Week 5: Prairie Creek

[Anonymous]

I think so much of gendered expectations and behaviors found in elementary children can be observed during free periods of class time, like recess or outside breaks. When I watch my students play outside for recess, it is really interesting to observe the division between the boys and the girls. Often, the boys will run into the forest and start banging large sticks against the ground or other trees while the girls group up on the grass and practice gymnastics together. These gendered behaviors are obviously taught behaviors that are reinforced by the type of activities and forms of socialization that their parents and teachers encourage. These two activities that the boys and girls choose to do during recess feel like a perfect example of the boys already practicing their masculine traits and the girls practicing their feminine traits. Further, the fact that the boys often end up entertaining themselves independently versus grouped up, like the girls, shows the differing values that are already being formed between the two groups. Gilligan discusses that women often possess much higher values in interpersonal relationships, especially within Level II of their moral development, and the fact that my female students spend their extra time advancing their skills together suggests that they are already being subjected to the social concerns and values of those around them.

Though I do not have a strong sense of gendered regimes being present in the classroom right now, I occasionally find myself questioning how differently she treats her males students versus her female students sometimes. Occasionally I feel that she is a bit sweeter and patient with the girls when they fail to complete their assignments or get off task while she can get rather agitated with certain male students when they do similar things. I’m not sure if I am overthinking these situations, but it often prompts me to speculate about how this gendered treatment may affect the boys and girls down the line. Gilligan suggested that certain treatment from teachers, such as negligence or a lack of academic challenge, can create an academic gap between the male and females students. I wonder if the extra sweet treatment from my teacher could make the girls accustomed with softer tones and special treatment, and in turn, more sensitive to anything harsher than that, like honest or blunt feedback.

Growing up, I do not think I noticed as drastic of a gendered educational experience as Gilligan discusses, though I question if that is due to other factors in my life. For one, I am the daughter of two teachers in my school and feel that I played the role of “teacher’s daughter” really well and my teachers accepted that as my school identity. Another aspect I wonder affected my education is my race. I was one of the only Asians in my school, and while I never directly received any kind of racially stereotypical remark about my intelligence in regard to my Asian ethnicity from my teachers, I did from my peers. It makes me wonder if the Asian stereotype, like being good at math or high achieving, unconsciously affected the way my teachers treated me.

With that being said, this class has made me much more aware of the gender biases I can face in an educational system, regardless of how the teachers treat me directly. I now realize that everything from the motivational athletics posters on the cafeteria walls that only depict male athletes to the books we read in English class can contain gendered material that displays gendered ideas of how women and men should behave. Gilligan suggests that schools should analyze their material more carefully and that teachers should record their classes to look for biased behavior, and I wonder what my high school would find. Part of me feels rather discouraged and thinks that they’d choose to ignore and scoff at any kind of idea of “gendered behavior” or “gender biased treatment”, seeing as 80% of my town voted for Trump. The other part of me hopes that my school will move with the times and make changes to their material and advancements in their teacher training in gender biases.

Something I discuss with Emma, my fellow tutor at Prairie Creek, pretty often is the fact that the students seem to get away with behavior on the playground that I would never even had the chance to dream of when I was in elementary school. They swing huge sticks at the ground and groups of five of them climb onto one swing together, and the observing teachers don’t bat an eye. I’m not sure if this is due to Prairie Creek’s more relaxed teaching approach or if schools have just loosened up in general. The thing is, I still have yet to see a kid get hurt, even though they regularly do things that would have been called dangerous when I was a kid. I’ve always kind of been with the mentality that kids should learn from their mistakes so it makes me quite happy to see them playing so freely at Prairie Creek.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Tonja Clay.

[Author]

Posts