Literacy and Gender

Researching Texts, Contexts and Readers

Gemma Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415234573
• eBook ISBN: 9781134566129
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today? To date, there have been few attempts to answer this question. Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools.

In studying schooling as a social process, this book focuses on the links between literacy, gender and attainment, the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond. Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls' relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class. Using fine-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context, this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site.

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LITERACY, GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT

Explaining educational failure and success

Introduction

This chapter explores the conditions under which boys’ comparative failure in literacy has become visible over the last decade, and considers feminist reactions to this turn of events in the broader context of the feminist struggle for gender equality in education. It asks how far a gender politics predicated on girls’ relative failure within the education system can be used to understand boys’ underachievement in literacy and whether the time has come to reflect more broadly on the role the social organisation of literacy in school plays in creating distinctions between readers and writers. At a time when homogeneity in measurable outcomes from the education system is increasingly seen as a desirable political goal, what is at stake for both girls and boys as they navigate their way through the literacy curriculum?

It has become increasingly hard to remember a time when the phrase ‘literacy and gender’ did not evoke a discourse about boys’ failings within the education system in general, and within the core subject of English in particular. Yet until recently, boys’ comparative underachievement in literacy went largely unremarked. Not so long ago the topic of gender and literacy would instead have elicited questions about inequalities in girls’ access to schooling, or literacy’s ideological role in sustaining women’s subordinate position as part of the unequal distribution of power within the wider society (Cameron, 1985; Horsman, 1991; Rockhill, 1993). Such a feminist agenda has increasingly been replaced by more technocratic questions about uneven educational performance demonstrated in the measurable outcomes of the system: exam passes and test scores. These demonstrate that boys are doing less well at literacy than girls, with many more clustered in the lowest quartile. This appears to be a consistent finding in comparable contexts internationally (OECD, 2004). The all too apparent inequalities of boys’ attainment within English seem to demand a technical quick fix which will iron out the discrepancy. Inevitably, from such a starting point, the politics of gender and literacy have been transformed.

Whilst the change in the discourse has been only too striking, deciding what an appropriate feminist response might be has proved more difficult. After all, many of the conditions which seemed to have produced girls’ educational underachievement persist, whilst factors that were assumed to work in boys’ favour still hold too (Epstein et al., 1998). How can these points be squared with tales of male underachievement in the literacy classroom? Myra Barrs explores this paradox the other way round:

Among the paradoxes that characterise this area, then, is the fact that despite some of the apparent obstacles that they face in primary classrooms – the propensity of boys to seek more of the teacher’s attention, and be given it; the continuing tendency of children’s books to deal in stereotypes, and to show boys as more active and lively agents of their own destiny; the fact that boys have access to more powerful role models, and that men teachers tend to carry more weight and occupy more responsibility posts within school than women teachers do – girls continue to achieve more highly than boys in reading.

(Barrs, 1993)

Is the anomaly that of girls’ success in a system weighted against them, or of boys’ failure in a system which should work in their favour?

Accounting for educational inequality from a feminist perspective

Feminists have long regarded education both as a mechanism for reproducing gender inequalities and as a possible institutional site for challenge and redress. This has meant arguing for a better place for women within the education system and using the system itself to foster further change. Quite how the argument has been pursued has altered over time, as has the particular target for reform. In the closing years of the nineteenth century women fought to gain access to education on a par with male students. This included access to the same kind of educational institutions; the same curricular content; and to educational futures which were not simply tied to the domestic roles of wife, servant or mother (Attar, 1990; Miller, 1996). Yet despite some early gains, institutionalised inequalities have continued to resonate through successive phases of educational reform in many countries.

In post-war Britain, the educational settlement which established grammar and secondary modern schools as a way of opening up education to more of the population for longer, also carried within it a significant act of discrimination against women. The 11+ examinations used to determine entrance to grammar schools routinely adjusted boys’ scores in reading and writing upwards whilst marking girls’ scores down, so as to balance out the numbers going forward (Millard, 1997). Justification for this act of positive discrimination rested on the notion of differing rates of biological maturity. Boys were seen as late developers, particularly in the areas of language skills. From this point of view, to treat boys and girls equally at the age of eleven would penalise the former unfairly. At the time it was perfectly possible to view the end results of the grammar school system, and boys’ success within it, as a vindication of this ‘late development’ hypothesis. (Indeed, some of the standardised reading tests still in use today continue to ‘adjust’ scores according to gender on the same grounds.) The gender politics which underpinned this hypothesis attracted very little comment. When the 11+ exam and the two tier education system it sustained were abandoned in the UK in favour of a predominantly comprehensive model of secondary education, the changeover was certainly represented as an equality issue. Yet the predominant terms of reference were the greater equality the new educational contract would give to children from different social backgrounds. Equality in this context was presaged on social class, not gender.

Access and equality in a comprehensive system

In Britain, the re-emergence of feminism as a significant political movement in the 1960s coincided with the introduction of comprehensive education. This soon led to renewed interest in the extent to which schooling either helped or hindered greater social equality. Concerned by girls’ continuing under-representation in key curriculum subject domains and their lower attainment in the education system as a whole, feminists began to explore how the apparent equality of access which comprehensive schooling promised masked continuing discrimination. Feminists began to identify both those institutional constraints which seemed to mitigate against girls’ full participation within the school curriculum and examine how dominant conceptions of femininity might hinder girls’ educational progress. To this end, some named and then studied the hidden curriculum: those aspects of school life which lay outside the subject content of schooling but which seemed to have a role in determining gender-differentiated outcomes. This included the ways boys dominated classroom interactions and playground space; and the ways school procedures themselves (lining up, the register, uniform) often reinforced gender differences, giving girls a less powerful place from which to speak (Clarricoates, 1987; Stanworth, 1981). Others identified bias in the existing curriculum content, the vantage point it encapsulated and its modes of delivery (Spender, 1982; Whyte, 1986). Such work became a means of explaining girls’ lower levels of achievement in the areas of Maths and Science as well as the mechanisms through which boys and girls came to predominate in different subject areas, without recourse to concepts of ‘natural aptitude’ driven by biological determinism (Kelly, 1987).

Such social explanations fostered the possibility of social redress. Ways of overturning the status quo were explored through different kinds of curriculum intervention. Some of these concentrated on urging girls to step beyond the traditional gender boundaries expressed in current subject choices and enter areas of the curriculum traditionally viewed as masculine. Others attempted to make ‘masculine’ areas of the curriculum more girl-friendly by adapting the content to suit girls’ presumed interests and expertise. Still others challenged the lower validation given to those aspects of the curriculum traditionally seen as ‘feminine’ (see for instance, my own earlier work on the romance genre, Moss, 1989a). The potentially conflicting logics of these approaches often led to heated debate within the feminist community. For instance, was it more appropriate to support Home Economics teachers in claiming higher status for what they did, or demand the abolition of Home Economics as a subject which reinforced gender stereotypes and acted as a poor substitute for science, needlessly diverting girls from other areas of the curriculum (Attar, 1990)?

The more debate on these issues continued, the harder it seemed to be to find neutral ground from which questions of value might finally be settled. How could feminists dissolve the distinction between masculine and feminine subject domains without adopting the values associated with one side rather than the other? Davies, drawing on Kristeva, refers to this question in terms of breaking out of the dualistic thinking associated with patriarchy, towards ‘multiple genders and multiple subjectivities’ (Davies, 1993). In her own work, she begins to outline how this might be done at least in part by underlining the extent to which questions of values are contingent: it may be strategically appropriate to blur the distinction between masculinity and femininity at one moment, identifying similarities of interest; and draw attention to sharply defined underlying differences at another. Fluidity becomes the name of the political game.

Gender identities as a focus for feminist action

This kind of post-structural analysis had most immediate influence in the study of gender identity. Girls’ enculturation into femininity was increasingly represented as an inherently unstable project, full of contradictions and uncertainties, and incorporating few safe spaces immune to potential challenge (Hey, 1997; Davis, 1994). Acknowledging that teachers and pupils, girls as well as boys, made use of the range of resources they had at their disposal, both to assume positions of power and oppose and resist others who would position them as less powerful, set the scene for a new kind of exploration of the relations between gender, identity and education (Walkerdine, 1981; Williamson, 1981/2). Gender identities emerge from this kind of analysis as actively constructed, rather than as givens (Butler, 1990). They also multiply. There is more than one way of doing femininity or masculinity. Children in classrooms ‘try out’ different gender identities. They may adopt identities which are easier or more difficult to incorporate into the value system of the school, converging with or resisting the identities they are offered through the education system itself, often by drawing on a wider range of resources, including those associated with peer cultures and popular media (Cherland, 1994; Gilbert and Taylor, 1991). Social class and ethnicity here intersect with gender. Different forms of masculinity or femininity win different kinds of recognition, approval or challenge from teachers in different subject areas (Gilbert, 1993; Lee, 1996). They also do different kinds of work in binding children into existing patriarchal values, remaking or even subverting them. In this kind of context a good deal of feminist attention began to focus on how and when best to intervene in the formation of gendered identities, and how to judge the aptness of any such interventions (Gilbert and Taylor, 1991). The English curriculum seemed the main arena in which these issues could be tackled.

Valerie Walkerdine and her colleagues’ study of girls’ underachievement in Maths took the debate in another direction by linking the fluidity of gender identity specifically to questions of educational underachievement (see Walden and Walkerdine, 1985). The ‘Girls and Mathematics’ projects set out to examine why, although girls often outperformed boys in certain aspects of the Maths curriculum, they were much less frequently entered for the higher status examination and then did less well within it. In seeking to understand how this could happen in an educational system explicitly committed to meritocratic principles, Walden and Walkerdine argued that the dynamic of the classroom depended upon the creation of two contrasting subject positions for ‘weak’ and ‘able’ girl students (ibid.). Girls variously took up one or other position in the social interactions which represented the handover of mathematical knowledge. These subject identities in turn established the girls’ overall place within the classroom economy as a whole, and so steered differentiated access to the curriculum content. The cumulative effect was to reinforce differentiated outcomes. For Walden and Walkerdine, questions about achievement within the curriculum are therefore less about who gains access to a given curriculum content than about how claims to knowledge are continuously defined and then (unequally) exercised in classroom settings:

The characteristics displayed by girls and boys in classrooms lead teachers to read their performance in different ways and therefore to do different things about it … It is not simply a matter of teacher bias against femininity. Rather it is a complex relation between theory and practice of learning and teaching, leading to gender-differentiated production of success and failure.

(Walden and Walkerdine, 1985, p. 12)

This kind of work changed the terms of the argument in so far as it showed that who does well and who does badly within the system as it stands cannot be deduced straightforwardly by assuming a preordained relationship between a given curriculum content, and fixed gender identities, or indeed gendered aptitudes. Rather, Walden and Walkerdine argued, ‘successful’ or ‘poor’ curriculum attainment is tied to the way teacher judgements are made in practice about who is knowledgeable on what kind of terms and what then flows from this (ibid. p. 15). This kind of feminist analysis highlighted the contradictory outcomes that education affords girls as well as boys. Some would succeed where others failed. Nevertheless, none of this seemed to prepare feminists with the immediate means to tackle the story the attainment data began to tell in the mid 1990s about boys’ uneven performance.

Gender and the curriculum: changing patterns of performance

By the mid 1990s, greater emphasis on the crucial role education was expected to play in producing a skilled workforce equipped to deal with the new knowledge economies had made the measurable outcomes of education much more visible, both nationally and internationally. Government-sponsored reform in many countries had seen an increasing emphasis on tracking pupil performance at different levels of the system, and making the results public through school performance league tables. As the supply of data built up, so more of the available evidence began to show girls’ levels of educational attainment substantially improving in all areas of the curriculum. In the UK by the mid 1990s, girls either matched or outstripped boys in the available public measures of performance, at least up to age sixteen (Arnot et al., 1998). Girls emerged as a school success story; boys did not.

The initial feminist response to news of girls’ educational success could best be characterised as surprise, if not in some quarters downright suspicion. This is not what feminists were looking for, or indeed expecting. The kind of detailed examination of schools and classrooms which had for so long rightly ...

Table of contents

• LITERACIES
• STUDENT WRITING
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 LITERACY, GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT
• 2 STUDYING LITERACY WITH MORE THAN GENDER IN MIND
• 3 LITERACY EVENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SCHOOL
• 4 TEXTS IN THEIR CONTEXT OF USENon-fiction, text design and the social regulation of reading in class
• 5 READERS IN CONTEXT
• 6 GENDER, LITERACY AND ATTAINMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM
• APPENDIX 1 Fact and fiction analytic matrix
• APPENDIX 2 Transcription conventions
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX