Gender Pedagogy

Teaching, Learning and Tracing Gender in Higher Education

E. Henderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137428486
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428493
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

When addressed in its full reactive potential, gender has a tendency to unfix the reassuring certainties of education and academia. Gender pedagogy unfolds as an account of teaching gender learning that is rooted in Derrida's concept of the 'trace', reflecting the unfixing properties of gender and even shaking up academic knowledge production.

1

Introducing Gender Pedagogy in medias res

Abstract: Gender Pedagogy, as a contribution to the global discussion of gender, begins ‘in medias res’, or ‘straight into the middle of things’, with an invitation to the reader to construct their own narrative of gender studies. The introductory chapter continues on this path, questioning the standard practices of academic knowledge production – and the expected form of a ‘book’. Gender pedagogy is a strategy for teaching and learning gender in educational settings, but it is also conceptualised in this book as an ethos for research and writing.

Keywords: academic feminism; gender pedagogy; Gender Studies; higher education and gender

Henderson, Emily F. Gender Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning and Tracing Gender in Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137428493.0007.

Oh my God that was like- I didn’t even know there was a term for it but I knew it was happening all my life!

Anisha (Interview, 25 November 2011)

Even working for a development NGO working in gender, there are things I learned on the course which I never thought about. I now feel like I am seeing everything in a gendered way, and it’s new to me.

Tara (Interview, 27 April 2012)

I hear someone say, ‘The interesting thing is that there’s nothing interesting’, then she leaves the room, returning some time later with a coffee cup.

(Observation notes, face-to-face module, 23 November 2011)

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I was initially interested in studying gender but the [Kenyan university], where we were doing development studies at graduate level, gender ... was just a topic in one of the units ... , yeah so I wanted to do a course where I could get the unit in gender.

Nyakwar-Osuka (Interview, 2 April 2012)

I’m doing this Master’s for professional reasons, but it’s- it’s not just for that, it’s- I love studying just- just for the sake of studying, so having the chance to study this which is making me question myself is quite interesting.

Sally (Interview, 24 November 2011).

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I tell myself, ‘Here I am, paying £6,000 to hear my colleagues go on about their lives’.

Azadeh (Interview, 24 November 2011, translated by EFH)

I’m not sort of a wealthy individual, I’ve done it as a kind of investment in my own kind of development, um you do think, you know, ‘Crikey’, you know, ‘That’s- that’s a lot’.

Lily (Interview, 28 March 2012)

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I was definitely censoring um errr my sexuality um within the group, ... um the- um err the exact kind of- or- or- I guess the- the- the- indirect influencing factors around my own family that I wouldn’t necessarily want to go into with people.

Lucy (Interview, 7 December 2011)

That part of me – no I couldn’t put it down on [the Virtual Learning Environment].

Mary (Interview, 3 April 2012)

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In this group of eight students alone, [country] experience included Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Sierra Leone), Asia (China, India, Iran, Thailand), Australasia (Australia), Europe (France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, UK), North America (US), South America (Argentina, Guyana).

(Chapter 2, p. 26)

Gender pedagogy

There are innumerable possibilities for what ‘gender pedagogy’ might mean, but it was introduced to me in circumstances that opened a channel of resistance in my mind. I was teaching with Miriam David (cf. 2014) on the feminist pedagogies session of the ‘Gender Theory and Practice in Education’ (GTPE) Master’s module at the Institute of Education (IOE), led by Jessica Ringrose (now ‘Gender, Sexuality and Education’). At one point during the session, Miriam asked if the students had an idea of what feminist pedagogy would mean in a classroom setting. One of the students responded that she could think of what ‘gender pedagogy’ might be: a pedagogy that would seek to promote equality between boys and girls. I found myself thinking about this after the class, in particular in relation to the effect that replacing ‘feminist’ with ‘gender’ had on the term ‘pedagogy’: gender, used in this way, became about levelling out, homogenising, much as in the version of gender that has been adopted into some gender mainstreaming objectives. I was unhappy with the idea that this ‘gender’ would feature in a gender-related version of feminist pedagogy. I felt that this ‘gender’, with its mechanistic procedure, was one of the contributing factors to the widespread distrust of ‘gender’ as a contemporary term for feminist studies.

I wanted to reclaim some of the creative and politically reactive potential of the term ‘gender’ in order to put forward a notion of ‘gender pedagogy’ that would encompass both the legacy of feminist pedagogy and the less binarising, more fluid versions of ‘gender’ that are circulating in Gender Studies spaces.

To get a sense of whether this term, which I had never come across before, was in common usage, I looked up ‘gender pedagogy’ in academic databases and Internet search engines. I found that ‘gender pedagogy’ has currency in the Nordic context, Sweden in particular, but is also found in (Anglophone) academic and policy literature in relation to Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Russia, Burma, Pakistan, ‘Latin America’, the United States. It seems to be a term that applies gender equality objectives to the education sector; it is used in passing, without definition, in policy documents such as UNESCO’s Gender, Innovation and Education in Latin America (Jung & King, 1999), and Hungary’s National Strategy for the Promotion of Gender Equality (Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, 2010).

‘Gender pedagogy’ must be different from feminist pedagogy, in that it can be listed alongside, not instead of, feminist and other forms of critical pedagogy: ‘inclusive pedagogy, multicultural pedagogy, gender pedagogy and feminist pedagogy’ (Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour (Hungary), 2010, p. 35), ‘anti-racist pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, gender pedagogy, norm-critical pedagogy’ (Lundberg & Werner, 2012, p. 6). It can even be adjectivally inscribed with feminism: ‘feminist gender pedagogy’ (Hussénius, Andersson & Gullberg, 2012, p. 22).

Further searches have informed me that there has been a shift in, or perhaps proliferation of, the meaning of ‘gender pedagogy’. It seems that the term initially gained currency in the area of developmental psychology, in relation to ‘children’s emotional development’ (Hässler, 2010, n.p.); this viewpoint is represented in Jensen’s oft-cited (1996) discussion paper, Men as workers in childcare services. Jensen refers to the ‘Nordic debate’ around gender pedagogy (p. 15), where gender pedagogy is used to argue for girls and boys to be treated differently at pre-school, for example, based on their ‘specific gender behaviour’ (p. 20). This approach is intended to ‘oppose limited gender roles’ (p. 15) by developing respect for, rather devaluing, girls’ games with dolls, for example.

Gender pedagogy has shifted from (but perhaps not replaced) this approach, towards a conception that engages with the social construction of gender roles. At times this gender pedagogy is used to reinforce an equality agenda, where each individual should be treated equally (Askland, 2013; Volzhanova & Karmanchikov, 2013), as with the definition offered by the student in the GTPE classroom. There is also a version of gender pedagogy that, in addition to its expectation of equal treatment, challenges that which is ‘considered as “common sense” or “normal” ’ about gender and gendered roles (Cuesta & Witt, 2014, p. 12). Although my own conceptualisation of gender pedagogy developed independently from any awareness of this dispersed literature, my thinking is aligned with this latter understanding of gender pedagogy, which can be summarised as follows:

Gender pedagogy examines meanings of gender in the classroom. Intersectional gender pedagogy focuses on differences, power and inequality. (Lykke, 2012, p. 15, emphasis in original)

Gender Pedagogy is an exploration of the teaching and learning of gender, but it also aims to carry its ethos into the writing and reading experience; as such, Gender Pedagogy is its eponymous textual performance. One of the central tenets of my understanding of this pedagogy is to call into question the conventions of academic knowledge production, whether in the classroom or in the writing of a book. As such, the approach involves a constant movement between doing things and asking what doing those things in those ways does to those things. It is a feminist approach, in that it holds dear the advice given by generations of feminist scholars on how to go about transformative teaching and thinking. It is also a deconstructive approach, because it always wants to know what is shoring up the feminist approach to make it strong, in case what makes it strong also undermines its strength. The aim is not to undermine feminist thought in favour of a nihilistic, relativist perspective, as is commonly thought in relation to deconstructive politics. Rather, it is taken to be a productive space for feminist pedagogy to be vulnerable, for gender to be troubling, for the academic production of both to expose its own underbelly.

In this book, you will find that I continually interrupt and disrupt bookish conventions by inserting the voice of the narrator, whose refusal to let the narrative swirl smoothly onwards you might find increasingly abrasive. These interruptions, however, are a key element of the deconstructive pedagogy: when something seems natural, it becomes the object of suspicion. Indeed, when my interruptions too seem natural, you should begin to suspect the success of my project.

* * *

The quotations with which Gender Pedagogy began (pp. 2–3) are designed to set you on your way with your own narrative of gender studies. They are also a representation of the narrative that will be constructed in this book. This narrative has two broad strands, which are inseparably interwoven.

The first strand concerns questions of gender, and specifically aims to contribute to the conscious, and conscientious, shaping of the gender studies discipline (Hinds, Phoenix & Stacey, 1992b). Questions raised include: How does treating gender (as opposed to women) as a starting point for learning work? What does the process of learning look like, and what is learned? This strand, which is signalled by the first three quotations in the in medias res box, but which is also refracted through the other quotations, forms the backbone of this book. ‘Gender’, which is conceptualised, troubled and complicated in myriad ways in the analysis of bodies and identities, leads much less of an intricate conceptual existence as the marker of a domain of research and study. In this book, I bring the conceptual reactivity back to the gender that is found in the term ‘Gender Studies’, and ask what gender learning and teaching would look like if the troubling qualities that are present in its application to bodies and identities were also brought to bear on the exigencies of the discipline and its pedagogic enactment.

This project is carried out through the lens of a small-scale empirical study that looked in detail at students’ experiences of a discussion activity on a gender course that required them to engage with their colleagues in personal reflection on their families in relation to gender and education (Henderson, 2012). The course was entitled ‘Gender, Education and International Development’, led by Jenny Parkes. The micro-lens of the empirical study pans out to conceptualise gender learning and teaching in the conditions of higher education. This is where the second strand comes into play: how do gender learning and teaching play out in a higher education classroom that barely resembles the rooms in which feminist pedagogical strategies were developed? In addition to its troubling and unfixing qualities, ‘gender’ also brings with it neoliberalism’s students who are, according to the dominant discourses about global higher education, behaving more like consumers of a marketable product (Molesworth, Nixon & Scullion, 2011; Brown & Carasso, 2013; Cowden & Singh, 2013a). As you have seen from the quotations with which this chapter began, professionalisation, monetisation, technologisation and internationalisation are all discourses that students brought into their discussions of the gender course in which they were enrolled. By taking these forces into consideration in the theorisation of gender learning and teaching, this book aims to construct a conceptualisation in which both theoretical and material concerns are embedded.

The chapters of Gender Pedagogy accumulate the conceptualisation of this concept, but they also each comprise a discrete step in the self-conscious knowledge production of ‘gender pedagogy’. Chapter 2, ‘Researching Gender Pedagogy’ introduces the research study, the gender course and the students who participated in the study, but it also calls into question the use and presentation of empirical material. Chapter 3, ‘Tracing Paper’ provides the theoretical underpinnings of the analytical approach taken throughout the book, which is based on Derrida’s use of the concepts ‘presence’ and ‘trace’. The chapter sets out the theoretical application; the process of the application of theory is simultaneously interrogated for its assumptions. Chapter 4, ‘Gender’, focuses on the concept of gender in ‘Gender Studies’, all the while rejecting and querying the possibility of defining the term. Chapter 5, ‘Learning Gender’, looks at moments where students engaged in gender learning; these moments are recognised as intangible, inexpressible experiences of un-learning and having-already-learned. Chapter 6, ‘Feminist Gender Pedagogy’, explores the tenets of feminist pedagogy, and (dis)aligns gender learning from traditional feminist teaching. Chapter 7, ‘Gender Pedagogy’, feels the pressure on the ‘book’ to set off a row of fireworks. Instead, it buries its head in the noises that the students make when gendering their experiences, in order to reach for final thoughts on gender pedagogy. The concluding chapter, Chapter 8, ‘Invitation’, counters the tradition of ending with conclusions. Rather, the invitation that was issued earlier in this introduction is revisited as a final reflection on the book that Gender Pedagogy has turned out to be.

A ‘book’

This book began in medias res. Because of the ever-changing nature of ‘gender’, and the always-evolving domain of research and study that is known as ‘Gender Studies’, any published contribution to the global conversation about gender can only ever begin in this way. Rather than trying to defend the linear chronology or durability of a particular understanding of gender or ‘Gender Studies’, I am attempting to capture a moment of gender learning that is both contemporary and situated in long-standing questions and concerns.

The attempt to begin ‘in medias res’, ‘straight into the middle of things’, with a disjointed selection of quotations and issues, framed within a box, was intended as your re-enactment of the start of the writing process. How would you take these fragments and construct a narrative about gender studies today? Having begun in this way, I hope to never quite be able to catch up with you or your construction of the narrative. I, the writer, do not lie some way ahead, gesturing at you, the reader, to keep pace with the linear progression of my fully-formed document. This book is not the ‘natural totality’ that books try to be (Derrida, 1974, pp. 30–31; Derrida & Spivak, 1976, p. 18), but an invitation to share my discomfort with the book form, which every book, however resistant, ends up embodying.

Derrida writes that ‘the idea of the book’ indicates a sense of unity, of comple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introducing Gender Pedagogy in medias res
• 2  Researching Gender Pedagogy
• 3  Tracing Paper
• 4  Gender
• 5  Learning Gender
• 6  Feminist Gender Pedagogy
• 7  Gender Pedagogy
• 8  Invitation
• References
• Index