Sexuality, Gender and Schooling

Shifting Agendas in Social Learning

Mary Jane Kehily

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415280464
• eBook ISBN: 9781134464067
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The sexuality of young people arouses controversy and remains a source of concern for parents, teachers, policy-makers and politicians. But what young people really think about sexuality and gender and how these issues impact upon their lives is often marginalized or overlooked.

Based upon extensive ethnographic research with young people and teachers, Sexuality, Gender and Schooling offers a telling and insightful account of how young people acquire sexual knowledge and how they enact their understanding of their own gender. It highlights the ways in which young people's constructions of gender and sexuality are formed outside the school curriculum, through engagements with various forms of popular culture - such as teen magazines and television programmes - and through same-sex friendship groups.

Offering a fresh perspective on a subject of perennial interest and concern, Sexuality, Gender and Schooling provides accounts from the inside - some of which may challenge and eclipse current approaches to sexuality education. It has significant implications for policy and practice in Personal, Social and Health Education and is also an excellent introduction to key debates and issues in the study of gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1

Fragments from a fading career: personal narratives and emotional investments¹

In this chapter I aim to document the personal journey by which I became interested in researching issues of sexuality and schooling. Something that has now become an academic quest did not start out as such. Through the use of personal narratives drawn from my career as a teacher, this chapter will illustrate the ways in which my present research interest is inextricably linked to my biography as a teacher and my political and emotional investments in certain forms of pedagogic practice. The style and scope of this chapter is indebted to contemporary feminist analyses which embrace auto/biographical modes of social research and stress the importance of self-reflexivity to the process of fieldwork and analysis (see Reissman 1993; Stanley 1990; Walkerdine 1986b). The chapter is also shaped by a reading of Jane Miller's (1995) critical commentary on the autobiography of the question which discusses the complex relationship between personal investments and research agendas.

Educational routes and biographical moments

Like many people in their final year of an undergraduate degree, I ‘drifted’ into the idea of doing a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. It wasn't so much a conscious decision to become a teacher, more an unconscious and unspecified panic about what to do at a more general level. Contemporary ‘lifestyle’ lexicon refers to these moments as ‘life choices’ and ‘career planning’. I don't recall thinking about it in such clearly defined ways but I do remember that education appeared an obvious ‘choice’. I had been to school, I knew about it and in a strange way it felt safe and challenging at the same time. At this stage my musings on ‘what makes a good teacher’ and ‘what is education’ were inevitably related to my personal experiences of schooling.

My journey to school was a short one, only ten minutes walk away, but in my mind it was another country. It wasn't like home or anywhere else I'd ever been. I don't necessarily remember the content of any of the lessons but I do remember what my teachers looked like, what they wore and whether they smiled or frowned. The significant others in my school life were the teachers who didn't explode into a fury for seemingly no reason. They were the ones who didn't instil me with fear. My two sisters and I were in awe of teachers, keen to please and fearful of incurring their displeasure. As adults we still recall stories of life in primary school and remember with clarity and a great deal of hilarity whether particular teachers were nice or nasty. The marker for us as children was whether we felt able or afraid to ask to go to the toilet. The high point of our recollections is a proverbial tale of the incident where my sister did a wee over Miss Costello's shoe. The teachers we admired were the ones who were nice. They encouraged us to follow up ideas, explore details, ask the odd question. Based on this partial and personal retrospective, good teachers, I decided, were the ones who had a vision that went beyond the curriculum and beyond the boundaries of the school walls. As a young adult I thought that education was about making a difference, making a difference to people's lives. In the development of this home-spun philosophical position I was assisted by my involvement with student and socialist/feminist politics during the 1970s and a generally haphazard and incomplete reading of literature concerned with the politics and practice of radical pedagogy (e.g. Illich 1971; Freire 1972; Searle 1974; Bowles and Gintis 1976).

Auto/biographical methods

With my philosophical position ‘sorted’ and my commitment to ‘making a difference’ firmly intact, I began a teaching career in January 1979. My first appointment was as an English teacher in a comprehensive school in the West Midlands. To explore some of the feelings, themes and complexities of this period I have employed the concept of ‘memory-work’ (Haug et al. 1987; Kuhn 1995), a method of research whereby participants collectively remember aspects of their lives in order to analyse the relationship between the personal and broader social structures. This method was introduced to me while undertaking postgraduate study at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham (1990–3). During this period I worked with a group of students, using personal narratives and photographs to explore issues of gender and sexuality in our past lives and current experiences, some of which formed the basis of an earlier study (Kehily 1995).² Michael Erben (1996:159) suggests that the purpose of biographical method is ‘to explore through the analysis of individual lives, the relationship between social forces and individual character’. For Erben, biographical method gives researchers access to the unfolding of people's lives that can be studied as ‘an enacted drama of selfhood’ (1996:159). Erben suggests that a consideration of how consciousness is constitutive of self-formation lies at the heart of biographical method.

Auto/biographical methods have been utilised in productive ways by individuals and groups marginalised by dominant forms. Haug et al. (1987) developed the concept of ‘memory-work’ as a method for the generation of personal stories of gendered embodiment that could be told and analysed within the context of a feminist project. In this chapter I appropriate this method to critically examine my personal investments in teaching and my early interest in sexuality. In an early study, the Personal Narratives Group (1989) explored the reading of biographical accounts from a feminist perspective. In Interpreting Women's Lives they argue that the use of women's personal narratives offers a challenge to traditional bodies of knowledge, truth and reality that have been constructed as if men's experiences were normative. They suggest that women's personal narratives are capable of illustrating aspects of gender relations which explore the constructions of a gendered self-identity within specific social contexts. The Personal Narratives Group define individual accounts as ‘verbal reconstructions of developmental processes’ (1989:5), indicating the interplay of agency and social dynamics in the shaping of gendered identities. Liz Stanley (1987, 1990) considers some of the methodological implications of feminist research and auto/biographical accounts. Stanley (1990) suggests that such work is reflexively concerned with its own production. Moreover, she sees the processes involved in this mode of analysis as problematising the notion of self; replacing unity and stability with ‘an understanding of self as fragile and continually renewed by acts of memory and writing’ (1990:62).

Within the field of education, biographical methods have provided an insight into the lives and careers of teachers and their relationship to structures of schooling (Sikes et al. 1985; Connell 1985; Goodson 1991, 1992). Cortazzi (1993) suggests that, as teachers are often the motors of change in education, an understanding of teachers’ experiences and perspectives can effect improvement in educational systems, curriculum reform and classroom practice. In a similar vein Connelly and Clandinin (1988) view teachers as holders of personal and practical knowledge which can be utilised to understand and develop the processes involved in teaching and learning. Further research in this field indicates that teachers’ pedagogic practice is shaped by their personal experiences of schooling as former pupils (Woods 1985; Goodson 1992; Wood 1992). I have drawn upon this insight in my analysis of teachers as sex education practitioners (Chapter 7). In ‘Sexing the Subject’ I consider teachers’ approaches to sex education and relate their experiences as practitioners to aspects of their biography that they discussed in interview. Hearing how teachers learned about sex and became sexual subjects provided many interesting reflections on the relationship of the past to the present. As pointed out above, I have found auto/biographical methods particularly useful for reflecting on my own investments in researching issues of sexuality and schooling. In this chapter I aim to offer a reflexive consideration of these themes which suggests that doing research and being researched provide a further site for the enactment of versions of the self. Viewed in this way, social research can be seen as a modern technology producing research subjects who can be ‘known’ through a dynamic where the research encounter provides a performative space for the creation of versions of the self (Foucault 1982a; Tagg 1980; Tolson 1990).

The stories that follow are my selected recollections of the years 1979-81, when, as a newly qualified teacher, I was attempting to establish my career, develop ideas about pedagogic practice and hold on to a personal vision. I use memory-work here to give my stories a structure that will facilitate a reflexive approach to self-generated memories of my past. Generally, however, the use of memory-work to generate stories is a collective endeavour, intended to produce different layers of meaning, understandings and reconstructions of identity relevant to the research process. Past and current version(s) of self can be juxtaposed to develop a reflexive and critical relationship between individual concerns and broader social, political and cultural issues (Stanley 1990; Reissman 1993; Kehily 1995).

Just call her ‘rat-face’

The fourth year class I inherited in my first year of teaching were ‘out of control’. They were ‘difficult’ when I took them over and ‘completely off the rails’ by the time they left me. Teachers in the school had a whole vocabulary for describing such pupils and such classes. It was a language I felt uncomfortable with at first but found myself using, initially with a hint of irony and, in time, as a matter of course. It became a way of communicating frustrations to other teachers, allying with them and drawing a sharp distinction between what it means to be a teacher and what it means to be a pupil. 4Z, it was generally acknowledged, were an ‘unholy bunch’, ‘a shower of shits’, ‘as high as kites’ and ‘off the planet’. Sometimes they were referred to as ‘retards’, ‘cretins’ and ‘toe-rags’. Occasionally they were called ‘seriously disruptive’.

I wanted to win them round, believed I could win them round if I persevered. Controlling them would be an achievement but teaching them that English could be fun was what I desired. After only a few weeks I settled for trying to control them. I tried every strategy I knew; being firm, being their friend, rewarding good behaviour, ignoring or punishing bad behaviour, shouting louder than them, isolating ‘troublemakers’, rearranging the desks, group-work, whole class-work, individualised study programmes, detentions. Nothing worked. I was inexperienced and they knew it. The battle was lost.

There was a lot of pain and hurt for me that year. On one occasion in the war between them, me and my idealism, one of them, in a moment of open resistance, called me ‘rat-face’. The whoops of laughter, banging of desk tops and unbridled excitement indicated to me that the rest of the class were very impressed by this and the name caught on in no time. Every lesson was a ritualistic humiliation, some worse than others. There was no way out.

This story of my relationship with 4Z coheres around the themes of control, teacher identity and pedagogic practice. The story begins with the details of my ‘inheritance’ as a newly qualified teacher: a ‘difficult’ class. My notion that this was a class I ‘inherited’ is suggestive of the level of responsibility and ownership teachers feel in relation to their classes, a notion which is not specifically taught in teacher training or through pedagogic literature, but is communicated informally through the culture of schools and teacher training colleges at the level of everyday talk and interaction. That teachers own their classes is an indisputable ‘fact’ of teacher existence, confirmed in numerous day-to-day exchanges (‘Send one of yours to the office’, ‘One of mine will go’, ‘She's one of Miss Green's‘). This feeling that your class ‘belonged’ to you and you were, therefore, responsible for them contributes to the associative link made between teaching and parenting (Steedman 1985; Walkerdine and Lucey 1989) where a discourse of control and protection operates to structure both roles. 4Z were mine whether I liked it or not and their decline could be directly attributed to my failure as a teacher. This is reflected in my deterministic view that ‘there was no way out’—until, of course, the end of the academic year when they would be no longer mine.

4Z were a class with a ‘reputation’. It was a generally acknowledged staff room ‘truth’, though one I resisted in the first instance. I had heard the stories teachers told about them, the catalogue of insubordination and deviance spanning four years that placed them utterly beyond redemption as ‘no hopers’ in the litany of the staff room. Ball (1981) comments on the assumptions teachers make of pupils based on their perceived ability, defined by the school in terms of the banding system.³

As the band allocation of the pupils was a ‘given’, a label imposed from outside prior to any contact with the pupils, the teachers were ‘taking’ and deriving assumptions on the basis of that label, rather than making their own evaluations of the abilities of individual pupils.

(Ball 1981:36)

As a band 3 class, 4Z were regarded as ‘non-academic’ and in need of ‘remedial attention’ or as the official school discourse put it ‘overcoming obstacles to learning’. It is, therefore, possible that 4Z ‘acquired’ a reputation in the minds of the teachers before the history of misdemeanours, where any negative event may serve to confirm teacher expectations of ‘non-academic’ pupils. My limited sociological understanding, combined with a politics which spoke of a sense of ‘justice’, produced an awareness of the power of the self-fulfilling prophesy. I did not want to be guilty of preconceived notions, labelling pupils and writing them off in the ways that I could see other teachers doing. I thought that if I adopted a different approach I would achieve a different outcome. Studies of teachers, teaching and the generation of school-based knowledge (e.g. Holt 1964; Esland 1971; Gorbutt 1972) led me to believe that this was the case—I had the power to change perceptions through practice. However, while this body of literature suggested the possibility of an alternative practice, the process by which this could be achieved was less well documented.

Geoff Whitty (1985) has commented on the ways in which the ‘new’ sociology of education of the 1970s tended to overstate and overestimate the potential for social change through schools. As a newly qualified teacher I had internalised this potential as a personal mission, ‘teaching them that English could be fun was what I desired’. It was part of a personal and political quest I had embarked on without reference to anyone else in the school or the community. What was to be done when it became clear that my open-minded optimism was not going to transform 4Z? Can the vision be dismantled and reconstructed in a different way? Is it my problem/fault or is it that of 4Z? Does the failure of the practice necessitate the abandonment of the dream? In the story I interpret the failure as my failure, a consequence of my inexperience as a teacher. As I was unpractised in the teacherly skills of organising and managing a class, 4Z were quick to spot my weaknesses and exploited them to the full. This analysis, plausible to me at the time, sees teacher/pupil relations as structured by and through the free-play of interactions within the classroom, where positions are negotiated and understandings reached. Within this conceptualisation it is possible for me to see teacher identity as open to reformulations of a positive and transformative kind, ‘making a difference to people's lives’. In retrospect I realise I overlooked, consciously and unconsciously, the ways in which teacher/pupil relations are already constructed through the social relations of the school where hierarchies of privilege and status provide a context for the construction and negotiation of pupil and teacher identities. At a conscious level this oversight can be rationalised in terms of my resistance to the ‘how it is’ set-up with its negative labelling and low teacher expectations which I saw, somewhat naively, as maintaining and perpetuating class relations and educational mediocrity. At the level of the unconscious there may have been other forms of resistance: the difficulty of recognising different and contradictory subjective investments and the need to forge a coherent identity invested in resolving contradictions through the ‘unitary’ identity of teacher.

Within the story, the shifting formations of my teacher identity can be located in my feelings regarding the language used by teachers to describe 4Z. I didn't know the word ‘discourse’ at the time, at least not in the poststructuralist sense, but I felt ‘uncomfortable’ with the epithets used and was concerned to define myself as against the popularly held assumptions and beliefs relating to band 3 pupils. Such a position, however, was difficult to sustain within the context of the school, where discursive patterns extended beyond any individual attempt at disavowal. To communicate my experiences and frustrations to other teachers I found myself using the same language as they used, ‘initially with a hint of irony and, in time, as a matter of course’. Here, I make a transition from defining myself as against other teachers, where I refuse to acknowledge and own my power as a teacher to define pupils in negative terms, to an acceptance of the teacher identified discourse which assimilates teacher concerns through the Othering of pupils. This process can be seen as central to the formation of my ‘unitary’ teacher identity expressed in the story through the language of warfare that permeates the rest of the narrative. The lessons become sites of ‘battle’, I use ‘strategies’ to ‘control them’ and loss of control can be detected in ‘open resistance’, ‘humiliation’ and defeat.

‘Rat-face’ is not the worst thing I've been called, though in the story it signifies a great deal of pain and hurt which may appear disproportionate to the verbal abuse itself. Here, it is the context of the classroom which gives the name-calling event its emotionally loaded significance. Carolyn Steedman (1985) comments on the claustrophobic world of the classroom as a place of anticipation, where events are observed and dramas staged. With 4Z I viewed this theatricality as their constant public appraisal of my performance as a teacher. The display of teacher involves a specific enactment: maintaining control, not losing ‘face’, not exposing weaknesses. Investing in and performing a ‘unitary’ identity such as teacher involves expelling doubts and vulnerabilities that may call your authority into question, for the duration of the lesson at least. Pupil perceptions, however, may be different. Bronwyn Davies (1983) notes how classroom order is reliant on pupil cooperation. In not responding to teacher ‘authority’, pupils may register an unwillingness to collude in practice...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Sexuality, Gender and Schooling
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Fragments from a fading career: personal narratives and emotional investments
• 2 Ways of conceptualising sexuality, gender and schooling
• 3 Producing heterosexualities: the school as a site of discursive practices
• 4 Agony aunts and absences: an analysis of a sex education class
• 5 More Sugar? Teenage magazines, gender displays and sexual learning
• 6 Understanding masculinities: young men, heterosexuality and embodiment
• 7 Sexing the subject: teachers, pedagogies and sex education
• 8 Sexuality, gender and schooling reconsidered: notes towards a conclusion
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index