Week Five – Gender in the Classroom

[Anonymous]

Gender in the Classroom and Literacy

The reading from Boys, Literacies and Schooling was a really interesting one for me this week. I think that’s because 1) I am observing in a 9th Grade English class on Fridays and the last twenty minutes of the period are devoted to independent reading each week and 2) I’ve spent a fair bit of time, myself, wondering how to get kids excited about reading because it’s something that I enjoy so much.

With regards to reading in Mr. DuBe’s 9th Grade class, it seems like finding that boys are not as interested in reading and are falling behind on literacy is an accurate one. During the twenty minutes of independent reading, I’ve noticed that, for the most part, the girls are more likely to open their books and quietly read through the end of class. Boys, on the other hand, appear more restless on the whole. They will often fidget, look at the wall, try to catch each other’s eye, or scroll on their phone. There definitely are a couple who will silently read, but the majority don’t. The boys are also almost always the first to start packing up, often several minutes before the bell. This gendered behavior is mirrored in the first thirty minutes of class: the boys take up a lot of space, girls not as much. Boys tend to fidget, ask questions, ask to leave the classroom to visit the bathroom or media center, ask to sharpen their pencils, etc. Girls, on the other hand, seem to stay in their seats and prefer to talk quietly amongst themselves.

Returning to the subject of reading, it is interesting to note that the boys often choose magazines (Mr. DuBe has a variety, including some on cars and sports). According to the protest masculinity and other essentialist mindsets, this would be the correct approach. English, from this mindset, has become too feminized and, because ‘boys will be boys’, they need to be enticed to read by being offered reading material more aligned with their supposed gendered interests (war, sports, computers, cars, non-fiction, etc). At the same time, the very fact that Mr. DuBe is a male English teacher, and that he models the value of reading for men by always participating in the twenty minutes of independent reading (he either brings his own book or reads a newspaper sitting at the front of the classroom) would seem to suggest an anti-essentialist and even transformative mindset to gender reform. I think that this could be effective, but like the point made in the chapter from Boys, Literacies and Schooling, modeling the desired behavior and signaling that ‘Boys read too!’ and simply hoping that students will choose of their own accord to pick up a book is a little idealistic. That just isn’t how gender reform works. What I’m a little confused on, however, is: what actually will work, then? The reading didn’t really provide any concrete or practical ideas about how literacy skills should be taught or how interest in reading could be fostered in schools. It emphasized the need to problematize gender roles for students and teachers alike, but didn’t explain what that looks like:

“The transformative mindset to gender reform embraces both men and women who work to contest fixed and rigid understandings of gender associated with masculinity or femininity, who recognize and legitimate multiple ways of being a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’ and who sees schools — and literacy classrooms — as places where gender norms can be explored, rendered problematic, denaturalized and transformed” (53).

How do schools actually transform the associations of Language Arts and reading with femininity? How do they transform the associations of Engineering and other STEM subjects with masculinity?

My Experience with Gender and Education

I resonated quite a bit with the responses of the undergraduate women that Gilligan interviewed on their constructions of morality. I often understand morality as the minimization of hurt for the maximum number of people. That, in an educational setting, usually manifests itself as choosing to make decisions that ‘hurt’ myself in order to avoid ‘hurting’ (or often rather, inconveniencing, annoying, bothering, etc.) others, in Gilligan’s language. It means making apologies for myself when I speak in class discussions or refraining from challenging a group mate when they make a decision on a group project that I would have approached differently. My internal dialogue sometimes actually operates in that exact language of ‘hurting’ when I’m trying to think through why I should or shouldn’t do or have done any given thing. What I hadn’t really ever considered about the logic behind trying to not to ‘hurt’ people before is that it is actually quite contradictory and even hypocritical logic. As Gilligan points out, women don’t often seem to realize that, in their desire to not hurt people, they often end up hurting themselves. Or rather, they do realize it, but they are quick to dismiss it because ‘no, that doesn’t apply to me’. This is because, Gilligan argues, valuing the self (in addition to others) is antithetical to what women have been socialized to think is the definition of their femininity (selflessness, compassion, etc). (As a side note: It seems like there is also something else going on here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. In general, I think people tend to create rules for how people should treat one another that they don’t seem to apply to themselves. The grace they give others is not extended to themselves. If this is something that happens in other areas, and applies to both men and women, which I think it does, what’s the reason behind that? Just something to think about, I guess!)

Additional Comments

This week, the students in Mr. DuBe’s class have started reading Romeo and Juliet. In both periods on Friday, the teacher took them through the opening sonnet of the play and they translated it together. However, it didn’t really seem like the students were being encouraged to participate in the translation process that much. Instead, the teacher was just sort of telling them what to write down. (Occasionally, he’d ask them a question, but it was always something very explicitly stated in the line being translated.) From a student perspective, I can completely see why Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t be interesting to learn like this. However, from a teacher’s perspective, I also understand that there’s only so much time in a fifty minute class period and if students aren’t responsive there’s only so much you can do. Still, I wish there was a way to teach Shakespeare that appealed more to students. (It can be a really interesting subject!)

During the lunch break, I asked Mr. DuBe about the other texts the students were reading that year, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of the books on the list was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. (It’s a contemporary young adult novel about two gay Mexican-American boys.) I just thought it was really cool that they were reading something that was so contemporary and centered around LGBT relationships. It also doesn’t seem like a typical contemporary book that teachers normally gravitate towards when they do choose books that aren’t classics (a book that I feel like I’ve seen more often in schools, The Fault in Our Stars, was also on the list).

 

• This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by admin.

[Author]

Posts