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Kids are going to think girls can’t be super heroes : using praxis to challenge the gendered attitudes and behaviours of elementary school children

University of British Columbia

Feminists and academics concerned with the inequities between the education that a boy gets at school and that of a girl, have examined the role the education system and, in particular, teachers, have played in creating and maintaining those inequities. These researchers have produced a wealth of advice that teachers can draw on to make changes in their own classroom practise. Unfortunately, this advice tends to take a fix-the-teacher approach, ignoring the implications and effects on classroom practise of the gendered behaviours and attitudes that children learn and have reinforced throughout their lives outside of school as well as within. To effectively initiate change in the gender inequities in classrooms, teachers need to collaborate with their students both to identify and understand the behaviours and attitudes that constrain equity in order to decide on a course of action to take to address that inequity. I argue that to implement significant and enduring changes to the gendered behaviour and attitudes of both themselves and their students, teachers need to be involved in the highly collaborative process of praxis research. Further, I contend that, in the course of completing my Master's of Arts degree in Education, I conducted a multilayered praxis research project involving my elementary school students and myself in one layer and myself and my university professors in another. The success of the praxis lies in the effective collaboration that I experienced in both layers. Inherent in praxis research is a never-ending and overlapping cycle of action and reflection continually working towards the illumination of forms of social injustice. Once the researcher understands the inner workings of that injustice they can take critical action to relieve the injustice. Finally they assess the action taken and then redefine the problem on which they will base the next round of research . This thesis chronicles the four research cycles that I went through as I investigated my concerns about gender inequity and illustrates, using personal examples , the nature of the collaborative roles of my students and my professors. The personal examples include both accounts of what I did in the classroom and how the children responded and citations from papers that I wrote for the university courses that I was taking. As I progressed through cycles one to four, I redefined the problem from one of how to fix-the-teacher to one of how to involve the children explicitly in addressing the issue of sexism in the classroom. Each cycle moved forward both my understanding and the students understanding of what was happening in our classroom and enabled us not only to initiate some satisfactory changes to our gendered behaviours and attitudes but also to critically assess some less than satisfactory results. This thesis contributes to the literature on gender equity in the elementary school classroom by rejecting the popular notion that teachers alone are responsible for the sexism in schools. The "fix-the-teacher" approach neither acknowledges that the children as well as their teachers come to school with gendered baggage nor recognises the complex gendered social web that baggage creates in any classroom. While I demonstrate that teachers and students collaborating for gender equity most certainly can address inequity, I also conclude that they cannot definitively resolve the issue.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-03-14

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6042

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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