The political is personal: An action researcher investigates issues of sex and gender in a junior school Victoria Perselli Prepared for the Second International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, August 16-20, 1998

 

 

In this paper I aim to demonstrate two ideas which were realised through my work with teachers investigating gender differences in their schools. The first was a dilemma - how to integrate an ethnographic study (Levinson, 1998) into an action research methodology (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead, 1996). The second is to demonstrate how an incident perceived as ‘political’ became ‘personal’ for the participants in this project.

Setting the scene: politics .....

In January 98 I was asked to participate in an Inservice Education and Training (INSET) initiative at a Junior School in West London, where recent Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection had highlighted as a cause for concern low rates of attainment among boys in the three core curriculum subjects (Maths, English, Science), and poor levels of achievement across the curriculum in general. The school had already responded, in accordance with OFSTED regulations, by drawing up an Action Plan which would address the perceived problem. The overall aims of this plan were threefold: 1) to identify underachievement among boys through examination of documentation regarding existing policy and practice (e.g. previous years’ test and assessment results, records of achievement, attendance rates, homework completion rates, parental involvement with school etc.) and, based on the evidence generated from this data, 2) to improve performance of boys via target setting; with particular regard to literacy, since this had subsequently been identified as the weakest curriculum area as well as the one most likely to impact detrimentally on the others. The final aim, 3) to change perceptions regarding boys and their learning, (by highlighting boys’ achievements etc.) was my point of entry to the project.

Both the head and governors of the school, (which was described to me as both very democratic and very autonomous in its policy-forming and decision-taking capabilities), had felt that on this occasion the participation of an outsider, acting as consultant/facilitator, would be the most effective means of pursuing this particular area of the plan. Whilst the first two aims related to, and were couched predominantly in the language of, ‘school effectiveness’; I interpreted this third element as lying more within the affective domain of teachers’ and pupils’ self-identities and feelings; with an expressed desire among participants to learn more about themselves and their institution, or to ‘reconceptualise’ themselves. Unlike the quantitatively orientated strategies of target setting (e.g. to raise scores on standardised psychometric reading tests through increasing boys’ exposure to selected literature), this carried no guarantee of quantitatively measurable outcome; the hope was, simply, that school ethos and styles of teaching and learning might in some way be enhanced.

Negotiations between the university and the school had established that consultation would take the form of interviews between myself and individual, volunteer members of staff, then with randomly selected groups of boys (five to a group) and girls (in pairs). These data would enable me to make some representations regarding teacher and pupil feelings, attitudes and responses to the issue of sex and gender which would then be fed back to the staff in an anonymised, generalised form, with recommendations for further action. Other practical activities in relation to literacy, for example a reading/football project for Year Six, devised by the Coordinator for English, would run concurrently. There would not be opportunities to observe classes in action; the teachers were not looking for close analysis of their personal practice, since, as was emphasised by the head teacher, they had not yet recovered from this experience during OFSTED.

... and people

Having just emerged from an OFSTED inspection in my own school (where I am a Support Teacher and Co-ordinator for Special Educational Needs), I could identify with this view. I also felt that, as a response to OFSTED criticism, this was already a bold and unusual initiative, not least given the climate of competition and marketing which currently prevails in the UK education system, whereby to expose teachers’ views to an outsider’s gaze, albeit anonymously, would not be perceived as expedient. Furthermore, as an action researcher engaging in an ostensibly ethnographic study, I felt a duty of care towards the participants - I had learned from previous experience that the uncovering or ‘unmasking’ of prejudicial or stereotypical views in self or others can be highly problematic. I was anxious that the act of intervention and the formulation of research questions: Do you think there are differences in the way boys and girls learn? Do you think you learn best with male or female teachers?could exacerbate what I believe to be negative sex-stereotyping, but also that not asking such questions would not help to move participants’ thinking forward. I didn’t see myself either as the inquisitor of other people’s views or as their custodian, and this became a dilemma regarding ethnographic methodology which remains unresolved for me. When the head teacher, on various occasions during the research, expressed feelings of vulnerability on behalf of herself and the school, I could only reply that the feeling, as they say, was mutual.

Educative relationships: the ‘consultant’...

In terms of fairness and equality between researcher and researched, my aim was to make the process of the research as transparent as possible, demonstrating ‘method’ as well as ‘content’. By providing relatively open questions, I hoped to create an atmosphere of open enquiry during the interviews. This was my first experience of consultancy work and, again, taking a cue from my action research past, I felt that my principal function was to enable participants to articulate their own views and value positions; whilst clarifying and confirming these when appropriate. This became more difficult than anticipated because on occasions I then found myself appearing to collude with views I did not share, or in an ethnographer’s terms, ‘engaging in gendered (i.e. sexist) discourse’:

VP ‘so would you say that the absentee father syndrome does make a difference to those boys? [yes] Does it make a difference to the girls? Would girls do better if they had their fathers as role model?

where ‘absentee father syndrome’ is a cliche I would not normally use (and in fact where other teachers had described specifically pupils whose fathers were the sole carer); or:

VP ‘well everyone has their own theories and thinks about [behaviours which are inherited, behaviours which are acquired] and will position themselves somewhere along the line. Obviously it’s got to be a mixture of things because we’re all a mixture of the experiences we have in life and the genetic material we’re stuck with; everyone will have their own views on how strong the genetic influence is on how boys and girls behave’

which appears to reinforce a view of the individual as prey to either ‘genetic’ or ‘environmental’ forces, i.e. a false polarisation very characteristic of the nature/nurture debate on sex and gender which I personally don’t subscribe to.

... and the ‘consultee’

What, then, could I reflect back to participants which would be of most use to them, given the very limited time-scale this project occupied, and taking into account the fact that this was one of a number of OFSTED issues which the school was engaging with simultaneously. A week in politics is a long time; but a week in a junior school can seem an eternity, and there was inevitably a time-lag between collecting the data, the literature search and the feed- back to the school, which had, meanwhile, turned it’s attention to other things (overall the project took nine weeks to complete). To an audience on the outside of the education system, the density and complexity of teaching is hard to grasp and exceptionally hard to represent on paper; sex and gender, to extend the metaphor, was not a single issue campaign for either these teachers of myself.

Several issues emerged from the data which seemed particularly pertinent. Overall the school had received a good OFSTED inspection. Although within a very mixed socioeconomic catchment area (defined by relatively high uptake of free school meals, special educational needs, density of housing, etc.) their attainment levels in general were good relative to national averages, but the opinion of both staff and pupils regarding able learners was uniformly deprecating. This was very consistent with recent gender studies where gender has been researched in conjunction with race and social class. Staff did not feel that there were any really talented pupils in this school; that they were in unfair competition with other more affluent local schools, and that their academic achievement was low, but also that peer pressure prevented pupils from revealing their capabilities:

Teacher, male ‘when I think back to when I was at school it was the boys who mucked about more, that was expected. I was like an intelligent boy but I was like the rest of them; if I’d done all the work they would have gone swot and you didn’t want that so you had to make out you’re stupid and at the same time try and have academic success, but you had to disguise it, it was hard; whereas with girls it’s acceptable culturally ... I feel sorry for the boys because I know how it feels ... they can’t be seen to be doing too well ... it’s cultural as well, you know, being a bit of a jack the lad and bucking the system’

Teacher, female ‘girls when they get to teenage they get self conscious and they develop their image of themselves, they don't want to be seen as swotty, especially in front of the boys’

and this view was corroborated by pupils:

Pupil, boy ‘ well there’s a few words people call it like boffins and swots but maybe if you look at their sporting activities - in the classroom they may be scribbling down loads of work but when they get out on the field they’re like kicking the ball about whacking it, and they could be bullies for all anyone knows’

Pupil, boy ‘well my friend *** he went to try for [local grammar school] and the girls took the mickey out of him and he felt pretty upset’

Pupil, girl: ‘well if you go to the shops, like um Tesco’s or something, we don’t shop at Tesco we go to Sainsbury’s, but usually you find [more] ladies at the counter than men. I mean you see maybe five or six men but, you know, it’s mostly ladies’

Pupil, girl ‘cause ladies like doing jobs that other people um maybe for them um they like doing kind of housework and stuff’

Sporting prowess -in football almost exclusively - was brought into the conversations by most participants:

Pupil ‘well I can’t see how sex changes the whole thing. People say that girls can’t play football but I’ve seen plenty of matches with like the women team of Arsenal playing but you can’t say that women are cleverer than boys’

Pupil ‘everyone says like girls work better than boys but I don’t think that’s the case ... girls haven’t really got anything to do at the weekend because they don’t play football whereas we’re like all getting ready for football and sometimes that can make us like . not concentrate so much on work’

Pupil ‘when you work with girls it’s a nice thing ... if they say in the media they should look at girls and boys working together, stuff like games; boys and girls mostly work together on that’

suggesting a strong counter-culture which is largely ignored by National Curriculum, and which poses problems for schools wanting to carry out innovatory projects to harness this, or to recapture pupils with low academic self-image. The older pupils were aware of recent representations in the media in respect of sex and gender and illustrated its divisive effect:

Pupil: ‘I think where do they get this information from? They just go to one school and maybe find that the girls are cleverer than the boys. Maybe if they went to another school they would find the boys are cleverer than the girls and they couldn’t be able to go all around the world and see um there’s more girls cleverer than boys’

Pupil: ‘like he’s saying, they haven’t actually seen how they do their work. They’ve just seen the results of their tests and stuff like that’

Pupil: ‘I really do feel sorry for the girls because the papers have written about aren’t girls cleverer than boys and the boys might come to school and think oh look you can’t say you’re better than us, and they might think yeah, but we haven’t done anything; what are you blaming us for?’

However there was good evidence among pupils of a desire to cross perceived boundaries of expectation and perception, and many affirmative examples cited by teachers of successful practice, but possibly a lack of strategies to tie these threads together. I looked both to the literatures on sex and gender ( Sewell, 1997) and to my own area of experience in support teaching to provide some suggestions, emphasising particularly the significance oftransgression (Hooks, 1994) as a vehicle for change, and how this might be structured.

The personal is political

In the 60 minute staff meeting allocated for feedback I used a series of overheads to summarise the findings, mapping these to quotations from the literature and the teacher and pupil interviews. I organised these to tell the story of the research in such a way as to be provocative but also supportive of what I felt the teachers were wanting to do. The underachievement of boys, is of course, only one half of the gender story; to what extent teachers at this particular school, responding to a specific criticism framed by narrowly defined criteria, feel able or willing to respond creatively will depend not only on their personal desire to do so, but also on the extent to which the current system allows them space, time and resources to carry this through.

Hooks, B. 1994 Teaching to Transgress, Routledge.

Levinson, B. 1998 The social commitment of the educational ethnographer, in J. Smythe, Becoming Reflexive in Critical Educational and Social Research, Falmer.

McNiff, J. Lomax, P. & Whitehead,J. 1996 You and Your Action Research Project, Routledge.

Sewell, T. 1997 Black Masculinities and Schooling, Trentham Books.