Gender Literacy & Curriculum

Alison Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135345174
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1996. Gender, Literacy, Curriculum is a major contribution to research and theory in literacy and curriculum studies. Alison Lee looks at how the texts and discourses of schooling construct 'geography' as a curriculum field, and how this construction is tied closely with students' gendered identities and practices in the classroom. She brings together discourse analyses of research texts, textbooks, classroom talk, students' and teachers' accounts, with a detailed linguistic analysis of students' written work. This title is of particular interest to those working in literacy education and curriculum, discourse analysis and applied linguistics, feminisms and critical pedagogies.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Gender, Literacy and Schooling

Robert:

Well, what’s a geographer? Probably someone like Harry Butler. He goes around, studies animals and trees, plants and maps out areas and stuff like that.

(transcript of interview)¹

Setting the Scene

The last two decades have seen important feminist interventions into gender and education. These have ranged from various liberal and cultural feminist agendas concerning access and equity for girls’ educational participation to more critical analyses of the dynamics of classroom interaction, the deconstruction of masculinist discourses of curriculum and schooling, and the production of various discourses of gender reconstruction and reform. As far as studies of gender and literacy are concerned, most attention has been paid to the school subject/discipline of English. It is within studies of English curriculum that the shift to more critical-theoretical accounts of gender and language/literacy have been developed, including, for instance, poststructuralist theory. This theoretical development has been of great importance, yet it has typically not engaged other subject/disciplines within the school curriculum. In general, also, there has been a reluctance to theorize and research the intersections between literacy and other disciplinary areas.

This book is an investigation of the literacy/curriculum intersection in one subject/discipline, that of school geography, from within a broad framework of feminist and poststructuralist analysis. The book raises specific questions concerning the gender politics of school literacy within a broader concern with curriculum as a social practice inescapably implicated in social difference and power relations. It argues that, while the purported purpose of schooling is to provide training in subject/disciplinary knowledges, the effect of this process is the formation of particular forms of student subjectivity which are necessarily tied up with major identity formations such as gender and hence connected to broader social power dynamics. Of course, this concern about gender also needs to take into account the intersection of gender with other identity formations; although the particular focus in this study is on gender, the method of analysis developed in this book may be extended into a more explicit exploration of the intersection of gender with other domains of difference, such as class, race, ethnicity and sexuality.

What might be the implications of poststructuralist and feminist theory for thinking about literacy and curriculum in schools? For a start, it is impossible to separate any form of social practice, including textual practices from the discourses/knowledges of which they are a part. That is, in an educational context this means the impossibility of exploring literate practices independently of curriculum. From that same perspective, an exploration of any form of social practice is also by definition an exploration of processes of subject formation and subjectivity.

Gender emerges as a central focus for this project, in part because the feminist literature is well developed in terms of elaborating theories of subjectivity and difference. That is, the point is not to elevate gender as the privileged dimension of social difference but rather, through a feminist analysis of classroom textual practices, to begin to address issues of power and difference in the curriculum more generally. As with curriculum research, however, feminist literacy studies has not forged strong links with gender and education research. When literacy emerges as a category within, for example, feminist engagements with critical pedagogy, it has remained at a level of abstraction. Similarly, feminists engaging recent poststructuralist theory have acknowledged the centrality of language in the construction of meaning but have not engaged in the consequences of this in terms of the relation between language and the question of literacy (Lee, 1994). In other words, literacy has not generally been grasped as a central site for struggle over meaning and power in the curriculum.

The issues around literacy practices and subject formation in non-English curriculum areas have a particular urgency at a time of state intervention into the domain of literacy and education. Literacy has in recent years become an explicit object of policy in Australia and elsewhere and linked to a government project of reform in education within a project of economic restructuring and reform. For feminists, then, there is an increasing urgency concerning the models and discursive frameworks within which literacy debate is carried out, in the conceptualization and implementation of policy, as well as in the broader intellectual work which informs such policy. Current policy represents literacy in terms of skills and competencies, almost totally eliding issues of the subject and power. For any domain of practice to be made over into policy links such practice intimately within a state project of the formation and government of persons. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to address current formulations of the literate adult as these are constructed through policy and attendant pedagogies very carefully.

A major development in the study of schooling, currently informing literacy policy developments in Australia, has derived from what is known more generally in the human sciences as the ‘linguistic turn’, leading first to various language and learning initiatives in the 1970s. Specific developments of this trend in the 1980s have been interventions into literacy pedagogies from within the discipline of linguistics. In Australia this has taken the particular form of a major writing and schooling initiative based on and developed out of systemic functional linguistics. More recently, this work has begun to influence literacy debates in Britain and North America. Broadly speaking, this linguistic work seeks to provide access to the official written genres of schooling to all students by means of explicit instruction in the structural and linguistic features of texts. Elsewhere, Bill Green and I have termed the work of the linguists in this project the Sydney School (Green and Lee, 1994), since much of the initiative and continuing research has grown from the University of Sydney as as result of Halliday’s term there as Chair of Linguistics from 1975 to 1988.

The entry of linguistics into literacy debates is a two-edged phenomenon. On the one hand, socially-based linguistic analysis can supply precise accounts of language in use in various social contexts, including school subject/disciplines. This is important for curriculum studies which has typically not engaged the implications for knowledge construction of the ‘linguistic turn’. On the other hand, various traditions within linguistics have historically not engaged in any rigorous way with questions of power/knowledge that emerge from social analysis of curriculum. The outcome in the case of the genre school of writing pedagogy has been a largely unreflexive promotion of a neo-liberal agenda of access and participation. This, in turn, has rendered the work of the Sydney School readily co-optible for various policy agendas which may well elide questions of gender and difference at stake for girls and young women as they engage in the curriculum.

Accordingly, the impetus for the research that informs the writing of this book has been the need to contribute to the building of a complex picture of the interaction between the school as a specific institutional site and the state within a generalized sense that there is more at stake at this time than ever before over what counts as the literate subject of policy and pedagogy in a rapidly changing educational scene.

The specific concerns which I address in what follows are threefold. First, I am concerned to address current debates in literacy from a perspective informed by current feminist theory to explore the gender implications of such notions as subject-specific literacy, re-production and critical literacy. Second, I am concerned to investigate what research into literate practices in one school classroom might contribute to feminist work on gendered subjectivity, specifically, how gender is achieved, in ways that do not simply assume categories such as ‘marginalization’ and ‘oppression’ as being empty metaphors, or ‘exegetical clichés’ (Showstack Sassoon, 1987). Third, more specifically, I am concerned to track the implications of the systemic linguistic project of the Sydney School in terms of what it contributes to current issues of literacy, schooling and social power, seeing it as a movement which purports to be on the side of equity and justice but which rewards scrutiny from a feminist standpoint.

The book considers what is differently at stake for girls and for boys in engaging in literate practices within the subject-disciplinary domain of school geography. An important argument developed is that gender is a significant factor in the positioning of students with respect to curricular knowledge. Differently gendered students encounter curricular knowledge differently and, as a consequence, reconstruct or rewrite it differently. The school classroom is conceived as a complex social site within which gendered subject positions are set up and taken up in the production and transaction of school knowledge in local and specific ways.

Through the following chapters, I develop and elaborate a particular way of reading the texts of the curriculum – the official texts of curriculum structure and content, as well as the spoken and written texts of the enacted curriculum. This way of reading, outlined below, is distinguished from already existing professional methods of reading curricular texts – methods such as content analysis, formal linguistic analysis and ethnomethodology. As a method, it explicitly engages the complexity of the politics of textual practice in school settings. The readings of curricular texts that are produced here represent an attempt to explore a complex of relations between public and private domains of existence, between notions of the individual and the social, between literacy and what might count as learning, between self-formation and social reproduction. These issues are principally engaged through an investigation of relations between textual practice and subject production, as these categories are developed in feminist and poststructuralist theorizing.

I locate the work of this book at the intersection of three broad disciplinary domains, constructing a matrix of theoretical relations within which I pose questions of literacy and literacy pedagogy. The first of these domains is what might broadly be termed curriculum studies. While this is not a study in (or of) formal curriculum theory, I nevertheless draw on a range of texts theorizing issues of curriculum and schooling. These range from the complex debates concerning the relations between education and power within critical educational sociology to a wide range of work in curriculum history and critical analysis in the specific curricular domain of school geography. The work in curriculum studies has supplied what might be termed the objects of this investigation: the particular selections of classroom talk; interview material; textbooks; essays and other curriculum documents which are subjected to close readings in the later chapters.

The second disciplinary domain is linguistics. But this is not a study in linguistics any more than it is a study in formal curriculum theory, and the methods I have developed are not confined to fulfilling those particular disciplinary imperatives. However, as I have indicated, linguistics has emerged in recent years as an important discipline for literacy studies. In particular, linguists in the Sydney School tradition have become major participants in contemporary literacy debates. There are two main, though quite different, reasons for this; accordingly, I draw on linguistics in two quite distinct ways.

On one level, aspects of the analytics of systemic functional linguistics form a part of the method of investigation. A version of textual analysis of student writing is presented in what follows, deploying aspects of functional grammar, register categories and genre, among other reading techniques. Linguistic analysis supplies a way of engaging with the density and specificity of texts, something that is all too often missing in much of the non-linguistic work in literacy studies at the present time (Lee, 1994). I consider more closely some methodological issues of the study in the analytic chapters but mention briefly here that from a poststructuralist perspective it is necessary to interrogate and loosen up the linguistic categories; accordingly, I work (provisionally) with the term feminist (post)linguistics, as well as with the term, following Fairclough (1992), ‘feminist textually oriented discourse analysis’ (Lee, 1994).

On another level, much of the shape this study has taken is as a result of, and in response to, the current influence of interventions into literacy pedagogy by the Sydney School of educational linguistics. Thus, some of the work of Sydney School linguistics becomes an object of the study. I do not, principally for reasons of space economy, mount a full critique of what is known as the genre approach to writing pedagogy within the Sydney School project. However, the study of writing in geography developed in the first five chapters establishes very strongly the conditions for such a critique, and produces, in Chapter 6, a detailed critique of one aspect of this work and a suggestion of some of the terms on which a more generalized critique could be constructed.

The third domain is feminist theory. This study is specifically about issues of gendered subject production in school-literate practices. Curriculum outcomes in the form of student texts which count as evidence of learning in geography are read from the perspective of feminist concerns with questions of representation and subjectivity, particularly as feminist geographers have engaged these questions. Feminist theorizings of knowledge and the subject supply a political context and a way of making theory about literacy. I have been concerned to construct a theory of subject formation in a specific curricular location, school geography, and to relate this process to the broader sociopolitical context of gender/power/knowledge relations.

To summarize: questions of gender, literacy and schooling are engaged in ways which interconnect the domains of curriculum studies, (post)linguistics and feminist theory. In addition to this, theories of discourse and subjectivity are engaged from within poststructuralism more generally, with particular attention to Foucault’s work on discourse and discipline. I work to explore, in one site, connections and tensions between Foucauldian notions of discourse and language, as that term is conceived within linguistics. It is in the assemblage of this particular configuration in an investigation of school writing that I seek in this book to make a specific contribution to literacy studies. Other work has investigated literacy issues in one, or particular combinations of two, of these disciplinary domains.

For example, issues of literacy and curriculum have been consistently engaged in the movement known as critical pedagogy. Influenced initially by Frankfurt School critical theory and by the work of Freire, 1971, literacy in the work of theorists such as Aronowitz and Giroux, 1985, Giroux, 1988a, 1988b; Giroux and McLaren, 1989; McLaren, 1989; Shor and Freire, 1987, and others² is understood as being intimately implicated in the project of the democratization of the curriculum and connected to issues of critical agency in a pedagogic project of education for critical democracy. Two points concerning this corpus of work are pertinent here. First, critical pedagogy has not, by and large, engaged with language as an analytic category, and hence with the issue of realization: how it is that social meanings are achieved in and through language; rather, discussions of literacy have remained at levels of abstraction over points of political principle. Second, the list of major theorists of critical pedagogy cited above consists entirely of men. That is not to suggest that women have not been involved in the movement, but rather that questions of literacy and curriculum in the tradition of critical pedagogy has remained, until very recently, for the most part, gender blind. More recently, women such as Ellsworth, Weiler, and the contributors to Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore’s (1992) anthology have produced what is a growing body of feminist critiques of the movement, pointing out the marginalizing of issues of gender in the work of the principal male theorists (Ellsworth, 1989; Luke and Gore, 1992; Weiler, 1991). Significantly much of this work has met with little sympathy from these theorists (Lather, 1992).

In terms of bringing current curriculum theorizing together with studies in literacy with a linguistic focus, there has to date been very little work. A notable exception is Bill Green’s edited collection, The Insistence of the Letter, in this series (Green, 1992). This collection attempts to redress the lack of communication and collaboration between these two disparate fields of study in education. The importance of this work lies in its bringing together curriculum researchers and literacy researchers to explore a shared problematic: the notion that school knowledge is characteristically associated with the written mode. Accordingly, Green is concerned to stress the insistence of written textuality and its associated epistemologies and effects in curriculum, and its significance in schooling more generally’ (Green, 1992: 206). This move brings curriulum theorizing into line with poststructuralist/postmodernist understanding of the centrality of language and subjectivity as ‘new fronts from which to rethink the issues of meaning, identity and politics’ (pp. 206–7). I see the work of this book as augmenting the discussion in Green’s collection with a study that produces a sustained focus on issues of gender.

Feminist theorizing of curriculum, schooling and subjectivity from poststructuralist/postmodernist perspectives stresses similarly the importance of the ‘textual turn’. In particular, Lather’s conceptualization of curriculum as ‘the textual staging of knowledge’ is useful for investigating the literacy/curriculum nexus within what she terms an ‘openly ideological approach to critical inquiry’ (Lather, 1991a: 12). Similarly, work such as that of Gore, 1993; Lather, 1991a, 1991b; Walkerdine, 1984, 1985, the contributors in Brodkey, 1989, 1992; Davies, 1989, 1992; Kenway, et al., 1994; Luke and Gore’s 1992 anthology; McWilliam, 1994; Rockhill, 1987; Threadgold, 1993; Wright, 1990; Yates, 1992 – is located within poststructuralist frameworks which acknowledge the productivity of language in the construction of meanings and gendered social identities. However, in much of this work too, beyond the positing of the importance of language, there remain questions of realization: questions concerning the actual transactions that are involved in literate practices in specific sites. The empirical study of literate practices and their relation to larger issues of subjectivity and power requires attention to such issues.

Feminist work specifically in school literacy has, as I have indicated, focused in large part on the primary and English curriculum areas, looking at the gendering of literary texts and at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Gender, Literacy and Schooling
• Part I: Reading the Con-texts
• Part II: Reading the Texts
• Part III: Reading the Meta texts
• Appendix A – 1989 Year 11 Geography Syllabus
• Glossary of Linguistic Terms
• References
• Index