realise that is a huge question! Florence:  Yes, this is a big question. The first thing is that in relation to the historical and intellectual landscape of Didactics, through the past and current work done in the network, we have started to accumulate some kind of knowledge of the different traditions for research in Didactics in Europe. But this knowledge is very young and also not very widely or deeply shared yet, largely due to linguistic differences in the different countries but also due to difficulties about identifying and communicating what is at the core of each tradition in the different countries. It is always a challenge to understand what other scholars who work within another tradition need to know about our own Didactic tradition to enable them to make sense of it. So, I would say at the moment, there is still a lot of knowledge that should be built about the traditions, particularly to build an internal perspective of each tradition that goes behind

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the macro description of the traditions. The second thing is that gender issues in educational research, as I see it, are very related to the political situations in the different countries, and so the relations between the Didactic traditions and the way that gender is addressed in the different countries are not straightforward. You may have a more or less shared Didactic tradition – as it is the case in French-speaking countries for instance – but each country will have different views on how gender should be addressed in society, since each country has its own political orientations. That makes the relationship between the Didactic traditions and the way that gender is addressed very different and so it’s difficult to make generalisations. Carol:  And do you think that work of the specificity then of thinking about gender within the different traditions, within Didactics, has begun to be addressed? I ask this because it has become clear to us in doing this book that gender is being addressed but in different ways, in different places, in different political context and it is all very uneven – it seems as though there are historical shifts where a lot of work seems to be happening but then those gains seem to be lost. But, again, it is difficult to generalise. Florence:  Maybe the question is, why gender becomes, or has the power to become, an important issue now and why it wasn’t an important issue until very recently for Didactics? The Didactic tradition concerning what should be learnt and how it should be taught can be traced back to the ‘Great Didactics’ founded in the humanist philosophy of Jan Amos Comenius in the 17th century and his idea of good teaching to all. As Schneuwly (2011) points out, Comenius included boys and girls in ‘teaching to all’ which was really advanced for his time, and considered that teaching to all was about everything that can be created by human minds, discourses and hands. That, of course, is a very broad view of knowledge – it includes know-what, know-how and the values that go along with knowledge content. Since then, the actual landscape of Didactics has been shaped by two major social evolutions. First, in the late 19th century there is the generalisation of public and compulsory instruction and this promoted a structuration of knowledge into school subjects in ways which parallel the structuration of academic disciplines, with the purpose of improving teaching through planning knowledge contents into different categories and levels that can be assessed. We can say that the modern way of thinking about Didactics starts when teachers and curriculum makers have engaged themselves in the practice of building methods and textbooks for teaching the subjects. Didactics, then, is really something that characterises the activity of practitioners with regard to how to organise knowledge contents within subjects, how to fit contents into appropriate levels that take into account the cognitive development of the learners and how to find the best pedagogical designs for enabling students to learn them. This is one facet of Didactics.

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The second facet appears in the 1960s–1970s with the spread of secondary education for most young people in Europe. This social move required deep reforms of the curriculum in each country. The public had strong expectations about these reforms, which unfortunately had mixed outcomes. The new curriculum was not successful in enabling all the students to succeed in their secondary education and, in certain extreme cases – such as the ‘modern maths’ curriculum in France – it turned out to be worse than the previous one. This is where the relationships between the academic disciplines and the school curriculum began to be debated according to different traditions, such as the ‘didactic transposition’ in French Didactique, categorical Bildung and key problems in the German Allgemeine Didaktik or in terms of content selection and associated values in the Swedish Didaktik, for instance. The mixed outcomes of the reforms also drew attention to the social inequalities produced by certain classroom practices. Who learns (or not) and what during classroom interactions and discourses became a research concern addressed by the different Didactics traditions, and brought together analyses drawn from sociological, ethnographic and linguistic/ communicative approaches to classroom practices. This second facet of Didactics offers a critical reflection on the teaching and learning experience offered to the student through the curriculum. And of course, when you think about Didactics in this way, it means that you need to refer to some kind of theories, both philosophical and social theories, to explain actions and communication in the classroom, how power relations take place between the teacher and the students with regard to the curriculum content, and how power relations also take place between the students. The two facets of Didactics are still perceptible in the network today. It is very obvious in the German tradition because there are two distinctive names for it. Whereas Fachdidaktik reflects different models for organising knowledge contents into subjects, the Allgemeine Didaktik is concerned with the critical reflection on how the relations between the teacher, the student and the content support Bildung. Things are less divided in the French tradition since the French Didactiques des disciplines (subject didactics) strongly relate the specificity of the content to the conditions for teaching and learning that content. The Scandinavian approach is influenced by both the German approach and the Anglo-Saxon approach to the curriculum. Unfortunately, in the network, we do not know much yet about other traditions in Eastern and Southern European countries. Carol:  That is really helpful, but can we pursue that question a little bit about your view on the relationship between the European Didactic traditions and the Anglophone traditions, more specifically in terms of how gender plays into those questions. Florence:  Didactics encapsulates humanist and cultural views of the role of knowledge in terms of both cognitive development and social progress.

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This is a heritage of the Enlightenment where being knowledgeable is the condition for being a full citizen, a person who is empowered to make informed and self-determinate decisions within public deliberations. For Condorcet, a French mathematician and philosopher in charge of organising the public instruction after the French revolution, instruction (the teaching of ‘truths’) should not interfere with private education provided by the family, which includes religious values in particular. The secular conception of public instruction (which is still strongly present in many countries through national education systems) relies upon a separation between facts and values in the curriculum. Of course, today the influence of pragmatist and postmodern philosophies in educational research tends to reduce the facts and values dichotomy. But the questions remain: should we teach values for themselves, or should we just accept that when we teach facts, there are values coming along? Should we make these values explicit and open a deliberation in the classroom? Or should we concentrate on the facts and concepts that can be easily assessed through standardised tests? From my experience in comparing classroom practices in different subjects and in different countries, I can say for example that in science classrooms in France, teachers remain focused on the separation of facts and values whereas in Sweden the focus on the values that go along with the scientific facts is much stronger. It seems to me, then, that the Scandinavian and Anglophone approaches to teaching and learning focus less on views of being a critical citizen, and more on education as training to be socially competent actors in society. It seems to be more directly influenced by the pragmatist philosophy in which teaching values is part of the curriculum as much as the teaching of facts and concepts, and less by the idea that the citizen needs a core knowledge content as a step to make decisions. Carol:  It is really interesting to hear you talk about the Anglophone tradition in that way. I think that there are some resonances. So, for example, we have had a lot of discussion over the past 40 years about key skills and about what the core curriculum should entail or what the core competencies are. The subjects of mathematics, English and science have become the core of the national curriculum. The Anglophone tradition has been concerned with the teaching of facts but perhaps in a different sort of way and for different sorts of reasons, for example in terms of the verification of knowledge which came with the scientific tradition and the scientific method and is part of the Enlightenment heritage we share with you. The sociological traditions, particularly discussions about the sociology of knowledge, debates about the social construction of knowledge by powerful elites, about the hidden curriculum, were very influential in shaping understandings and analyses of pedagogy and curriculum within the Anglophone tradition. Florence:  This raises interesting questions about subject knowledge and contents. The Didactic traditions take the content as a starting point,

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how it is organised within the subjects, how it is communicated in the classroom, and how it supports the cognitive development of the children, but also their social agency. But at some point, knowledge is always a power to act and this is where gender gets plugged into the debate. Chantal’s chapter points out that Didactics research has been blind to gender issues until recently and it is the same for ethnic and racial issues in terms of access to culture and to knowledge. Gender inequalities addressed by the French Didactique tradition is a new thing. It reflects wider debates in society, such as the glass ceiling in women’s scientific careers, the #MeToo movement to fight against sexual harassment and so on. While I cannot see any direct relationship between these kinds of movement and what is being done in the classrooms in terms of addressing gender, nevertheless, the growing concern about masculine domination in various social spheres goes along with a growing attention paid to gender issues in classroom practices. It does not seem possible that within schools we remain blind to these kinds of topics. In France, the introduction of gender equality is made through specific teaching resources (ABC de l’égalité). In the Western Swiss curriculum there is no specific material, but it is part of the general formation of the students, in terms of understanding alterity and reflecting on differences. The teachers get specific training in this. But these are very particular examples, and I have no idea of what is happening in Germany, in Spain or in Greece! Carol:  We touched on macro and micro relations earlier – is there anything else you wanted to say about that? Florence:  It is not really surprising that the French Didactique focuses on the micro level because this research tradition is really interested in how knowledge is being built in the classroom. Of course, the micro can connect with more macro-educational perspectives, through a bottom-up movement. Typically, it takes a lot of space in a standard scientific article to talk about the micro, because empirical examples are needed, in terms of verbatim reports of speech, task descriptions, students’ writings and so on. You need to explain in detail why this kind of action by the teacher and this kind of response by the students is gendered. Then you need to compare different examples to go beyond facts and show a more general pattern. If you start at the macro level, then you need to find a methodological way to articulate the empirical data at the micro level. You cannot presume some kind of top-down causal relations between the two levels; you need to add different layers of description going from the bottom to the upper layers or from top to bottom. It is very demanding, and most often, it does not fit into a single article or chapter. Carol:  I’d like to shift the focus to language. One of the important things that we found with doing the book is the large role played by national languages in defining what is important for that particular community. Do French didacticians have their own literatures that they call on in

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their own language? Do German didacticians? Do Anglophone researchers? And how then does that make it difficult to kind of speak across those traditions? Florence:  Language has a dramatic role in spreading, but also preventing the spreading of ideas in Didactics. As I said, the historical roots are different, but also the national contexts play an important role in diffracting ideas. The work by the teachers and the curriculum makers is oriented by the educational politics in each country. Hence the departure point of the scientific inquiry on teaching and learning is somewhat different and the concepts used or built tend to encapsulate certain implicit values about teaching, learning, knowledge and so on, which are historically sedimented within each educational context. When the countries share the same language then it is easier to start a dialogue between the specificities of the educational contexts and the outcomes of the didactic research. This is why the Didactic traditions tend to be developed in a confined manner within the main languages in Europe – the Scandinavians as they can understand each other, the Germans and French, and I would say the Spanish and the Italian who tend to rely a little bit on the French because there is the same Latin roots in the vocabulary. But, still, it is very difficult to make research understandable across national educational contexts. When the only possible shared language is English, then the native ideas in each language, which are born within specific educational contexts, have to be translated and, in some cases, they get transformed in the translation. There are also some serious dilemmas about publications. Major references for each Didactic tradition are written in the native language of these traditions. When we refer to them, they are not available to a wide international audience. I also teach in French and I use my research for training the teachers in my country, in Geneva. If I publish my research in English, then I get cut off from my relationship with the practitioners in my own country. A tricky situation! Carol:  Moving on from that, within your own tradition and within your own teaching and research; which writers and theorists have been important to you? And why? Florence:  Within the French tradition, there are two major scholars. The first one is Guy Brousseau who worked on mathematics in primary school from the 1970s to the 1990s in Bordeaux. He developed specific designs in which mathematical content could be constructed – that is a constructivist approach derived from Piaget, but his interests were really to understand what kind of situations could be set up in the classroom in which the mathematical content could be reconstructed with the significant participation of the student. Brousseau suggested certain concepts, such as the didactic contract and the milieu, to capture what is going on between the teacher, the student, and the content. These concepts have spread to the other subject didactics (Brousseau, 1997). The second major scholar is Yves Chevallard, who developed an anthropological theory of

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the ‘didactic institutions’ that relates the threefold relationship between the teacher, the student and the content in the curriculum (Chevallard, 2007). Yves Chevallard originated the concept of transposition to understand the relationships between knowledge in use outside of school, in society – it could be in the scientific lab, it could be in a consumer association, it could be, well, in professional or engineering practices – and the knowledge that is encountered in schools, and that is constructed to fit certain educational goals and also certain structural constraints (assessment, for example). Transposition is not a simplification; it is a reconstruction. In this reconstruction, certain dimensions of the knowledge in society are lost, and certain dimensions become more pronounced. Both Yves Chevallard and Guy Brousseau are very prominent in the French Didactique tradition. Carol:  That is really interesting, and as far as I’m aware, neither of those theorists have had much of a public outing in the Anglophone world, which is a pity as I can see really interesting connections. We will have to wait for them to be translated. I will move onto the issue of what some of my US colleagues would call ‘scholar activism’ and I would call feminist praxis – this is about considering the classroom as a place where the feminist teacher may be able to effect change. This has been quite a powerful thing in the Anglophone world in terms of promoting gender equality, but I don’t get the sense it’s been a powerful driver in Didactics and I would like to have your views on that. Is there a place or what would be the place for feminist activism from teachers within the Didactics tradition? Florence:  If I pushed the reflection towards what’s happening in the schools nowadays in France and Western Switzerland, I think that the teachers have the freedom, in the classroom, to discuss different kinds of events related to gender, whether they come from relations between the students themselves, or from social issues that are debated in the media. There is space to do it. Then, developing the kind of scholar activism that you mention relies upon two things. One thing is of course the training of the teachers to make them aware of gender stereotypes in textbooks, children’s albums, etc., but also their own actions that might be loaded with stereotypes too. Teacher training has a major role to play in helping teachers change their own way of doing things but also in regulating the gendered relations among the students, for example the way they share the space in the schoolyard, the way they get organised in groupwork and so on. The second thing is about introducing reflections on gender norms and stereotypes as content in the curriculum. An example of this is what Chantal writes about Louise: Louise has a developed a specific agency towards stereotypes and she is able to distance herself from what the teacher asks by circling in blue and pink. Introducing reflections on gender stereotypes into the curriculum is a way to empower the students in challenging stereotypes both in school and in society.

In conversation  179 Carol:  And

I think, what you have just said is resonates with what feminist teachers in the USA, the UK and Australia are also doing, so even though we’re using a different language, some of the political aims are the same and this raises a question for all of us to think about how learning and pedagogy relate to effecting social change in our different contexts. Florence:  In fact, it brings us back to the Enlightenment roots of Didactics that is about becoming knowledgeable in certain domains (here it is about gender stereotypes) as a condition for exercising self-determination in one’s own life choices. Carol:  I’m going to move on to the final question here which is about looking to the future. What are the new directions that you see in your field for gender and feminism in learning and teaching? What do you see happening? For example, one of the things that is increasingly happening in the UK is that gender itself is becoming a more complicated category to talk about, to think about, and it’s influencing school policy, in terms of non-binary, of trans inclusion, for example. These are very sensitive subjects which problematise the teaching and learning around gender even more. I wondered what your thoughts were. Florence:  I perfectly understand this kind of evolution, in particular this fluid understanding of identity. It is very powerful to understand that we are not necessarily confined to one role. We can play different roles in different situations. What I fear, based on the experience that they had in France with the introduction of teaching materials about gender and diverse identity roles, is that this fluid understanding of identity is not easy to understand for the public yet. This concept can get confused with ‘favouring homosexuality’ or ‘favouring transgender changes’, which is something conservative activists dishonestly claim to be the case. Teacher training can be far advanced compared to the state of the mind of the people in the street, and this could cause problems between teachers and the families who perceive these issues differently. It is tricky. In my view, teaching about gender stereotypes in schools is definitely a form of social progress. But it goes along with a reflection about the relations between the public and the private, and how public education can and, perhaps, should address gender as a social issue whereas it tends to be regarded only as a private system of values by the families. In some ways, this brings us back to Condorcet, for whom teaching religious values was out of the scope of public education. The dichotomy between facts and values brings up the need to develop an ethical reflection about the private and the public dimensions of the contents taught in the schools. Carol:  It is really interesting for me that you should quote Condorcet, because I’ve been reading Isabelle Stengers (2018) recently and she offers a damning critique of science for doing the very thing that Condorcet says that science should do, which is separating facts and values. Isabelle Stengers says that there are no facts because the facts themselves are

180  Carol A. Taylor and Florence Ligozat

constructed as facts by the values of society. Which is probably a good place to leave it! I want to say thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation Florence, it’s been a delight talking to you about the history, purpose and scope of Didactics in relation to challenging points about gender and feminism. Thank you.

References Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics. Didactique Des Mathématiques, 1970–1990. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chevallard, Y. (2007). Readjusting didactics to a changing epistemology. European Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 131–134. Schneuwly, B. (2011). Subject didactics: an academic field related to the teacher profession and teacher education. In B. Hudson & M. A. Meyer (Éds.), Beyond Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe (pp. 275–286). Opladen & Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Stengers, I. (2018). Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbas, A. 7, 8, 172 academic disciplines 74; and gender inequalities 68 Achiam, M. 83 Adam, M. 89 Adorno, Th. W. 56 Ahmed, S. 7, 42, 45, 47, 162 Allgemeine Didaktik 174 Amade-Escot, C. 5–7, 36, 172, 174, 176, 178 American feminist 3 American social psychology 28 Amsler, S. 154 Anglophone: feminist pedagogy 1, 4; feminist research 5; feminist tradition 3; tradition 2, 4, 5, 36, 153, 174, 175 Anglo-Saxon tradition 144 Anti-bullying 165 Anti-Discrimination/Equal Opportunity Acts 103 applied sciences 7, 83, 86–91, 93–6; in images 88–93; for rural boys schools 91, 93; for rural girls schools 91, 93; for urban boys schools 91, 93; for urban girls schools 90, 93 Archer, L. 3 Arendt, H. 56 arts and crafts 7, 83, 86, 95 assemblage 99, 102, 110, 128, 133, 134, 136, 137, 169 asymmetric relationship 57 Attar, D. 97 Australia/Australian 3, 4, 7, 99–103, 110–12, 179; education 7; secondary schools 99

Baillargeon, N. 121 Barad, K. 42, 47, 49 Bazzul, J. 48 becoming 18 behaviour policy 161 Behn, Aphra 4 Bérard, J. M. 118 Bergann, S. 116 Bernstein, B. 7, 68–80, 154; conceptual framework 69–74; changing curricula through questioning 75–9; classifications 70–1, 76; codes 69–71; evaluative rules 72; framing 70–1; horizontal knowledge structures 75; pedagogic device 72–4 Biesta, G. 15 Bildung 11–22, 65, 174; civic forms of 15, 17; classical development of 14; as concept 11, 14, 20–1, 65; education for girls and women 15–17; ethicalpolitical promise of 12; European educational thinking 12–13; for feminist aims 6; feminist analysis of 11–12; feminist critique 17–18; functions of school and family 21; as gendered performative 18–20; German Didaktik tradition of 5; ‘natural’ gender characteristics 15; power and knowledge 17 Blaise, M. 130 Bourdieu, P. 19, 29 Braidotti, R. 12, 128, 133, 136–7, 168–9 Brayet, A. 89 Broda, M. 41, 48 Brousseau, G. 177–8 Brownhill, S. 129, 130

182 Index building respectful relationships 99–105, 107–10 Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence (Ollis, D.) 99–101, 104, 105, 108–10 bullying 161, 165, 167 Butler, J. 11, 18–20, 28, 29, 45, 61, 63, 134, 160 Caillot, M. 2, 25 Canella, G. S. 130 career 43, 73–5, 77, 80, 102, 114, 119, 129, 135, 136, 176 Carlile, A. 157, 161, 166 Carlson, D. 133 Chevallard,Y. 50, 111, 177–8 Choppin, A. 86, 89 citizen 13, 20, 48, 99, 100, 108, 168, 175 civil rights movement 4 Clark, L. 85 classifications 36, 70–1, 74, 76, 77, 79, 89; implicit and explicit 70 class inequality 20 classroom (classroom resources) 3, 5–7, 25–31, 34–6, 39–41, 43, 45, 47–51, 65, 66, 99–102, 107, 109–11, 116, 128, 130, 131, 133–8, 142–4, 146, 148, 152, 154, 165–7, 174–8 classroom practices: gendered debates in 130–1; gender issues in 176; studying gender order in 26–9 codes 68–72, 74–6, 79 Collet, I. 7, 8, 117 Collins, C. 103 Comenius, J. A. 3, 173 concept as method 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21 Condorcet, N. de 175, 179 Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (Schleiermacher, F.) 16 Connell, R. 2, 69, 71, 115, 121 contemporary schooling 56–7 Cooper, E. 4 corporeality 62–4 critical reflection 63, 174 critical scholarship 78 cultural heritage 24 culture 5, 12, 14, 16, 19, 48, 58, 61, 63, 73, 77, 80, 83, 86; Humanist 121 curriculum/curricula 7, 8, 20, 25–7, 48, 50, 51, 68, 70, 72, 74–80, 94, 99, 118, 127, 132, 136, 142, 143, 157, 174, 178; entitlement 158; in France 174; gender and 157–162; hidden 60, 86,

95, 157–9, 165, 167, 175; history of 3, 84; informal 109; integration with mandated 103–5; National 84, 96, 103, 158–60, 166; and (feminist) pedagogies 100–2; prescribed 95; of primary education 122; Western Swiss 176 daily life 61, 90, 93 day-to-day classroom life 28 debars, C. 8, 154 decolonising 4, 6, 72, 78, 79 Decroux-Masson, A. 85 Deleuze, G. 11, 128, 133, 137 Didactics/didactique 2, 3, 29, 30, 35, 99–101, 137, 172–80; comparative didactics 33, 101; curriculum 100–2; learning and teaching network 172; malestream 5; transposition 3, 83, 111 didactic contract 24, 28, 30–2, 34, 36, 37, 150, 151, 177; differential didactic contract (DDC) 6, 8, 30, 32, 35, 143–5; implicit and gendered differential 32; teacher vs. student 30 didactic transposition (didactic transposition of knowledge) 3, 7, 50–1, 83, 95, 110–12, 174 diffractions: methods of 41–2, 177 digital media 6 disability 68, 69, 71, 76–9 discourse analysis 5, 28 discrimination 85 dissection 7, 39–51 distributive rules 72, 77 do Mar Pereira, M. 78 domestication of women 85 Doulin, J. -R. 89 dualistic philosophy 17 Dubois, L. 118, 119 Durkheim, E. 21, 22, 70 Duru-Bellat, M. 117 early childhood 8, 36, 122, 127, 131, 137, 168; children’s education 130; development of 129–30; education and care (ECEC) 127; feminist pedagogy 132; gendered childhoods and posthumanism 131; gendered debates in classrooms 130–1; play vs. formalised pedagogy 131–2; post-human feminist pedagogy 132–6; and post-structural debates 130–1; professional roles for 128–30; sex-role socialisation 130–1; women’s work 128–9

Index  183 education: equality 18; policy 84; Education Reform Act of 1988, 158; egalitarian 22 Eichmann, A. 56 emotions in science 44, 49, 121 engineering 3, 70, 71, 74, 76, 79, 114, 115, 159, 178 Enlightenment 7, 11, 17, 19, 21, 22, 175, 179; legacy 65; modernity 64; movement 55; philosophy of research 5; principles and contemporary schooling 56–7 epistemic gender positioning 6, 24–37, 80, 144–6, 151, 152; to account for individual agency 28; analysing 31–4; fluidity 6; multiplicity and relationality 6 Epstein, D. 3 equality 4, 7, 12, 17, 18, 20, 22, 55, 65, 66, 68, 79, 80, 95, 96, 111, 154, 161, 162, 164, 165, 176, 178; Act 2010, 162, 165; policy 161, 162; formal educational 96 ethics 20, 40, 55, 110, 145; political 12, 20, 65; political citizenship 65 ethnicity 68–70, 79, 142, 145, 146, 149, 154; ethnic mix 70 European Conference for Education Researchers, xv European Didactics 2, 5–7, 64; European Didactic tradition (French tradition, German tradition, Nordic\ Scandinavian tradition) 1–3, 137, 142, 174, 177 European educational thinking 12–13 European modernity: pedagogy and 54–5 European schooling 55 evaluative rules 72 extended schooling degree 86 Fairchild, N. 4, 8, 137, 138 family 21, 47, 51, 85, 86, 92, 111, 116, 145, 149, 160, 161, 163–5, 167, 175; Life Education Policy 163 Farr, A. 56 femininity 15–17, 86, 95, 105, 146 feminism 6; critique 17–18; educators 99; engagement with Bildung and gender 11; gender, knowledge and identity 17; material 60, 62, 65, 131, 137, 168–9; methodology 21; pedagogy 4, 7, 66, 128, 132–7, 172; politics 12; prioritize women’s experiences 12; scholarship 2; science education orientations 3, 24,

40–1, 48, 49; scrutiny 14; social justice and equality 55; theory 5, 6; thinking method 40; waves 6, 25 feminist pedagogy: Anglophone 4; didactics 100–2; early childhood education and care (ECEC) 132; posthuman 8, 128, 132–6 feminist perspectives: on learning and teaching 3–5; science education from 49; university and schools’ curricula 4 feminist research: European Didactics vs. Anglophone traditions 5; teaching and learning 6; theoretical traditions in gender and 5–6 de Fenelon, F. 115 formal educational equality 96 Foucault, M. 3, 65, 70 framing 42, 56, 58, 70–1, 79, 99 France/French 21, 24, 25, 50, 51, 83–6, 95–7, 111, 114, 115, 117–19, 121, 145, 149, 174–6, 178, 179 Francis, B. 3, 29, 83 Frankfurt School 64 free will 55 French didactique research: analysing epistemic gender positioning 31–4; curriculum reforms 25; epistemic gender positioning in 24; gender focus in 24–6; gender order in classroom 26–9; implications for teaching and learning 34–5; JAD framework in classroom 29–31; tradition 24–6, 30, 34, 35, 100, 110, 143, 176, 178 French educational system 26; moyenne section, French Preschool 26 French schools 50, 84 French-speaking tradition: of Didactique 2–3 Fricker, M. 71 Gannon, S. 2, 6, 7, 110, 111 gender, doing/undoing gender 35; and education network 69, 74; equality 22; equity 100–2; gap 80, 114; gender binary (non-binary) 27, 31, 160; norms 24, 31, 32, 40; schooling 116–17; socialization 123; studies 4, 80, 83 Gender and Violence Project 102 gender-based violence 6, 99–104, 107–11; in Australia 4, 7; commitments to social action 107–9; conceptualisations of risk 106–7; didactic principles for learning 99; impact on ‘knowing and

184 Index being,’ 100; integration with mandated curriculum 103–5; and sexual harassment 102; social construct 105–6; use of gendered statistics 102–3 gender differences: and inequalities 24; in knowledge construction 35 On Gender Differences and Their Impact on Organic Nature 15 gendered childhoods: and posthumanism 131 gendered content 27, 35, 86, 144, 148 gendered curriculum forms 157–8 gendered performatives/ performativity 11, 18–20, 28, 31, 32, 61, 131 gendered power relations 5 gendered subjectivities 19, 131–5 gender education 4; benefits 35; in England and Wales 158–9; gender and schooling 159–60; and implications 166–7; schooling and heterosexuality 161–6 Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997) 102 gender identity 18, 19; masculinity and femininity 95; by school and textbooks 84–6 gender inequality 5, 12; and academic disciplines 68; French Didactique tradition 176; in higher education 12; for individuals 6; race and class inequality 20 gender issues 89; in classroom practices 176 gender order: in classroom practices through JAD framework 26–9; French didactique research 26–9 gender performances 45–7 gender performativity 18, 19; multiple modes of 31; relative complex and unstable continuum of 32 gender positioning 24, 28, 30–4, 143, 144, 146, 150, 152; pre-eminent masculine 32; and students’ practical epistemologies 33–4 Gender Trouble (Butler) 61 Genre & Didactique 25, 26 German Didaktik tradition 5 Germany/German 2, 5, 7, 8, 16, 21, 22, 55–7, 65, 118, 119, 137, 174, 176, 177 girls 3, 11, 13, 19, 24–8, 33, 35, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 55, 83–96, 92, 102, 103, 106, 114–17, 119–21, 123, 134–6, 142–53, 158–60, 166, 167, 173; education 15–17, 85 Goodman, J. 83 Goozé, M. 15

Grafton, T. 159 Guattari, F. 11, 128, 133, 137 Guigni, N. 131 Haraway. D. 61, 63 Harding, S. 5, 78 Harré, R. 28, 144 Health and Physical Education (HPE) 103, 104 hegemonic masculinity 115, 121, 129, 138, 147, 152 Héritier, F. 31–2 heteronormativity 131, 160, 161, 167 heterosexuality: and schooling 161–6 heterosexual matrix 22 hierarchical knowledge structures 75, 77 higher education: gender inequality in 12; learning and self-cultivation in 20 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adam, M.) 36 home economics 7, 83–5, 90, 90, 97, 159 homophobia 106 homosexuality 179 hooks, b. 78 horizontal knowledge structures 75 Horkheimer, M. 56 Hudson, B. 2 Huguet, P. 116 humanism, humanist culture 121 humanity 13, 14 Humboldt, W. 13–15, 17, 21, 22 Husserl, E. 42 images 48, 61, 84–6, 88–95, 90, 92, 94, 105, 167 implicit knowing 60 in-depth analysis 26 informal curriculum 109 instructional discourse 73 intellectual traditions 1, 2, 16, 55 International Women’s Day 85 intersectionality (intersecting gender inequalities) 6, 20, 142, 145, 154 Jagger, G. 63 James, C. 4 Jarlégan, A. 117 joint action in didactics (JAD) 5, 24, 29–31, 35, 109, 111, 143–6, 149; gender order in classroom 26–9 Kant, I. 17, 55 knowledge: content 27, 29, 142, 144, 146, 148, 173–5; emancipatory 153;

Index  185 hegemonic orders of 54; and power 5, 34, 64–6, 137; Horizontal knowledge structures 75; powerful 73, 77; selection 116; structures 68, 69, 74–5, 77; Tacit 57–60; transpositions 101 Krais, B. 21 Krauss, A. 7 Laclau, E. 54 Lafosse-Marin, M. O. 118 Langenhove, L. van 28, 144 Langevin-Wallon Plan 88 language: English 2; national 176; national language and communication 174; and research 2, 28, 145, 177 Larson, H. 33 Laslett, P. 92 Lather, P. 3, 154 leadership 45, 48 learning 3–6, 8, 16, 20, 25–7, 31, 32, 34–5, 59–60, 63, 75, 99–101, 103, 104, 106, 137, 143, 146–8 Lebeaume, J. 6, 7, 96, 97 Lévy-Leblond, J. M. 121 LGBTQI+, 6, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167–9; school policies 164; trans 4, 6, 8, 157, 161, 164, 166 Liberation 85, 87, 88 Lignon, F. 89 Lizogat, F. 7 Local Government Act 1988, 161 Lyotard, J. -F. 59 Lyttleton-Smith, J. 131, 134 MacNaughton, G. 134 malestream and didactics 5 malestream theorising 6 male theorising 5 male work force 16 Marx, K. 70 masculinity 11, 15, 17, 18, 24, 32, 33, 35, 60, 83, 86, 95, 102, 105, 107, 146; hegemonic 115, 121, 129, 138, 147, 152 material feminism 6, 60, 62, 65, 131, 137, 168–9 materiality 41, 50, 59, 60, 62, 65; material objects 137 Mayeur, F. 83 Mazón, P. 16 Mazzei, L. A. 42, 47 McLeod, J. 100 Mellor, D. 131 Merleau-Ponty, M. 62

#MeToo movement 4, 176 Meyer, M. A. 2 middle-class women 135 Mikuska, E. 134 Minnich, E. K. 4, 78 modernist reductionism 29 Moi, T. 60 Mollo, S. 85 Mosconi, N. 26 Mouffe, C. 54 Multi-ethnic school 142, 147, 148, 152, 153 National Action Plan on the Education of Girls 102 National Action Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children 102 National Curriculum 84, 96, 158–60, 166 National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children 2010–2022, 103 nature/natural 5, 7, 11, 14–16, 18, 20, 40, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, 62, 77, 83, 86, 110, 115, 123, 127–9, 131, 133, 134, 164, 168 #NeverOk 4 Noble, D. 115 No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence (1995) 99, 101–5, 109–11 Nohl, H. 57 Nomadic Subjects (Braidotti, R.) 169 nomadic theory 128, 133, 137 No Outsiders Project 167 Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky, F.) 36 Oakley, J. 40–1 opportunity 42–4 orientations 41–2 Osgood, J. 131 Paechter, C. 4, 7, 8, 168, 169 parents 31, 123, 145, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163–7, 169 partial perspective 63 Pautal, E. 33 pedagogical anthropology 57–66; body and tacit turn 60–2; corporeality and lived body 62–4; materiality 60–2; postmodernism and tacit knowledge 57–60 pedagogy: device 72–4; gross 40; pedagogic device 7, 68, 69, 72–4, 78,

186 Index 79; Post-human feminist pedagogy 128; socially just pedagogies 11, 20; university curricula 78–9 Penfold, J. 97 personal experience: epistemological validity of 100 Pestalozzi, J. H. 16 Pfahl, L. 116 phenomenology 62 physical education (PE) 8, 24–6, 32, 142–4, 149, 151–3; data analysis 145–6; differential didactic contract 143–4; gender issues in 142; Health and Physical Education (HPE) 103, 104; JAD framework 143–5; learning environments and content delivery 146–8; materials and methods 145–6; multi-ethnic PE class 152–3; research setting, participants and data collection 145; scales of analysis 146–52; teacher’s verbal supervision 148; variations and resistance in 149–52 Piaget, Jean 177 policy 1, 3, 8, 75, 80, 84, 100–3, 108, 110, 129, 130, 132, 135–7, 154, 161–6, 168, 169, 179 positioning theory 28 posthuman 8, 65, posthumanism 128; gendered childhoods and 131 post-human feminist pedagogy 128; enacting 133–6; theorising 132–3 postmodernism: and tacit knowledge 57–60 post-structuralist relativism 29 power 2–5, 13–15, 17, 26, 28, 34, 37, 56, 57, 61–4, 69–71, 73, 74, 78, 80, 103–6, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116, 121, 122, 128, 130–4, 136, 137, 147, 152, 173, 174, 176 power/knowledge 65 power relations 5, 61, 63, 132, 136, 137, 147; academic knowledge 130; sociosexual construction of knowledge 116; teacher vs. students 174 practice/practical: practical epistemology 30–5; practical work 86, 87, 92, 101; practitioner 4, 70, 74, 127–31, 133–6, 168, 173, 177 praxis 20, 100, 109, 178 primary schooling 117 proto-feminism 16 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 40, 42

queer-feminist 47–9 queering 39–51 queer theory 5, 6 race inequality 20 racial/socioeconomic status 41 rationalization 55 reason 12–14, 16, 17, 20, 40, 50, 55, 56, 64, 65, 92, 120, 121, 129, 149, 159, 164, 175 recontextualising rules 72, 77 Régner, I. 116 regulative discourse 73 Relations 5, 6, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 24–7, 29–31, 34, 35, 42, 44, 60, 61, 63, 70, 76, 77, 79, 83, 89, 93, 95, 99, 100, 105, 112, 114–16, 120, 122, 128, 130, 132–4, 136, 137, 143, 148, 149, 152, 162, 165, 172–4, 176, 178–80 relationship quality 57 Renold, E. 131 resistance 28, 31, 48, 104, 107, 131, 149, 152 Richaudeau, F. 89 risk 5, 35, 102, 106–7, 120, 153 Roberts-Holmes, G. 129, 130 Rogers, R. 83 Roman Catholic primary school 163 same-sex relationships 163 Scarlet, R. R. 131 Schleiermacher, F. 16, 17 Schneuwly, B. 2, 173 Schnyder, M. 119 schooling 7, 8, 22; contemporary see contemporary schooling; and enlightenment principles 56–7; ethnicity and gender in 142; and gender 159–60; and heterosexuality 161–6; practices in cultural reproduction 29; social class in 142; social values through 54 school reform 16 schools: preschool 24, 26–8, 123, 134; primary school 33, 84, 86, 88, 93, 111, 114, 116–19, 121–4, 138, 163, 167, 177; secondary school 24, 40, 41, 49, 84, 99–101, 103, 117, 121, 145, 157–9, 163, 167 school violence 103, 108 Schubauer-Leoni, M. –L. 30, 144 science and technology 34, 84, 121

Index  187 science classrooms: dissection in secondary 40–1; and feminist resistance 48; forms of ethical 48; queer-feminist 47–9; specimens in 44–5; as student and teacher experiences 40 science education 3, 32, 42, 48, 86, 87; secondary science education 24, 40–1, 49, 88 science teacher 39–40 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) 3, 5, 8, 42, 114–18, 121, 122 scientific activity 118 scientific culture 121 secondary science classrooms 40–1 self-cultivation 19 self-formation, Bildung 17 sex and gender 19, 83, 169n1 sex and relationship education (SRE) policy 161, 162, 165–7 sex Discrimination Act 103, 159 sex education 4, 15, 28, 95, 96, 102, 111, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167 sex-role socialisation: and post-structural debates 130–1 sex-role theory 28 sex stereotypes 146 sexual harassment 102, 176 sexual identity 163 sexual orientation 160, 162, 163, 165–7 sexual violence 107, 110 Skelton, C. 147 Skelton, D. 3 Smith, D. E. 5 Smith, J. 19 Snaza, N. 168 Snow, C. P. 121 social change 108 social class 13, 17, 50, 68, 70, 73, 79, 116, 142, 144, 149, 158–9 social constructionism 28, 31, 83, 101, 104–6, 136, 142, 168 social equality 55 social exclusions 17 social formation 13 social gender 142 social inequalities 174 social justice 69, 76–7 social life 60 social media 6 social reality 54, 58 social reform 110 social roles 15, 28, 84, 95, 158

sociology 4, 5, 22, 24, 25, 65, 69, 70, 74–8, 175 Solga, H. 116 Spender, D. 3, 14 Stanat, P. 116 Stengers, I. 44, 179 stereotype/stereotypes 25, 31, 32, 45, 60, 61, 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 95, 114, 116, 117, 119–22, 146, 153, 160, 178, 179; threat 116 student learning experiences 29 students: age and (dis)ability status of 70; didactic contract 30; power relations 174; practical epistemologies 33–4; relationship 25 subject contents 6, 25, 31, 32, 35, 83 subject didactics 2, 3, 25, 86, 99, 109, 111, 174, 177 Sweden/Swedish 7, 55, 174, 175 Switzerland/Swiss 7, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 178 tacit turn 57–62, 64, 85 Taguchi, L. 11, 130, 131 Taylor, C. 6, 7, 21, 22 teachers practical epistemology: impacts on gendered learning 32–3 teacher-student interactions 5 teacher training 74 teaching 3–6, 20, 31, 34–5, 50, 51, 87, 93, 95, 96, 101, 118, 122, 127, 132, 143, 154, 158, 164 technical graphics 89 technology education 94–5 textbook/textbooks 5, 25, 83–6, 88–97, 90–2, 94, 116, 117, 158, 173, 178 time 7, 14, 21, 22, 39, 46, 51, 60, 77, 89, 95, 99–103, 107, 108, 110, 118, 119, 123, 138, 146, 148, 151–3, 159, 166, 173, 180 Tolbert, S. 7, 8 UK Equality Act 2010, 162, 165 United Kingdom/British 4, 6–8, 55, 65, 68, 70, 73, 74, 76, 78, 96, 97, 129, 137, 154, 157, 160, 162, 179 universal secondary education 96 university curricula 78–9 unthinkable knowledge 73, 75, 78 USA/North American 39, 154, 179 Verscheure I. 5, 8, 30, 144, 154 Vinson, M. 33

188 Index violence 102, 105, 106; gender-based see gender-based violence; in same-sex relationships 167; school 103, 108; sexual 107, 110 Volatile Bodies (Grosz) 169 Vouillot, F. 117, 120 Wajcman, J. 70 Weber, M. 70 Weinstein, M. 41, 48 West, C. 116 Whitson, D. 32 Wittig, M. 160

women education 15–17 women in STEM: alliance of gendered social practices 119–21; constructing knowledge to exclude 115–16; in Europe 114–15; primary science school 117–19 Working-class women 135 Wulf, C. 58, 59 Yates, L. 103 Zimmerman, D. H. 116 Zirfas, J. 58, 59