Girls, Single-Sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies


Book Description

Bringing together feminist theory, girlhood studies, and curriculum theory, this book contributes an in-depth critical analysis of curriculum in single-gender schooling for girls in postfeminist landscapes of "unlimited choices" and resurgences of proper girlhood. The arguments challenge the mainstream assumptions and promotions about the guarantees of female success via small school supports, tailored curricula, protection, school choice and class advantage. Single-gender schools are not homogenous; they have different histories, student populations, finances and organization. Recognizing this diversity, Girls, Single-sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies draws on rich data collected in two US secondary schools over a two-year period to identify and explore the ambiguities of success in single-sex schools for girls. Rich classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students reveal the resounding message delivered to girls - that they can "have it all" by going to college. By exploring students’ imaginings, hopes, and doubts around college, the text illustrates how this catalyzes girls’ critiques of their futures and of the schooled storylines of female success. While teachers might trumpet college, career, and limitless horizons, girls seek to understand their social positions and try to make sense of family, passions, and future happiness. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers, libraries in secondary education, girlhood studies, sociology of education, gender and sexuality in education, single-sex schooling, and feminist theory.







Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education


Book Description

This updated second edition unpacks the discussions surrounding the finest qualitative methods used in contemporary educational research. Bringing together scholars from around the world, this Handbook offers sophisticated insights into the theories and disciplinary approaches to qualitative study and the processes of data collection, analysis and representation, offering fresh ideas to inspire and re-invigorate researchers in educational research.




Mapping the Affective Turn in Education


Book Description

Passions are high in education, and this edited volume offers bold new ways to conceive of the affective intensities shaping our present historical moment. Concerns over school practices deemed "ineffective," "disruptive," "irrational," or even "promising" are matters modulated by and through feelings, such as, optimism, shame, enhanced concentration, or empathy. The recent turn to affect offers vibrant methodological and theoretical material for an educational present marked by high stakes rhetoric, heated debate, teacher and student vulnerabilities, and extreme educational measures. Affect studies are a part of new materialist and post-humanist turns, and this volume connects these new theoretical directions within education. This comprehensive volume on affect crosses educational subfields and responds to the transdisciplinary interest in thinking through pedagogy, education, and feeling. This comprehensive reader addresses affect in education from a wide range of styles, topics, and perspectives. This collection offers an introduction to theory, empirical research studies, interviews with affect studies scholars, and an assessment of the current and future significance of affect studies in education. Contributors utilize a range of theoretical and interpretive approaches to thinking with and through schooling phenomena. Interviews with affect scholars in the humanities and social sciences address affective dimensions of teaching. The editors’ introduction, different foci, and interdisciplinary genres of writing help readers feel their ways into what affect studies in education does and might do. This field-defining collection will be of interest to a range of readers--from graduate students to established scholars--with varying levels of expertise and familiarity putting affect theories to work in education. All the contributions are accessible to those new to the theory, methods, and debates in this vibrant area of educational studies.




Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl


Book Description

By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential. Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students’ everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking. This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book.




Latina Students’ Experiences in Public Schools


Book Description

Focusing on issues relating to gender, gender relations, and discrimination, this book provides nuanced insight into the experiences of young Latina women and their teachers in a North American middle school. Latina Students’ Experiences in Public Schools details how students navigate questions of gender, gender discrimination, and gender relations in the context of post-feminism, and in view of widespread claims that advocacy for girls and women has been outmoded by anti-discriminatory legislation. Drawing on an ethnographic study that focuses on gender segregation and dominance, relational identities, and the role of teachers in reinforcing gender dynamics, the text deftly demonstrates the effect of postfeminist policy and ideology on gender equity and achievement in public schools. In particular, the text illustrates that young Latina women continue to face both physical and verbal harassment on a daily basis, which is often overlooked by school faculty and administrators. A powerful and timely text, the volume advocates for action to counter school-based gender discrimination. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, policy makers, libraries in the field of gender and sexuality in education, gender studies, secondary education and urban education.




Internationalizing Curriculum Studies


Book Description

This book seeks to understand how to internationalize curriculum without imperializing or imposing the old, colonial, and so-called first-world conceptualizations of education, teaching, and learning. The collection draws on the groundbreaking work of Dwayne Huebner in order to invite scholars into conversation with histories of curriculum studies and to posit them within it, opening up new spaces to work in and through curricular issues. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students looking to reconceptualize international curriculum development and theory.




Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice


Book Description

Offering an examination of educational approaches to promote justice, this volume demonstrates the necessity for keeping race, ethnicity, class, language, and other diversities at the core of pedagogical strategies and theories that address queer, trans, gender nonbinary and related issues. Queer theory, trans theory, and intersectional theory have all sought to describe, create, and foster a sense of complex subjectivity and community, insisting on relationality and complexity as concepts and communities shift and change. Each theory has addressed exclusions from dominant practices and encouraged a sense of connection across struggles. This collection brings these crucial theories together to inform pedagogies across a wide array of contexts of formal education and community-based educational settings. Seeking to push at the edges of how we teach and learn across subjectivities and communities, authors in this volume show that theories inform practice and practice informs theory—but this takes careful attention, reflexivity, and commitment. This scholarly text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, teachers, libraries and policy makers in the field of Gender and Sexuality in Education, LGBTQ studies, Multicultural Education and Sociology of Education.




Lad Culture in Higher Education


Book Description

Responding to increasing concerns about the harmful effects of so-called ‘lad culture’ in British universities, and related ‘bro’ and ‘frat’ cultures in US colleges, this book is the first to explore and analyse the perspectives of university staff on these cultures, which students suggest foster the normalisation of sexism, homophobia, racism, sexual harassment and violence. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a broad range of staff and faculty across different types of universities in England, the book explores the following key questions: What is lad culture? How and where is it manifest in higher education and what are the effects on students and staff? How can ‘laddish’ behaviour be explained? How can we theorise lad culture to enable us to better understand and challenge it? How do dynamics in the United Kingdom compare to so-called ‘bro’ and ‘frat’ cultures in US colleges? By examining the ways in which lad culture is understood and explained, the authors illustrate that current understandings of lad culture obscure the broader processes through which problematic attitudes, practices, and educational climates are fostered. This analysis enables a theorisation of lad culture that makes visible the gendered norms and intersecting structural inequalities that underpin it. This timely and accessible volume will be of great interest to anyone looking to understand and tackle sexism, sexual harassment and violence in and beyond university contexts. It will be of particular significance to researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics, and policy makers in the fields of gender and sexuality in education, higher education, and sociology of education.




An Ethnography in an Irish Girls Secondary School


Book Description

Based on an ethnographic study, this book explores the cultural experiences of a group of Irish 6th year girls. Facing the high stakes Leaving Certificate examinations while on the cusp of adulthood, this study contributes to the agency-structure debate from a feminist perspective. Findings elicit insights into incidences of social and cultural reproduction with hegemony evident in visible and invisible ways among the cultural group. This ethnography describes how a group of girls navigate this territory in school. It explores the effects of the personal, group and institutional habitus that mediate the girls’ everyday interactions. The girls’ peer interactions and contextual experiences serve as an explanatory framework, which references how power is shared, wielded and resisted among the myriad of relationships within the school. The school life of the girls is described at an individual and group level with themes such as friendship, conformity, resistance and alienation discussed, within the framework of school life. Findings related to youth culture and identities elicit challenges for the girls as they manage the duality of adolescence and scholarly endeavour.