|
From Equity to Identity:
A Shift in Focus in Gender and Science Education Studies
從平等到認同：性別議題與科學教育研究的轉向
蔡麗玲，加拿大英屬哥倫比亞大學博士候選人©版權所有
論文初稿，請勿轉載引用
摘 要
這篇文章主要在指出，近年來性別與科學教育研究的提問重心，已從追求平等轉變為探勘自我認同。這樣的轉變，並不是由後者取代前者，反而是透過自我認同的研究來細緻化科學教育中性別平等的追求。這篇文章以耙梳科學與性別以及科學教育與性別兩領域的文獻來探討此一轉變。
本篇文章共分成五部分。第一部份「女性主義對科學的反省」探討的珊卓哈定(Sandra
Harding)所謂的「女性主義裡的科學問題」來指出實證科學的困境。哈定(1986)曾指出，性別與科學研究的焦點，已從所謂的「科學裡的女人問題」擴展到「女性主義裡的科學問題」。前者關心的是科學界裡為何女性偏少，造成這種現象的原因有哪些。不過，筆者認為，這樣的提問有將問題的負擔放在女性身上的傾向。後者則將問題負擔改為放在科學身上，質問實證科學本質裡的西方中產階級男性傳統，如何轉變為對女性不利的因素，並且探討另類科學建構如何可以對目前的科學發展有貢獻。本文第一部份便是探討哈定的「科學問題」來呈現認識論與方法論上的科學辯論，例如怎樣的學問才算科學，女性主義科學有可能嗎？第二部分「科學教與學的性別議題」則是列舉科學教育的性別研究如何著重在哈定所謂的「女人問題」。在這些研究中，研究重點在於追求科學教育中兩性平等，並以此發展出一些相關方案來降低不平等。但是這些方案所落的批評是，它們對科學本質沒有提出挑戰。第三部份「性別包容式的科學與其後結構轉向」則介紹了較近且較廣為接受的性別與科學教育研究的發展，即所謂「性別包容式的科學」。這個發展明顯企圖將哈定的兩個問題融合在一起處理，並也因為如此，而在發展後期呈現出後結構主義女性主義的影響，而開始專注於認同問題。第四部分「科學教育裡的認同問題」我利用最近幾位女性主義科學教育學者在認同議題上的研究，來指出認同問題在科學教育中的重要性。在最後一部份，我則歸納並提出認同研究所面臨的挑戰，以及它在了解個人抉擇科學與否時的貢獻。
Abstract
In this paper, I argue
that a shift in focus from equity to identity in gender and
science education studies has emerged in recent years. This
shift is not a simple replacement of one term for another;
instead it involves reformulating equity projects through the
notions of identity. To explicate such shift, this paper traces
major themes in the discussions regarding gender and science and
gender and science education.
The first section of this
paper, “Feminist Reflections on the Sciences,” discusses what
Sandra Harding calls “the science question in feminism” to
examine the problems with positivist sciences. Sandra Harding
(1986) points out that gender and science research has extended
its focus on “the woman question in science” to a focus on “the
science question in feminism.” The former highlights concerns
regarding why so few women remain in sciences and how we can
identify factors that disadvantage women and improve the
situation. The latter, instead of problematizing women in their
participation, problematizes science itself, criticizes its
positivist, narrow nature that involves Western, bourgeois,
masculine projects, and ask how it can benefit from a feminist
reconstruction of a different “science.” The first section of
this paper adopts Harding’s “science question” and employs
feminist perspectives to discuss both epistemological and
methodological concerns about what counts as science and whether
this is feminist science(s). In the second section “Gender
Issues in Science Teaching and Learning,” I show how “the women
question in science” has manifested at school level and
concerned many feminist science educators. In their research,
“the women question in science” is mostly discussed as a matter
of gender inequity and several correspondent remedies are
proposed to mitigate such inequity without adequate challenging
the nature of positivist science. In the third section “Gender
Inclusive Science and Its Poststructuralist Turn,” I trace the
development of the “gender-inclusive science” as a more recent
and commonly accepted model that aims to combine thoughts and
discussions from both the science question in feminism and the
women question in science. In this development, a feminist
poststructuralist turn clearly emerges that leads to a focus on
“identity study” in science education among feminist scholars.
In the fourth section “How Identity Issues Matter in Science
Education,” I review several feminist science educators’ recent
research on identity issues in science learning and teaching and
explain how and why identity issues matter in science and
science education. Finally, I argue that shift in focus of
gender and science education studies from equity to identity
requires further investigation of how identity plays a
significant role in individuals’ decision-making regarding
gender and science.
Feminist Reflections on
the Sciences
The Problems With
Positivist Science
Evelyn Fox Keller,
as a prominent pioneer of the feminist critiques of science, has
laid out several major problems that arose from the male
dominance of positivist science. Her work can be seen as a
foundation of the feminist criticism of science on which later
criticisms are based. In her classic work “Feminism and
Science,” Keller (1989a) argues that feminist and minority
critiques of science could be arranged on a four-point continuum
from liberal to radical, and the four points all pinpoint
science’s strong androcentric bias.
The first critique
proceeds from the basic observation that almost all scientists
are men and leads to inquiries such as “Women in science: Why so
few.” Because of the apparent unequal numbers, advocating the
recruiting of more women and girls into science became a major
theme in the equity project, especially in the 1970s in North
America. However, as Keller points out, even with a critical
concern of equity, such kinds of solutions usually consist of a
liberal project that demands ways for girls and women to
gain equal access to the range and depth of positivist science
that are already available to boys and men. The problem with
this liberal approach is that its focus on numerical equity does
not challenge traditional conceptions of science. In this
approach, women can well be recruited to serve as “substitute”
manpower. If this is the case, why recruit women? Thus, how the
presence or absence of women may affect the nature of science
requires more and deeper examination of the nature of science.
Compared to the other three critiques Keller identifies, this
first approach is the least radical. However, this liberal
approach is taken by many influential associations and
institutions in the US such as the AAAS (American Association
for the Advancement of Science) and the NSTA (National Science
Teachers Association). The NRC (National Research Council) has
also made this approach explicit in its national Science
Education Standards (Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998). This kind of
“compensatory” strategy to treat disadvantaged people with the
aim of enabling them to “measure up” to an established standard
already set by the advantaged group is in fact functioning to
perpetuate the system that is supposedly to be questioned.
The second and slightly
more radical critique is that the predominance of men has led to
a bias in the choices and definitions of the questions with
which scientists have concerned themselves. For example,
menstrual cramps, a serious problem for many women, have never
been taken seriously by the medical profession; a second example
is that early contraception research focused primarily on
contraceptive techniques to be used by women, research that
caused many problems with women’s bodies. Such critique has
helped to locate similar bias in many science research projects,
in the process appealing to more women’s participation in
science in order to redefine and reframe what science questions
are worth doing. But, as Keller has also pointed out, this
approach still does not touch the very conception of what counts
as science. A fundamental critique of science takes more than
expanding the choices and definitions of scientific questions.
The predominance of men
also leads to the third problem that the actual designs and
interpretations of experiments are gender-biased. For example,
virtually all of the animal-learning research on rats has been
performed with male rats while the female ones are excluded
because, the male scientists alleged, their biological cycle
would “complicate” the experiments. Also, in primatology, the
common descriptions of male-female interaction in a primate
troop was dominated by the majority male researchers who viewed
the only male in a troop as the troop leader, an assumption
generated from the bias of privileged white males’ social
status. Only until later research, a few female researchers
demonstrate that the social organisation of some primate troops
is better explained by matriarchy and that female primates tend
not to limit their sexuality to one male. In this new
interpretation, the male role in a troop can be very minimal if
its only role is to provide necessary materials for females’
offspring.
The fourth form of
critique, moving away from the liberal domain, focuses on
scientific ideology itself. It questions the very assumptions of
objectivity and rationality that underlie the scientific
enterprise. Tracing the dualism and dichotomy that arose from
the Western Enlightenment, Keller points out the problems in
modern positivist science: the division of
emotional/intellectual labour, the demarcation of mind/nature,
and the split of subject/object (1985). In Western science,
impersonality, detachment, and objectivity are valued
exclusively and other human resources such as personal
intuitions, feelings, and connectedness are discarded in order
to comply with the scientific rationale. The repudiation of
these resources derives precisely from the conventional naming
of science as “masculine,” coupled with the equally conventional
naming of these resources as “feminine” (Keller, 1989b, p.38).
This asymmetric assignment colludes and resonates with social
and cultural practices where masculinity is usually assigned to
the male and femininity to the female. This asymmetric
assignment also at the same time buttresses the unequal power
politics of gender in science. Barbara McClintock’s success has
shown that the so-called “feminine” values are equally important
in contributing to the advancement of science that improves
human being’s lives (Keller, 1983). With Keller’s reclamation of
the so-called “feminine” resources, later researchers informed
by feminist poststructuralism and postmodernism have tried to
place criticism of such positivist science outside of this
masculine/feminine trap (see Haraway, 1991). Instead of claiming
to produce a universal knowledge, processes leading to situated
knowing are much more pertinent and appreciated among feminists
concerned about the nature of science.
Sandra Harding (1986,
1991) has taken the task of reflecting upon objectivity in
science, especially from a philosophical perspective. She
questions the conventional unchallenged epistemology and
methodology of science and argues that objectivity as its
foundation is based on a nature/mind dichotomy and is developed
among a particular science community in seventeenth century
Europe. Thus this kind of science does not reflect the ultimate
criteria of objectivity but presents the interests of a small
group, namely western middle-class males. In this sense, she
argues that “the natural sciences are a particular kind of
social science” (1991, p. 309) and their objectivity is indeed a
“weak objectivity.” Further, this kind of science functions as a
“truth regime,” in Foucauldian terms, that oppresses other forms
of knowledge production through alternative routes by other
cultural and social groups. These other forms of science are
exactly the resources by which the “weak objectivity” can be
improved to a “strong objectivity” (1991, 1993), in which what
counts as science and how to achieve scientific knowledge are
evolved from various gender, class, racial, economic, political
groups’ experiences.
Harding further proposes
“standpoint epistemology” as an epistemological framework to
achieve “strong objectivity.” Contrasting with “empiricist
epistemology” with which researchers try to be detached and
aloof and pretend to be objective and invisible, the knowing
subject in standpoint epistemology is embodied and visible;
subjects and objects of knowledge are fundamentally connected
rather than separated; knowledge is produced by communities
rather than by individuals; and subjects of knowledge are
multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory rather than
homogeneous, unitary, and coherent. Ultimately, standpoint
epistemology refers to the distinctive ways of generating
scientific knowledge for distinctive groups of people according
to their very distinctive living contexts, i.e. their situated
natural and cultural locations (Harding, 1997).
Keller and Harding’s work
is innovative but also integrated with work of other feminist
science critics’ such as Helen Longino, Donna Haraway, Ruth
Ginzberg and others. While others have paid attentions to issues
other than gender and science, Keller’s and Harding’s works are
the most focused on the nature, ideology, and language of
science. Although they have received criticism from an
anti-postmodernist camp that consists of several scientists and
researchers who launched the “science-war” (see Gross & Levitt,
1994; Koertge, 1998), their work remains firmly influential and
is cited in almost every piece of work on gender and science
education.
In addition feminist
scientists such as Keller and science philosophers such as
Harding, ecofeminists are also gravely concerned about the
consequences of the use of modern science and technologies. The
economic development of the so-called “first world” and their
subsequent political power expansion are usually pushed forward
by massive uses of contemporary science and technologies that
are used as the vehicle to intruding the “third world” in the
name of helping them “develop.” At times, the third world
countries’ economics have not yet “improved” but women and
children in these countries have become victims of such
“development.” Women are losing their cultural possessions of
land and their traditional living skills for survival. Vandana
Shiva (1988) challenges the myth that the third world
should/must “catch up” to developed countries and argues that
women and nature are marginalized and exploited by such kinds of
development—a process she argues should more aptly be described
as “mal-development.” She explores the unique place of Indian
women in their natural environment and contends that women are
the victims of this mal-development as well as its saviours. Her
analysis shows how these women's efforts constitute a
non-violent and humanly inclusive alternative to the dominant
paradigm of the massive use of contemporary science and
technologies.
These critiques and
discussions over the nature, ideology, and usage of science are
important because only after a thorough scrutiny on what kind of
science is worth pursuing can one justifies advocacy and the
necessity to recruit more girls and women into science. Getting
more females into science should not become a slogan that
functions to reproduced a colonized womanpower to uphold the
existing system but should be a means to achieve critical mass
of women that can potentially change the nature and practice of
science from within. A thorough discussion of the nature and
ideology of science can provide necessary conceptual tools for
feminist scientists to construct an alternative science.
Priority of science research inquiry should be given to women
and other historically subjugated groups through contested
epistemologies and methodologies and based on feminist
standpoint theories.
Debating Feminist
Science(s)
Several scholars have
debated the idea of “feminist science,” either in a singular
form that refers to its generic meaning, or in a plural form
that deliberately points to a multiplicity of knowledge(s). In
these debates, feminist scholars present four approaches to
conceptualize for or against the idea of feminist
science. I present the arguments of Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen
Longino, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway as they are the
leading figures in these four approaches.
Evelyn Fox Keller
advocates adding the traditionally disvalued qualities in
science such as feeling, empathy, affection, eroticism, and
intimacy to the existing dualist and dichotomist objectivity and
proposes a “dynamic objectivity” to replace it. Although she
presents McClintock’s story as an example, she does not approve
the idea of a feminist science. For Keller, feminist science
conveys the notion of a “separate reality” (1989b, p.42) and
places women scientists in a disadvantaged place:
To ask women scientists to
accept the notion of a different science representing a
different reality would be to ask them to give up their identity
as scientists—in much the same way, incidentally, that
traditional science has asked them to give up their identity as
women. (p. 42)
Keller encourages women
scientists to read McClintock’s success not as an invitation to
rebellion, but as evidence of legitimacy of difference within
the established criteria of scientific truth and as making room
within the prevailing canon to accommodate different questions,
different methodologies, and different interpretations. The
issue of an alternative science, for Keller, is to seek a larger
canon rather than a different one.
Keller’s focus on the
content of science has received critiques from other feminists
(Harding, 1986) contending that she ignores the social,
political, economic constraints that a different or female
scientist has to face. McClintock’s success does not guarantee
other female scientists’ successes. Feminist critiques of
science should also focus on why some research projects receive
recognitions but others do not. What made McClintock’s work
invisible for thirty years then suddenly become visible and won
her a Nobel Prize? These challenges direct feminists’ concerns
to the contexts of scientific knowledge production.
In contrast to Keller’s
content-oriented approach, Helen Longino proposes a
context-oriented approach to the debate, and she also cautions
against the idea of a feminist science. Longino (1989) pointed
out that the current social, cultural, and political environment
for doing science is not friendly to a woman scientist’s
alternative science making, or to any scientist trying to do
science differently. Doing science differently requires more
than just the will to do so, and scientific inquiry takes place
in a social, political and economic context that imposes a
variety of institutional obstacles to innovation. In her
opinion, science must be seen as practice rather than as
content. Instead of pursuing a feminist science, one should
believe that, in principle, it is possible to do science as a
feminist, but in practice, it is impossible until the current
conditions are changed.
On the contrary, Sandra
Harding is more optimistic and committed to the development of
feminist science(s). For Harding, the purpose of proposing
"feminist science" is not to create a kind of women's science or
a feminine version of science; nor does it refers to a singular
separate reality that merely trades one absolutism for another,
about which Longino has expressed concern (1989). Rather, the
central concern and essential concepts of feminist sciences
should focus on the processes (how) and the purposes (why) of
knowledge making. In a sense, she also focuses on the
contextual—social, cultural, and political—backgrounds that
influence the construction of western science. Harding argues
for feminist sciences from a two-pronged approach, one focused
on methodology and the other on epistemology. Methodologically,
doing feminist sciences requires “strong objectivity” that
requires systematic examination of scientists' assumptions and
beliefs in the doing of science, which means scrutinizing the
constraints and resources allocated to form scientists' beliefs
within historically located social relations (1991).
Epistemologically, feminist sciences require “feminist
standpoint epistemology” and it is legitimate at the current
stage to place priority on science questions generated from
lives of women and minorities. Because they are historically and
politically subjugated groups and modern science owes them
spaces in the science inquiries, it is imperative to gain
knowledge from the subjugated to refine and maximize
“objectivity” in order to produce plural knowledges that are for
marginalized people (Harding, 1993). Feminism and other
liberatory projects support each other in their fight against
dominant values and against knowledge that favours dominant
groups. This thought leads to a discussion of the fourth
approach: constructing feminist sciences as situated knowledges.
Donna Haraway’s (1991)
take in this debate does not answer directly whether she agrees
or opposes the idea of feminist sciences but further pushes
forward the conceptualization of Harding’s “strong objectivity.”
Haraway introduces an advanced poststructuralist perspective
into the discussion by stating that “feminist objectivity means
quite simply situated knowledges” (p. 188). For Haraway,
feminist sciences are partial, situated knowledges generated by
the “positioning” of the split subjects; only partial
perspectives promise objective vision. The knowing
subject, she argues, is a split and contradictory self, and the
known object is a witty agent. This view of feminist sciences
focuses on capricious subjects’ partial, limited knowing of
equally capricious objects as actors/agents. Haraway’s
conceptualization of situated knowledges has pushed the debate
of feminist sciences out of the concerns of absolutism, separate
reality, essentialism and monolithicity. She opens up the next
scene of feminist science debate yet to be imagined by new
feminist science study researchers and feminist science
educators of the next generation.
Other Strategies
Other feminist strategies
to explore gender issues in science involve disputing the
conventional discourse of women’s under-representation in
science, recognizing the vast amount of scientific work that
women have done, thus reclaiming the term “women’s science.” For
example, in her study of the early history of women in
university physics departments in the Toronto area in Canada,
Alison Prentice (1996, 1999) challenges the problematic use of
the term “non-traditional” in describing physics as women’s
career choices. She argues that women have historically occupied
a fairly high percentage in the faculty of the physics
departments in the Toronto area. Science only became a
“non-traditional” choice for girls after World War II. Margaret
Rossiter (1995) points out that, starting around 1954-1955 in
the US, there was a sudden explosion of discourse urging women
to study science, primarily in order to become laboratory
workers or assistants, while at the same time these discourses
functioned to restrict and minimize the roles they might play
and to make sure any increase of scientific womanpower could be
safely channeled into traditional feminized roles. Women in
these sectors, recruited into science but moved to the margin,
are usually not counted as scientists. Eisenhart and Finkel
(1998) investigated the places where women succeed in science
and the places they go when they leave what she calls “elite
science.” She found that remarkably high proportions of women in
environmental action groups and nonprofit conservation agencies
are utilizing their scientific abilities and labels this kind of
science as “women’s science.” This use of the term “women’s
science,” though, is tricky because it falls into the tension
between giving women adequate recognition for their contribution
to science and subscribing to a binaristic and possibly
essentialist dichotomy of women’s science or men’s science.
Gender Issues in Science
Teaching and Learning
Research on gender issues
conducted in school contexts is usually concerned with the
“women question in science”—why are there fewer women than men
choosing science as one of their school subjects? Although the
overall female percentages in school science classrooms in the
Euro-American contexts have been gradually but slowly increasing
in the past three decades, the percentage differences among
biology, chemistry, and physics indicate that further refined
research is necessary to discern what is happening in different
subjects. In the following paragraphs, I investigate previous
research of the women question conducted in the contexts of UK,
US, Australia, and Canada to show that their research topics
usually follow one or both of two major themes: the factor
search and the remedy search. The factor search involves how
educators can identify factors that disadvantage women in their
learning of science; the remedy search involves projects to
improve such situations. In the factor search, I present two
models proposed by Nancy Brickhouse—the deficit model and the
inferior treatment model. In the remedy search, I discuss
several projects corresponding to the call for fairer treatment.
Factor Search: The Deficit
Model and the Inferior Treatment Model
Nancy Brickhouse (1994)
has pointed out that the equity project in science education can
be categorized into two models: the deficit model and the
inferior treatment model. To explain the differences in the
achievement and participation in science between females and
males, earlier diagnoses picked up an deficit model, asserting
that girls lack the cognitive ability to do science and only
very few exceptional women can “handle” it. Although some social
scientists have criticized this model as being sexist, it is
unfortunately still a common perception taken by many male
professors and students in science and engineering departments,
especially when they look around and find very few women in
their disciplines. It is also a popular explanatory model for
the gendered achievement gap in contemporary international
tests. The fundamental problem of this model is that it does not
challenge the existing authority and the inequity caused by the
system but blames the victims of the system.
This model also reflected
a general sexist tendency of research of gender disparity in
education in the 1970s. Strategies for changing such disparity
were usually based on sex role socialization theory and tended
to focus on changing girls rather than changing curricula. They
focus on how we might act upon girls to shape them differently;
how to make them more autonomous; how to change their attitudes;
how to give them self-esteem; how to make them want to do math
and science. On contesting the scholarship of “fixing” girls’
self-esteem, Kenway, Willis, and Nevard (1990) have pointed out
the problematic conceptualization of such strategies as they
blame girls’ “deficient” and “victim” status; rest the burden of
change on girls, as if it is girls’ “inadequacy” that needs to
be mended. These strategies have the problem of seeking to
change the individual rather than the social. Individuals may
perceive themselves as causing the problem while the gender
power structures are left unchallenged.
In the late 1980’ to the
early 1990’, the equity project of gender and science has
finally changed from asking why girls “couldn’t” do science to
why girls “won’t” do science. This change of approach resonates
the similar change of approach in studies of gender and math
(Willis, 1989) in the same era. Scholars began to ask questions
about what happens in classrooms and schools that contributes to
the gender disparity in science and what kind of inferior or
inequitable treatment is happening to discourage girls’
participation in science. Focusing specifically on the school
context, Alison Kelly (1985a) has located three ways in which
schools contribute to the construction of science’s masculine
image. The first and the most obvious is the numbers—the image
of a disproportionately large numbers of males who study and
teach science has caused difficulties for girls to identify with
such a career. Secondly, there is a masculine bias in the
presentation and packaging of curriculum materials. The way
science is presented, the language it uses, and the examples and
applications it addresses imply science to be masculine and,
especially, military. Thirdly, classroom behaviours and
interactions often present elements of both masculinity and
femininity that are developed in out-of-school contexts and are
transformed into classrooms in ways that establish science as a
male preserve.
Following Kelly’s layout,
researchers have identified several factors that affect girls’
science learning and career choices, including gender
stereotypes in teacher-student interactions, classroom dynamics,
issues of sexual attractiveness, and the biased methods of
assessment. For example, researchers have found that both female
and male students consider science as more appropriate and
important for boys than for girls, and students’ impressions of
the traits of scientists are more often associated with
masculinity than with femininity (Kahle & Meece, 1994; Sadker &
Sadker, 1994). Teachers rated boys’ work higher than the same
work done by girls; if girls’ work was praised, it was more
likely because of its neat presentation rather than its
substantive content (Spear, 1987a,b). Jones and Wheatley (1990)
observed that females were called on less often in class and
were asked fewer questions. In Taiwan, She (1998) reports
similar findings in a female teacher's science classroom
indicating that even female science teachers would teach in ways
that favour boys. This research suggests that, although female
science teachers may be role models for female students, their
presence does not guarantee that female students are sitting in
a classroom with less gender stereotypes. This finding resonates
with another finding in British Columbia, Canada that most
female teachers do not consciously make a special effort to
reach female students (Gaskell, Mclaren, Oberg, & Eyre., 1993).
For sexual image issues, Head’s (1987) earlier study found that
girls who choose science are considered socially and sexually
less attractive while this factor is still recently reported as
a factor affecting girls’ choices in science. For example,
Priest (2000) reports that girls gifted in science and maths are
at high risk of playing to gender stereotypes and hiding their
talents. When asked why they dropped out of their gifted
programs in grade 7 and 8, these girls replied that being gifted
was not a quality that boys found attractive. Giftedness and
femininity are not considered compatible in conventional social
and gender codes. Walkerdine (1989) also points out that in
school assessment, femininity is equated with poor performance,
even when the girl is performing no less well. Assessment
studies have long shown that students’ performance on
traditional assessment may be largely attributed to gender and
personality traits rather than to knowledge and understanding (Kahel
& Lakes, 1983). Murphy (1996) also found that female students
often feel alienated from traditional assessment techniques and
she sought for alternative strategies.
Remedy Search: Remedies to
Ameliorate Gender Inequity in Science Education
Some researchers suggest
that all-girl classes or all-girl schools might be a solution to
the problem of gender stereotypes. Early research has documented
that girls in single-sex schools view physics and chemistry as
less masculine than girls in mixed schools (Ormerod, 1975;
Vockell & Lobanc, 1981). In a more recent study, researchers
found that a much larger percentage of girls at the all-girl
schools chose to enrol in science courses than did girls in
mixed-sex public schools (Campbell and Evans, 1993). It seems
that social roles and gender stereotyping can be partially
ameliorated in this kind of classroom setting. However,
Guzzetti's (1998) study shows that girls' success in all-girls
grouping does not persist once they join mixed-sex groups as the
gender codes and gendered expectations start to function among
male and female students. Further, Kenway and Willis (1998) have
pointed out that single-sex classes for girls were often read as
re-inscribing girls to traditional femininity. Same-sex
schooling settings solve gender stereotypes in some ways but
induce and reinforce others.
Other remedies have
attempted to repackage science in ways that will attract more
females. For example, “girl-friendly science” was an idea first
used at the first GASAT (Gender And Science And Technology)
conference in 1981(Raat, Harding & Mottier, 1981). Its goals
included applying women’s ways of knowing into teaching, making
course content and pedagogy less alienating for women, and
warming up the classroom climate for women. For example, Smail
(1984) proposes developing a nurturing science curriculum that
focuses on “relationships,” “people,” and creating a “network
world view” in order to avoid the sex bias in the old curriculum
and classroom dynamics. Smail (1987) also advocates an inclusion
of real-life examples and introduction to related career
opportunities in order to encourage girls to give physics a
second chance. Jan Harding (1985) suggests changing curricular
presentation according to social contexts to make science more
acceptable to girls. These remedies are working on the dichotomy
of femininity versus masculinity and the assumption of women
being more relational and men more detached.
However, as Jan Harding
has pointed out, over time, girl-friendly science became
associated with a perception that, for various reasons, science
had to be made easier for girls. Consequently, girl-friendly
science came to be perceived as low status science and started
losing momentum (Parker, 1994). Moreover, this program is
labelled as a “superficial ploy” and is criticized as merely
being concerned with giving girls a “fair deal” (Bentley and
Watt, 1986:124). Many scholars pointed out that it leaves the
very masculinity of the content and style of science untouched
or unchallenged (Bentley & Watt, 1986; McLaren & Gaskell, 1995;
Kenway & Gough, 1998). In fact, repackaging science with a
traditional assignment of gender roles did not succeed in
attracting girls into science. Teaching air pressure with vacuum
cleaners, heat-transfer with cooking, electric circuitry with
domestic wiring, and energy changes within the household (Kelly,
1976) reinforces gender stereotypes. In the GIST1
project, Kelly (1985b) discovered that girls were less
enthusiastic than boys about learning how a vacuum cleaner works
and that girls were not particularly keen to find out what
baking powder does.
The approach of
girl-friendly science has later become “female-friendly science”
and was adopted and promoted by Sue Rosser (1990, 1997). Rosser
contends that the evolution of female friendly science can be
seen as “phase theory.” She proposes a six-stage model for
curriculum transformation to facilitate the inclusion of more
women and men of color into science. However, her linear stage
model still sees women as the problem and calls for a liberal
project of “adding in” women and women’s perspectives into
science. In the final stage, her goal is to utilize womanpower
to “expand” and “improve” the quality of existing science but
not fundamentally challenge its nature and ideology, its
historical assumptions and its political structure. Nancy
Krienberg and Sue Lewis (1996) also adopt a similar approach and
propose to redefine science towards a “transformed,
reconstructed gender-free [science] curriculum” (p. 197). The
introduction of a “gender-free” curriculum indicates a return to
and a re-embrace of the heavily-criticized objectivist model of
modern science; no mention that the dream of any gender-free
item is incomprehensible and impossible in a poststructuralist
era.
Solving the women question
in science has its value in promoting women’s participation to
reach a critical mass in science for possible change; it also
has value in raising gender consciousness among female
scientists. The rationale behind this manoeuvre, however, is one
of liberalism. Seeking liberal equity must accompany a thorough
examination of the nature and ideology of science, the role of
science in a broader political economic context, and the
identities of scientists as science practitioners.
Gender Inclusive Science
and Its Poststructuralist Turn
Gender Inclusive Science
A more recent trend
brought into discussions about gender and science education
reform is “gender-inclusive science.” This trend carries general
responses to Keller’s (1985) eloquent criticism on the symbolic
and characteristic masculinity of modern science, and Harding’s
(1991) advocacy in applying standpoint epistemology to stress
women’s and minorities’ experiences in the development of a
feminist science with a “strong objectivity.” At first, starting
from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the conceptual framework
of gender-inclusive science focused on two parts: inclusion in
gender and strategies to achieve such inclusion; and reflections
on the nature of science and science education.
The first part emphasizes
the active inclusion of girls into science, to engage them to
ask scientific questions relevant to their lives, to value what
they can bring to science classrooms, and to develop
corresponding teaching strategies for teacher education. Many
feminist science educators have endeavored to make
“gender-inclusive” science education a more developed and
accepted term within research communities (e.g., Haggerty, 1996;
Harding & Parker, 1995; Hildebrand, 1989; McClintock Collective
1988; Roychoudhury, Tippins, & Nichols, 1995; Weinburgh, 1995).
Their mandates can be concluded in Harding and Parker’s (1995)
definition of “gender inclusive science”:
… a gender inclusive
science curriculum is one which values what both boys and girls
bring to science classrooms and one which challenges existing
definitions of science. It must probe the social construction of
both gender and science, challenging the power differential of
gendered relationships and working towards an understanding of
science which embraces all human being. (p. 539)
The second part reflects
upon the nature of science and science education and seeks to
challenge scientific orthodoxies. For example, Brickhouse (1994)
argues that science needs to be taught in ways that enable
students to understand its multicultural nature, its
controversial character and its relationship to the world so
that their masculine images of science will be challenged and
hopefully changed. That is, science teachers can give students
an education not only in science, but also about science. This
advocacy corresponds to the WISE2
(Women in Science Education) group’s call for the learning of
science to be much more than the learning of facts, theories,
and procedures. Learning in science must also means learning
about the norms, beliefs, values, discursive practices, and ways
of acting and reasoning that are acceptable within the community
of scientists (WISE, 1994, 1995). In general, their concerns
involve two areas: what type of science gets taught and how it
is taught. These concerns of gender-inclusive science are based
on a social constructivist perspective and can be compared to
Angela Barton’s (1998a) four characteristics of gender-inclusive
science: scientific knowledge is acknowledged as culturally and
socially bound; scientific knowledge is reflective of nature’s
holistic, interactive, and complex existence; the scientific
contributions of women and minorities are incorporated into a
historical analysis of the development of scientific knowledge;
and science is practiced through multiple ways of knowing.
This two-parts focus of
gender-inclusive science from the late 1980s through to the
mid-1990s has generated extensive discussions on gender and
science education and attracted attention from science education
community. This focus emphasizes the inclusion of females in
order to challenge and change the existing practice of science
education and to rethink science teaching and learning from a
critical of gender politics. It also calls for a political
investigation of the nature of science from its social, cultural
contexts. It has optimized feminist criticism of science and
utilized gender as a factor to examine many important questions
in the teaching and learning of science. Its strong focus on
gender, however, also runs the risk of merely attending to one
analytical dimension and overlooks others such as ethnicity,
race, class, and sexuality. Its advocacy for inclusion,
nonetheless, appears to be “adding females” without scrutinizing
what it means to be a female.
Some Problems and the
Poststructuralist Turn
Several scholars have
noticed these problems. For example, claiming that science
necessarily occupies the superior role of masculinity over
femininity is at the same time re-enforcing the cultural
dualism; an emphasis on the “feminine” side in the
reconstruction of science is reasserting this dualism (Kenyway &
Gough, 1998). Making associations between the subjectivities of
male students and the masculinity accorded to abstract science
runs the danger of essentialism (Hughes, 2001). In a debate
arranged by the Journal of Research in Science Teaching Volume
37, Issue 4, Atwater (2000) questions whether the study on
females in science education falls into a presentation that
“white is the norm and class, language, lifestyle, and religion
are nonissues.” Other feminist researchers (e.g., Howes, 2000;
McGinnis, 2000; Rennie, 2000) responded to the question and
agreed that intersections among gender and ethnicity, class,
language, and religion are necessary in the future research on
“inclusiveness” in science education. Rennie (2000) also
cautions that gender and sex are not the same yet quite often
critics’ use of the word gender is actually referring to
biological sex. The inquiries of the natures of “inclusiveness”
and the intersections among gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class,
language, and religion will inevitably entangle with
questions of identity especially in a poststructuralist era.
The above concerns and conversations thus sharpen the
conceptualization of gender-inclusive science.
Feminist poststructualism
(Weedon, 1987) draws upon work in linguistics, psychoanalysis,
and philosophy and, in my opinion, has at least four major
theoretical tools to offer for feminist science educators’
reflections on issues of gender and science. First,
poststructualism dismisses the idea of finding an a-historical
truth and denies the claim of a universal unitary scientific
knowledge. Second, poststructuralist feminists have demonstrated
how male-female dualism as a foundation of science arose in the
Enlightenment and how its rise was enmeshed in an oppressive
history of science over nature (Harding, 1986). Careful critics
of science are advised not to follow the masculine/feminine
dichotomy based on such Enlightenmental models of science.
Third, poststructuralist feminists emphasize the plurality in
the meaning of gender. Research on aspect of gender should
account for a diversity of meanings of gender and attend to the
variable grounds of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and
sexuality. Research on gender and science cannot avoid
scrutinizing the historical, social, cultural contexts that
support or restrict what it means to be a girl, a boy, a man, or
a woman in their communities. Fourth, individual subjectivity
and identity are not unitary and fixed but complex and
constantly shifting. They are formed and transformed in response
to the construction of meanings of gender intersecting with
other social, cultural, historical, and political factors.
Toward Feminist Poststructuralist Identity Questions
Some feminist science
educators have adopted this poststructuralist turn and identity
issues became a major focus in their recent research. For
example, the WISE group underlines the importance of identity
issues in science teaching and learning in a pamphlet designed
to display their different approaches from those of mainstream
science education communities3.
Gwyneth Hughes (2001) demonstrates an anti-essentialist approach
on the study of science students’ multidimensional identities
and argues that gender inclusivity has to attend to any
discriminatory discourses and practices within which student
scientist identities are formed and transformed. Angela Barton
(1998) uses concepts of “positioning” to analyze students’
situated identity formation in an urban setting and call for an
understanding of situated knowing and learning in science. Nancy
Brickhouse and her colleagues (2000, 2001) have conducted
research on a group of schoolgirls’ identities with various
ethnicities. Their work will be further discussed in the next
section.
Why and How Identity
Issues Matter in Science Education
Identity and Learning
Scholars of practice
theories4
such as Lave and Wenger have asserted that issues of identity
are crucially related to issues of learning (Lave & Wenger,
1991; Wenger, 1998). Learning, according to these scholars, is
situated and has to be perceived as a process of
identity-formation. Learning is not merely a process of
acquiring knowledge through cognitive phenomenon that happens in
individuals’ minds. Instead, it should be understood as a series
of decisions about what they want to know; what they want to
ignore; who they think they are; and who they want to be, under
socially situated conditions such as gender, race, class,
religion, and so forth. Such decisions are made at the
intersections of individual agency and societal constraints and
are informed by subjects’ previous identities; these decisions
also inform and transform these subjects’ future identities.
Learning can be seen as a process for individuals to find
livable identities in a complex world. As individuals seek
meanings to build identities, learning becomes a delicate
balance between what learners choose to know and what they
choose to ignore (Wenger, 1998).
Identity and Learning of
Science
The importance of identity
issues in science learning appears in Nancy Brickhouse’s early
and frequently cited article “Bringing in the outsiders” (1994).
Although this article is usually cited for its incisive
perspectives on literature in gender and ethnic difference in
science and its call for including and recognizing contributions
from groups traditionally marginalized by elite science, it also
points out a potential identity problem for these “outsider”
science learners when they come to decide what they want in the
future. Unlike social studies or English, science is not a
school subject that everyone is expected to understand. Students
may opt out of science as early as grade ten if they cannot see
adequate relevance or build identification with it. If science
keeps its elite, white, male, middle-class nature and images,
members of ethnic minority groups and women may not identify
themselves with these images, may not steer in their careers
onto the science track, and may not choose subjects that are
unlikely to be useful to them as adults.
In her later work, Brickhouse and her colleagues continue to
reflect upon and deepen discussions about identity issues in
learning science by incorporating practice theories such as Lave
and Wenger’s theories on identity and situated learning. “If
students are to learn science, they must develop identities
compatible with scientific identities” (Brickhouse, Lowery, &
Schultz, 2000, p.443) because learning has to be thought of as
an apprenticeship where students forge identities on communities
of practice. They argue that how students engage in school
science is influenced by how students view themselves, i.e.
whether or not they view themselves as the kind of person who
engages in science (Brickhouse et al., 2000); and educators need
to know how students’ engagement in science is related to who
they think they are and who they want to be (Brickhouse, 2001).
On examining urban schoolgirls’ contestation of their science
identities, Brickhouse et al. found that school science does not
provide learners with a wide range of identities (Brickhouse et
al., 2000). For example, some girls may have to construct their
science identities through activities not chosen or approved by
school discourse of traditional science.
The narrow definition of
school science usually causes troubles for “outsiders” or
members of traditionally marginalized groups when identifying
with science. School science is usually defined and presented in
terms of how well it matches what professional scientists do (Brickhouse,
2001) and such narrowly defined identities are found incongruent
with women’s gendered identities. For example, young women may
refuse to participate in scientific activities that are not
consistent with their gendered identities or participate in
nontraditional ways or careers of science to better resonant
with their gendered identities (Carlone, 1999; Eisenhart &
Finkel, 1998). Choosing to engage or not to engage in school
science tells us how individual identities are forming and
transforming in interaction with prevailing and dominant
discourses and structures of power. As Brickhouse (2001) states:
“the decision to disengage, resist, and ignore is the important
other side of engagement and learning.” Understanding issues of
identity, marginalization, and engagement in school science
becomes essential for teachers to prepare student scientists of
diverse identities (Brickhouse & Potter, 2001).
Another US feminist
science scholar Angela Barton has also developed a scholarship
of identity study in response to the call for “science for all”
(Barton, 1998a, 1998b, 2001). She questions how inclusive the
science education community is in its efforts to understand the
meanings of science for all. Barton follows critical pedagogy
and feminist pedagogy concerning the production of knowledge,
culture, and identities (Giroux, 1991; Gore, 1993) to examine
the representation and identity questions in doing science. She
argues that pedagogical questions of representation and identity
in teaching and learning science are issues of power and
actuality; such as who has the power to fashion images of
science and identities in science, and in what ways are these
images and identities fashioned (Barton, 1998b). For Barton,
pedagogy in science classrooms is about the struggle for
“identities” and “representation” and it asks us to think about
much more than scientific concepts when we think about helping
all children to become scientifically literate. The identity
question in science is important because it asks who we think we
must be to engage in science. Barton pays particular attention
to urban homeless children’s socially, politically, historically
situated identities in acquiring access to science and
illustrates how significantly different life experiences
intimately shape the ways in which children engage with each
other and the ways they think about science. Instead of
following the traditional paradigm where science lies at the
center as a target to be reached by students at the margins,
Barton’s approach is to relocate students’ identities at the
center of science education.
Gender Identity and
Science Education
With their research on
gender identity in the learning and teaching of science, Jim
Gaskell and his colleagues warn us about the difficulties in
making gender visible in classrooms. They found that the
invisibility of gender issues in the classroom discussions among
students and teachers has complicated gender identity
construction inside the classroom and under peer interaction
(Gaskell & Hildebrand, 1996). Many teachers talked about gender
as a personal factor than a group trait. Girls tend not to
connect their struggles in physics with the gendered context of
science, while they would recognize the invisible yet existing
sexism in some other conversations (Mclaren & Gaskell, 1995).
Students may also adjust their subject choice according to how
other people talk about gender and science. For example, in
research conducted with grade 10 students, several girls talk
about taking physics even though they said they were not
interested in the subject. They were aware of the pervasive
concern about the need for more girls to enroll in physical
science and they “wouldn’t let the side down” (Gaskell &
Hildebrand, 1996). Students are always constructing their
identities and positioning themselves in relationship to others
that have power over them or about whom they care. Their
identities as gendered beings were complex and situated. Their
decisions in messy, complex situations embody their priorities
and will be judged by reactions of the communities they live
(Gaskell, Hepburn, & Robeck, 1998). Further, gender identity is
not a simple issue dealt with females and males because, again,
gender intersects with ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and
biography in the construction of identity.
Identity, Discourse, and
Agency in Science Education
The intersection of
gender, class, and ethnicity in the construction of students’
scientist identities is a recent research topic that attracts
attentions from feminist science educators (e.g., Atwater, 2000;
Barton, 2001; Brickhouse & Potter, 2001; Hughes, 2001; Howes,
2000; McGinnis, 2000; Rennie, 2000). Gwyneth Hughes’ (Hughes,
2001) undertook a research in a city school and a post-16
college in the UK to examine how students produce their
scientist identities within competing curriculum discourses,
ethnicity discourse, feminist discourse, and gender discourse.
Students’ scientist identities cannot be adequately depicted
with isolated rigid categories such as gender only or ethnicity
only. She stresses that a multidimensional approach is necessary
in order to avoid a one-dimensional essentialist perspective.
For example, in her
findings, female students did not reject science just because
they were marginalized in the discourse of masculine science,
while male students could drop out of physics and still embrace
the masculinist values in science curriculum. An Asian female
student managed to stabilize her identity as a successful female
scientist by drawing on the discourse of Asian parental pressure
for school success to overrule the implicit contradiction
between her subjectivity as a female and the anti-femininity
science discourse. In this case, both science curriculum
discourse and ethnicity discourse are necessary and mutually
implicated. Hughes’ another example involves a black female
student who rejected to conform to the traditional white,
submissive, feminine role and used feminist discourse to
celebrate her nontraditional choice. She was also able to create
female “new scientist” subjectivity with her reconfiguration of
dominant science curriculum discourses. In this research, Hughes
identifies at least four different discourses regarding gender
or ethnicity: a discourse of physics as a masculine, white,
middle-class, hard science; a discourse of biology as more
feminine science for females because of its affinity to “human
interests”; a discourse of ethnic minority as “outsiders” to the
societies and values with which they reside; and a discourse of
feminism for support of nontraditional career choices.
Hughes demonstrates a
research model of how to portray and track students’ identity
constructions within various discourses and how these discourses
are competing against or cooperating with each other in the
process of identity construction. This kind of research follows
feminist poststructuralist contestation of identity as complex,
shifting and constantly being constituted and reconstituted
through a range of discursive practices. It also uses the
concept of “positioning” to understand individuals’ positioning
themselves within available and regulatory discourses in order
to adapt recognizable and acceptable social identities (Davies,
1993)5.
For Hughes, the goal in stressing a gender-inclusive science is
as much to challenge intellectual abstraction and rigid
epistemology as to identify and resist discriminatory discourses
and practices. It is as important to provide various discourses
for students to construct their identities as to observe how
students construct a wide range of scientist subjectivities
through their reconfiguration of dominant discourses. It is
through such reconfiguration and positioning that student agency
becomes visible.
From Equity to Identity
The poststructuralist turn
in gender and science education studies, along with the
aforementioned recent research by many scholars, suggests a
shift in focus of this field from a concern with equity to a
focus on identity. This shift, though, is not a simple
replacement of one term for another. In no way does it suggest
that previous goals for equity have all been accomplished; nor
does it propose that equity is no longer a relevant concern in
gender and science education studies. Instead, this shift in
contemporary scholarship recognizes a necessary refinement of
equity inquiry. It involves reformulating equity projects
through the notions of identity. It aims at achieving equity
through an understanding of identity.
I have arranged my
arguments with response to Sandra Harding’s two questions and
described their merge through a poststructuralist turn. In
addition to this structure, my arguments can also be rearranged
into three trends as it helps identify the shift from equity to
identity: fixing the girls, fixing the teaching, and fixing the
science. Fixing the girls project includes research bearing
assumptions such as ordinary women cannot do science and
only those exceptional ones can; girls’ attitudes towards
science are problematic and thus require some change; and girls’
self-esteem is low and thus needs to be raised. Fixing the
teaching project includes research that aims to fix the unequal
attention given to male and female students; gender stereotypes
reproduced in interactions in classrooms; comments and
evaluations in favor of particular gender; and heterosexual
assumptions and interruptions between female and male students.
Fixing the science project includes stressing science as a
social construction; investigating the language, metaphors,
examples used to illustrate scientific concepts; examining the
epistemological and methodological bases of science; identifying
norms, interests, and beliefs intrinsic to the designs and
interpretations of scientific questions; and contesting
alternative conceptualizations of objectivity.
The structure of these
three trends helps to identify problems and challenges inherent
in studies stemming from a gender equity focus. For example,
fixing the girls project commits a fallacy of mixing “don’t do”
with “can’t do. Looking for girl-friendly or female-friendly
ways to fix the teaching in the classrooms leaves the nature of
science unchallenged and assumes that boys and males are the
norm and girls or females have special needs. The difficulties
facing the project of fixing the science are the tremendous
philosophical issues involved in conceptualizing feminist
science(s) and the genuine difficulty in constructing
alternatives. Through these three trends, an equity focus has
achieved considerable success in providing alternative curricula
and demanding gender-sensitive pedagogies, but the limit of an
equity focus also emerges when it comes to disentangle “won’t
do” from “can’t do” and to question how the meanings of gender
are constructed and contested within the norms in science and
science classrooms.
The gender equity focus
has, in the past three decades, energized scholars to identify
gender bias in the presentations and practices of science and
science education. Corresponding remedies such as alternative
curricula and interventionist projects have been implemented in
order to reduce gender bias and increase females’ and
minorities’ participation in science. However, researchers have
already found that attempts to persuade girls to pursue
particular subject and career choices often adopted a rather
authoritarian model of pedagogy—preaching rather than
teaching—and such a model failed to adequately attend to the
complex issues of reception and identity (Kenway & Gough, 1998).
A mere focus on structural equity is not enough to push the goal
of equity forward to a larger success. It is clear that pursuing
gender equity in science and science education takes more than
providing equal opportunities and access to science. A shift in
research focus from equity to identity thus evolves examining
individuals’ choices regarding science and the meanings and
senses of selves they attach to such choices. An identity focus
enables us to understand choices as closely enmeshed with how
individuals imagine who they are and what they can do. Such
choices have to be understood within the discourses and power
structures of disciplines and societies. Feminist
poststructuralist theories on what it means to be a female or a
male in the discursive practices of science and science
education are useful and crucial to such identity inquiry.
Notes:
-
GIST,
Girls Into Science and Technology, was an action-research
project run by the Department of Sociology at the University of
Manchester, UK, in 1984. It attempted to explicate girl’s
under-achievement in physical science and technical subjects at
school. More description can be found in Kelly, Whyte and Smail
(1987). [back]
-
As of
April 1998 (WISE, 1998), the WISE group consists of eight
feminist science educators from various campuses in the US. Most
of them are based on Michigan State University. They are
Lynnette Cavazos, Graduate School of Education, University of
Santa Barbara; Constanza Chiappe Hazelwood, Teacher Education
Program, Northwestern Michigan College, Elaine V. Howes,
Department of Scientific Foundations, Teachers College/Columbia
University; Lori Kurth, Department of Teacher Education,
Michigan State University; Paula Lane, Department of Teacher
Education, Michigan State University; Gail Richmond, Department
of Chemistry, Michigan State University; and Kathleen J. Roth,
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University. [back]
-
The WISE
group position themselves as a group “forced into marginalized
position by those in power” (WISE, 1998, p. 34). They have
invited the NARST community into their discussion and provided a
“Call to Action” pamphlet to address their different stances
regarding various issues in science education from the
mainstream opinions. For example, in response to the common call
to “attract more girls to science,” they question the “deficit
model of girls” assumption and advocate the need to recognize
what girls can bring to science. In response to another common
ides that “science teaching should be hands-on, minds-on and
linked to everyday experience,” they point out the na?ve
concepts of experience in the idea and postulate the importance
of identity issues in science teaching and learning.
“Experience,” according to them, “is a product of identity in
multiple communities—gender, racial, religious, cultural,
socioeconomic. Everyday experience is not he same for everyone….
For science teaching to connect with some people’s experiences,
it must touch their hearts as well as their minds and hands.”
(WISE, 1998, p. 35) [back]
-
Following
Eisenhart’s and Finkel’s (1998) definition, practice theories
focus on how people generate meaning systems as they participate
in everyday, local activities, and on the ways these meaning
systems connect people to broader patters of social reproduction
or change. These theories investigate what meanings are produced
within and about everyday activities, how knowledge, identities,
and learning are situated in practice, and how everyday
activities and meanings organise participants in wider relations
of power. For example, see Bourdieu, 1977; Ortner, 1984;
Connell, 1987. [back]
-
In her
book Shards of Glass (1993), Bronwyn Davies adopts a
poststructuralist approach to seek strategies for educators to
work with children in order to go beyond their gendered
identities. For Davies, poststructuralism provides a radically
different conceptualization for an understanding of the process
of becoming a gendered person. It is important to enable
children to see for themselves the discourses and storylines
through which gendered persons are constituted; and to see the
cultural and social production of gendered persons that they are
each caught up in. In her conceptual framework, children are not
seen as passive recipients, but as producers of culture, who
make themselves and are made within the discourses available to
them. [back]
|
