ENCOURAGING GENDER EQUITY STRATEGIES FOR SCHOOL CHANGE.doc

ENCOURAGING GENDER EQUITY:STRATEGIES FOR SCHOOL CHANGEEditor: Heather MacKinnonProceedings from the Human Rights Research and Education Centres 1995 round table, held at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa on September 25 and 26, 1995. The Human Rights Research and Education Centre, Ottawa, Ontario, 1995Translation by Judith PoirierAussi disponible en franais: Pour favoriser lgalit des sexes : des stratgies permettant doprer des changements lcoleACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe Human Rights Research and Education Centre would like to thank the Childrens Bureau, Health Canada, for its support of the Centres 1995 round table and this publication. The round table was funded by the Partners for Children Fund and is part of the CRISIS project of Human Rights Internet. The editor would like to thank the Director of the Centre, Professor Errol P. Mendes, for his help in organizing the round table. Encouraging Gender Equity: Strategies for School Change is an edited account of the presentations which took place at the round table on September 25 and 26, 1995. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent the views of The Childrens Bureau of Health Canada or the Human Rights Research and Education Centre. TABLE OF CONTENTSAcknowledgementsA Strategic Approach to Negotiating Power in the Classroomby Linda BriskinEquity in Mathematics Educationby Claudie SolarFrom Body Image to Body Equityby Carla RicePolicy and Partnershipsby Shirley AvrilThe Linden School: A Woman-Centred Schoolby Eleanor Moore and Diane GoudieEnabling Visions: Strategies for Gender Equityby Susan Hutton and Tom GougeonMedia Literacy Strategies for Gender Equityby Peter DavisonTowards a Harassment-Free Learning Environment: The AICE Model of Equal Opportunityby June LarkinRetreating for the Future: Young Women and Young Men Discuss Gender Equityby Margaret WellsAction Plan from Beijing - Implications for Girls in Canadaby Senator Landon Pearson List of ParticipantsA STRATEGIC APPROACH TO NEGOTIATING POWER IN THE CLASSROOM Linda Briskin, York University, 1995In one of my classes, two students who received A on their assignments were asked to read their papers to the rest of the class. When the male student had the floor, he received the undivided attention of the class. However, when the female student read her essay, there was a perceptible change in the classroom environment. The noise level rose considerably. She did not get our undivided attention. She received a clear message that very few students were interested in hearing why she had received an a. In order to gain control of the class, she turned to the professor for support. None was given. As women in the classroom we are often left talking to ourselves.STUDENT, YORK UNIVERSITY (quoted in Fleming, 1991)I. POWER IN THE CLASSROOMDynamics of power shape, constrain, interrupt, facilitate, both learning and teaching. They shape students sense of entitlement to learning and to voice; they impact on teacher credibility and authority. Power is mediated, organized and expressed by and through difference - gender, race, class, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age - which affects the way students learn, teachers teach and interact with students, and students interact with each other and with teachers. As currently constituted, these power dynamics often produce exclusion, marginalization, disempowerment, and silencing. They are always operating in the classroom environment and they not only impede learning, they are the site of some of the most important and deeply remembered learning. However, they have become so much a part of the commonsense practices of schooling, naturalised and thus seemingly not subject to intervention, that we dont even notice them (Ng, 1993). These power dynamics are part of a systemic and structural reality; they are not attitudinal, accidental or based on ignorance. To say that sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism or ageism are systemic is to say that they are embedded in the practices of institutions: policies, pedagogies, structures of knowledge, and patterns of classroom interaction. As a result, teaching tolerance of difference is not enough. The implication of teaching tolerance is that difference will be overlooked but such disregard makes invisible discrimination based on and organized around difference.Discussions of classroom power tend to focus on teachers who discriminate against students based on their race, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, ethnicity and gender (see, for example, Moses, 1989; Hall, 1982). Research on gender and sexual harassment, on racial harassment and increasingly on heterosexism and homophobia has revealed the practices of teacher power. However, by only focusing on teachers, power and formal authority are conflated. Distinguishing power from the authority which is granted to teachers by virtue of their positions in institutional structures reveals the ways in which authority is mediated by power and makes visible the reality that both teachers and students have power (Ng, 1991).Two power axes, both of which involve student power, then, necessarily complicate an understanding of teacher authority and power (Briskin and Coulter, 1992). First, power dynamics among and between students shape the learning of students, their participation, their risk taking, their sense of entitlement in the classroom. I always felt that I didnt belong in maths and science. Sometimes the boys would make jokes about girls doing science experiments. They always thought they were going to do it better and it made me really nervous. Sometimes I didnt even try to do an experiment because I knew they would laugh if I got it wrong. Now I just deaden myself against it, so I dont hear it any more. But I feel really alienated. My experience now is one of total silence. Sometimes I even wish I didnt know what I know.STUDENT, QUEENS UNIVERSITY (quoted in Lewis, 1992: 173)Second, student exercise of power has an impact on the credibility and authority of teachers, affecting all women teachers and especially minority women and lesbians (Basow, 1994; Hoodfar, 1992; Khayatt, 1992; Ng, 1991; Ng, 1993).Very often male students do not give female professors the respect and attention they deserve. In a second year economics course taught by a female professor of a racial minority, the male students challenged her authority by constantly interrupting her during the lecture, most of the time to ask trivial questions in order to disrupt the class. I have noticed a sharp contrast in how differently the authority of a white male professor is accepted by his students.STUDENT, YORK UNIVERSITY (quoted in Fleming, 1991)The recognition of power dynamics challenges the commonsense notion of the classroom as a learning space, apart and safe from the outside. Teachers have tended to have a distorted sense of what constitutes classroom safety and the limits of classroom safety, and of who feels safe in the classroom - perhaps projecting their own feelings of comfort. Roxana Ng (1993) points out To speak of safety and comfort is to speak from a position of privilege, relative though that may be. For those who have existed too long on the margins, life has never been safe or comfortable (p. 201). Once the repressive fiction (Ellsworth, 1992: 107) of safety is dismantled and the limits of safety problematized, space is opened in which to develop techniques for creating safer, if not safe, classrooms.Examining the multiple practices which organize classroom power challenges conventional approaches to classroom power in a number of ways. It recognizes both teacher and student power, distinguishing between power and formal authority; it rejects the binary paradigm of authoritarian classrooms dominated by teacher power and democratic classrooms based on sharing power; it disputes the possibility of classrooms as safe havens away from racism, sexism and homophobia, and the view that sensitive teaching can make the problematic of power evaporate; and it assumes that classroom power dynamics shape what is learned and thus cannot be avoided. II. PRO-ACTIVE INTERVENTIONIST STRATEGIESPro-active interventionist practices bring to consciousness through naming, and openly negotiate about the power dynamics in the everyday life of the classroom. This pro-active approach is in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom about how to address sexism and racism in the classroom, the central informing vision of which counterposes sexist and racist with non-sexist and non-racist, sometimes called gender and race-neutrality. Strategies of gender and race neutrality presuppose the possibility of making gender and race irrelevant. They try to ignore or at least minimize the significance of gender and race, for example, when we assert that it doesnt matter what colour or sex a person is, or when teachers say: a child is a child. to indicate their sex and colour blindness (Briskin, 1990/94).In contrast, I argue that teachers never teach, for example, a generic engineering student. She is not an engineering student who just happens to be a woman; being a woman is significant to how she is an engineering student, how and what she learns, and how we teach her. This is not an essentialist view, ie. it does not assume that there is a transhistorical and unchanging meaning to being a woman. Rather it is historically specific (Riley, 1988). So, for example, as a result of the 1989 Montreal Massacre in which fourteen women engineering students were murdered ostensibly because they were feminists, the meaning of being a woman engineering student has changed significantly. I conclude that gender and race neutrality is impossible and that neutrality strategies can reproduce privilege. Strategies to increase classroom equity, such as collaborative group work and encouraging students to speak, which do not name openly and confront directly power dynamics may not be successful and may even backfire.The text and subtext about power is clearly exposed when research on changing classroom dynamics and student reactions to such changes is examined. Barbara Houston (1987) describes a study where attempts to eliminate gender bias against girls provoked claims of discrimination by the boys. When a teacher tries to eliminate gender bias in participation by giving 34 per cent of her attention to girls who constitute one-half the class, the boys protested: "she always asks girls all the questions" "she doesnt like boys and just listens to girls all the time." In a sexist society boys perceive that two-thirds of the teachers time is a fair allotment for them, and if it is altered so they receive less, they feel they are discriminated against. And of course they resist, and they protest, and teachers often give in in order to foster the cooperation that gives the appearance that they are in control of the classroom (p. 141).In such examples (see also Molloy, 1987), teachers assume that the lack of equal attention to girls is simply a result of teacher error which can be corrected through care and diligence. Teachers focused on altering their own behaviour by equalising attention given to the boys and girls. They did not openly take up the dimensions of power that were producing and reproducing patterns of attention within their classrooms, and did not engage students in actively interrogating their own behaviours. What they underestimated is the deeply embedded gendered relations of power. Teacher strategies to eliminate gender bias invariably invoke questions of power and make visible the boys sense of entitlement to more than a fair share of attention and space. Group Work Many teachers organize group work and collaboration in the hope of providing a more effective learning space for marginalized voices. I would argue, however, that if the organization of group work does not take account of power dynamics, group work itself can reinscribe power relations rather than create openings for more inclusive learning.The composition of work groups is rarely seen to be significant. An interventionist approach, however, begins by naming the problematic of power that exists in work groups and then negotiating with students about the composition of groups. In making an argument, then, for the possible use of same sex or same race work groups (and, by extension, depending on the context, same sex or race classes, and perhaps schools) to address problematic power dynamics, it is important to stress that, in the current historic context, this strategy is different from imposed segregation, or from separation based on essentialist difference; rather, it rests on the recognition of differences in power. There is a growing interest in single sex schooling for girls. The all-girls and specifically feminist Linden School has recently opened in Toronto, and Kinesis (May 1995) reports that a pilot project with girls only classes is operating at Earl Grey School in Winnipeg. The Toronto Board of Education has also recently launched the Triangle Program for lesbian and gay youth at the Oasis Alternative Secondary School and the Nighana Program - a black focussed satellite class. Single sex work groups, for example, can be a strategy for revealing gendered relations of power and for empowering girls and women to resist them, on the one hand, and, on the other, a context in which their learning can be facilitated. I make a similar kind of argument about separate organizing by union women. See "Union Women and Separate Organizing (1993)". Research suggests that under many circumstances mixed gender work groups reproduce existing power dynamics. How Schools Shortchange Girls (1992) provides a comprehensive review of the literature. Different communication patterns of males and females can be an obstacle to effective cross-gender relationships. Females are more indirect in speech, relying often on questioning, while more direct males are more likely to make declarative statements or even to interrupt. Research indicates that boys in small groups are more likely to receive requested help from girls; girls requests, on the other hand, are more likely to be ignored by boys. male students may choose to show their social dominance by not readily talking with females.Some research indicates that the infrequent use of small, unstructured work groups is not effective in reducing gender stereotypes, and in fact, increases stereotyping. Groups often provide boys with leadership opportunities that increase