Gender and the Politics of the Curriculum

Sheila Riddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415683623
• eBook ISBN: 9781136634864
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book uses detailed case studies of two secondary schools to examine the relationship between curriculum choice and gender identity among fourteen-year-old pupils making their first choices about what subjects to pursue at exam level. It reveals a two way process. Pupils' decisions on what subject to take are influenced by how they perceive themselves in gender terms, and the curriculum once chosen reinforces their sense of gender divisions. The author looks at the influences on pupils at this stage in their lives from peers, family and the labour market as well as from teachers. She argues that the belief in freedom of choice and school neutrality espoused by many teachers can become an important factor in the reproduction of gender divisions, and that unless the introduction of the national curriculum is accompanied by systematic efforts to eradicate sexism from the hidden curriculum it will fail in its aim of creating greater equality of educational opportunity among the sexes.

Part I

SETTING THE SCENE: THE PHYSICAL AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF THE STUDY

Social research does not occur in a vacuum, but is a complex result of the researcher’s initial interests and motivation, theoretical and methodological preferences, and the various influences encountered whilst undertaking the fieldwork. Burgess (1984) reminds us that knowing something of the biographical as well as the technical background to the research is likely to be extremely helpful in allowing the reader to make a fair evaluation of its authenticity. In Chapter 1 of this book I set the scene of the study by providing the reader with some insight into the concerns which initially prompted my interest in gender and education, the research strategy I adopted and the research questions I developed. I also discuss the theoretical background which has informed the study from the initial shaping of the research design to the final analysis and interretation of the findings. The methods which I selected were suggested both by my theoretical concerns and my political position as a feminist. Chapter 2 attempts to convey a sense of the physical location of the study, the classroom, staffrooms, towns and villages where pupils, parents and teachers generously offered me insight into their lives. I hope that from these early chapters, the central themes of the study will begin to emerge and take shape.

1

RESEARCHING GENDER AND CURRICULUM CHOICE

Theory, methods and research role

INTRODUCTION

The research which I describe here is rooted in my experience as a comprehensive school teacher in a county lying to the south west of England which I call Westshire. During the period of my life spent in the classroom between 1976 and 1983, I became fascinated by the significance of both the overt and the covert curriculum. Qualifications in particular subjects clearly acted as passports to various areas of work and higher education but also, at a more subtle level, the culture of each subject, even its physical location in the school, ranging from the factory atmosphere of the ‘heavy craft’ areas through to the cosy domesticity of the home economics room, carried powerful symbolic messages about the appropriate spheres of activity of women and men, working-class and middle-class pupils. In the early 1980s, when I began my research, at a national level the ‘gender spectrum’ in subject option choice was extremely marked. This is reflected, for example, in the secondary schools studied by Pratt, Bloomfield and Seale (1984), as well as in national statistics of gender differences in examination presentation (DES, 1981). Similar divisions were also apparent at Millbridge School in Westshire, a rural area in the south west of England where I was then working.

Along with many other comprehensives at the time, Millbridge offered a cafeteria style of option choice, where, within certain limits, pupils in their third year of secondary schooling were permitted to select their own curriculum from a wide range of subjects on offer. In view of this, the question of why so many pupils made such sex-stereotyped choices appeared even more puzzling, since at least at one level some degree of freedom of action appeared to be possible. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about the option choice system was the smoothness with which the whole process seemed to operate. Particular courses were offered by the school and were generally filled with approximately the right number and ‘type’ of pupils. But was the whole process as unproblematic as it might at first sight appear? An art teacher commented:

Makes you a bit suspicious, doesn’t it? The way that all the courses get filled up with the right number of pupils year after year.

It was the desire to investigate this puzzle which inspired me to embark on the research project which I describe here.

CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF THE RESEARCH

Many interesting studies in the sociology of education start out by asking questions which at first sight appear naive, but on reflection reveal important insights into how schools function within wider social systems. Willis (1977), for instance, begins by asking questions about why working-class kids get working-class jobs. More recently, Stanley (1989) introduces her study of comprehensive schooling by asking why fourth and fifth-year pupils persevere with examinations designed to fail 40 per cent of them. In the same way, the starting point of my research was the following question: Why do girls, and working-class girls in particular, continue to opt for a school curriculum which is likely to lead to their long term disadvantage in the labour market?

Clearly, in order to make sense of gender differentiation in the curriculum, it is necessary to understand both the ways in which pupils are actively engaged in the process of gender identity construction and also the filtering system constructed by the school through which they pass. A range of questions were thrown up by these considerations. Did girls still generally subscribe to traditional notions of femininity and did this account for the traditional choices which they made? Further, was there any evidence of change in the gender identity they were constructing, reflecting the changing nature of the labour market and more radical notions of femininity deriving from the women’s movement? Did the management of the option choice system by the school channel them, perhaps unwillingly, in conventional directions? In the context of the introduction of the national curriculum, was there likely to be a reduction in gender differentiation, or was the establishment of male and female curricula likely to continue in a relatively unimpeded manner? Further questions arose with regard to the influence of parents. Did these powerful figures subscribe to versions of masculinity and femininity which were broadly in line with those officially espoused by the school or were points of conflict likely to emerge and if so how were pupils to resolve these conflicting messages from home and school? With regard to individual teachers, could it be assumed that they would all support similar constructions of masculinity and femininity and how might divergent views be conveyed to pupils? By addressing these questions I hoped to discover whether pupils’ apparent compliance in the process could be accepted at face value, or whether the underlying reasons for the outcome of option choice required a more subtle explanation.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

My concern, then, was to analyse the part played by option choice in the cultural reproduction of gender and class and I was aware of the attempts made by earlier analysts to come to terms with these issues. In the 1970s, the most frequently offered explanations were variations of social or cultural reproduction theory. Althusser (1971) and Bowles and Gintis (1976) offered explanations of the way in which the school prepared young people to fit neatly into predefined work roles necessary for the capitalist economy. Bourdieu (1977) and Bernstein (1975) approached the issue of reproduction from a slightly different angle, examining how dominant class values, essential to the perpetuation of capitalist society, were reproduced. Researchers such as Willis (1977) rejected the view that the school merely rubber-stamps children in preparation for a particular position in the social formation. Arguing that pupils’ culture represents a vital ingredient in the process of social reproduction, Willis claimed that the lads featuring in his study were far from passive observers of their own destiny. Clearly, there were strong pressures on them to follow their fathers’ footsteps into hard manual labour, but at the same time it was essential to their sense of pride to feel that they were actively choosing this role for themselves and their adamant rejection of all things educational signified anything but passive compliance. Combining feminist understandings with the type of neo-marxist analysis employed by Willis, Anyon (1983) discusses how the culture of femininity is used by girls in school to both accommodate and resist aspects of the dominant ideology. According to Arnot and Whitty (1982), by stressing the transformative potential of the school, she avoids some of the deterministic pitfalls of neo-marxist analysis. Movement away from traditional marxist accounts of social reproduction theory is also evident in the work of Connell et al. (1982) who provide a rich sense of the scope for individual action which exists within structural constraints.

More recently, commentators such as Weis (1990) have gone even further in questioning the validity of social reproduction theory. She points out that the deindustrialisation of western societies has made it no longer useful for schools to produce boys ready to slot into traditional male working-class jobs of the hard manual variety and girls anticipating a lifetime of domesticity. Given the rapidly changing nature of the labour market, reproduction theory fails to describe adequately the processes at work in school or the wider society. Citing Touraine (1981), she suggests that it is no longer appropriate to envisage the struggle between labour and capital as the fundamental pivot of society. Rather, society is best understood as ‘a dynamic set of social movements – as the material accomplishment of conflicting groups struggling for control of the field of historical cultural action’ (p. 10). Although noting that it is not yet clear how the traditional working class is to define itself in relation to the rapid process of de-industrialisation currently occurring in the USA, Weis suggests that outcomes may be far less firmly circumscribed than they were in the past. In view of these changes, the task should now be to understand the nature and form of the production of self engaged in by young people in school. To investigate the ‘new ideology’ of the white working class she utilises a social action perspective.

The theoretical approach which I adopt here incorporates aspects of both social reproduction and social action perspectives. I explore the nature of actors’ rational decisions and the context within which these are made, whilst acknowledging the very powerful constraints on their actions. Pupils’ culture is clearly very important in the formation of group and individual identities and the way in which social movements impinge on the process of identity formation is also important. However, whilst acknowledging that individual identities and outcomes are not entirely predetermined, I feel that a danger of the social action perspective is that it loses sight of the structural constraints on action. For example, an important aspect of girls’ access to a wider range of jobs is a recognition that there is nothing inherent preventing them from working as a mechanic or an electrician or an engineer. But unless jobs are available in these areas, their aspirations cannot be fulfilled. It is also the case that some interactionist work underplays the importance of class, Although there are undeniably major changes currently taking place in the nature and identity of the working class linked to the erosion of the manufacturing base in Britain and many other western societies, this does not imply that class has lost all its power as an explanatory tool. In the following chapters I attempt to shed light on actors’ own accounts of their decisions, but also show how these diverge significantly along lines of gender and class.

At this point it is worth commenting briefly on the definition of gender and class which I have used. Oakley (1972) clarified the distinction between sex and gender, pointing out that whereas sex refers to biological differences between males and females, gender is a socially constructed category which may vary in different cultures and different historical periods. Recently, some commentators have suggested that women’s experience is now so diverse as to call into question whether the category ‘woman’ continues to be meaningful (Delmar, 1986). My aim in this book is to explore both the common ground and the differences which characterise the experiences of girls and women.

Since class is one of the major factors differentiating female experience, I have attempted to incorporate it into my analysis where appropriate. The definition I have used is broadly in line with the Registrar General’s classification of occupation, but takes mother’s as well as father’s occupation into account. Thus if one parent reported a middle-class occupation, then the family was defined as middle class. Further details are reported in the Appendix. This clearly differs from the view of class taken by Connell et al (1982). Although acknowledging that some state schools may contain a significant proportion of children from business or professional backgrounds, Connell et al. defined all the state schools in their study as working class because this was their predominant character. The private schools, on the other hand, were described as ruling class. Within the context of the Westshire schools where I was conducting my research, this classification would have been too simplistic, and I decided that it was appropriate to distinguish between working–class and middle-class families, although I do recognise that the Registrar General’s classification is something of a rough instrument. However, the importance of including some measure of class is underlined by Mitchell (1986). She comments that when she started her research in education in 1962, it was impossible to find data on gender; everything was broken down by class. Today, she says, precisely the reverse is the case. In so successfully focusing attention on the importance of gender, the women’s movement may have been complicit in official attempts to conceal the importance of social class. Although the major focus of this study is on gender and subject choice, I have attempted to indicate the salience of social class in influencing the different educational outcomes of girls and boys from different social backgrounds. In many parts of the country the links between race and gender also demand exploration, but in the Westshire schools, the minority ethnic population was almost nonexistent, and so this does not feature as a major focus of analysis.

PREVIOUS WORK ON GENDER AND CHOICE IN SCHOOLS

Turning from the macro- to the micro-theoretical background, this section explores the literature on schools and subject choice. My initial survey of the literature suggested that some studies of subject choice offered important insights into the way in which comprehensive schools continued to operate a system of social as well as educational selection, but concentrated on class rather than gender divisions (Woods, 1976; Ball, 1981). Other studies, such as Pratt et al. (1984); focused on the operation of option choice systems within schools and failed to look in depth at wider aspects of social reproduction in the classroom and the family.

Some feminist researchers, on the other hand, had come much closer to conceptualising curriculum choice in ways which took acount of both the social constraints on action and the propensity of individuals to take meaningful actions within these boundaries. Gaskell (1985), for instance, in her study of Canadian teenagers and ‘tracking’, pointed out that an analysis of the mechanisms by which young people negotiate their future paths within the school curriculum brings us to the heart of a major problem in social theory. It is not simply a matter of deciding whether pupils choose or are coerced in different situations, but rather of understanding the relationship between individual agency and social structure. Pointing to the work of Giddens (1979), Gaskell reminds us that even subordinate groups have some social power and are more than helpless pawns in a pre-decided game. Applying these understandings to the context of gender differentiation and option choice, I decided that my objective should be to understand the external forces which were shaping girls’ lives, also their perception of these constraints and the rational and creative strategies with which they responded.

Within the field of gender and education, it would appear that whilst earlier studies tended to reflect rather rigid notions of the overwhelming power of sex-role socialisation, implicitly adopting a deficit model to describe the behaviour of pupils and parents, more recent studies paid greater attention to the role of teachers, the school and education policies in general (Acker, 1987). Kelly (1987) describes the shift in the analysis of girls’ relative absence from science classes, arguing that recent work:

locates the fault at least partly within science, within schools or within society at large. These institutions must change to accommodate girls. Science is not an immutable ‘thing’, it is a socially constructed process which is produced in schools and laboratories in accordance with societal norms.

(Kelly, 1987 p. 1)

Reports of the GIST study (Whyte, 1986) and Kelly (1985) provide some fascinating insights into the potential of teachers to sabotage or facilitate equal opportunities initiatives, and I felt that there was a need for further exploration of teachers’ attitudes to gender equality policies.

In deciding that subject option choice should be the starting point for my investigation of gender identity construction, it also struck me that I would learn very little from sticking too narrowly to an analysis of what happened...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the Scene The Physical and Theoretical Context of the Study
• Part II School Organisation and the Construction of the Gendered Curriculum
• Part III Girls, Their Families and the Construction of Femininity
• Part IV The Impact of the National Curriculum on the Construction of Gender Divisions
• Appendix 1 The Conduct of the Research
• Appendix 2 Option Choice Schemes at the Two Schools
• References
• Index