Discussion
Question:
We know that education is a gendered institution: it is
governed by norms and policies and that the salience of gender often ebbs and
flows across different contexts, activities, and spaces. Use the readings and
lecture this week with specific examples from the Annamma et al assigned
reading to answer the following:
(a) How is the educational experience gendered in terms
of norms and policies?
(b) How is it also raced?
(c) How does this differentially shape student
experiences?
And (d) Why does it matter? (what are the implications?)
Material
from textbook:
Norms are beliefs and practices that are well known, widely followed, and culturally
approved (like back-to-school shopping
trips). Conformity with institutionalized ways of doing things is also
secured with formal policies,
which are explicit and codified expectations, often with stated consequences for deviance (like rules
related to attendance). Many policies elaborate on and reinforce norms,
transforming common sense into regulations (like no cheating on tests); some
policies explicitly are intended to
override and change beliefs and practices that have become the norm
(like texting in class). Some norms and policies are strongly enforced while
others are enforced only weakly.
Wade, Lisa. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions
(Second Edition) (p. 193). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
A gendered institution is one in which gender is used
as an organizing principle. In a
gendered institution, men and women are channeled into different, and
often differently valued, social spaces
or activities and their choices have different and often unequal consequences. Education, for example, isn’t just an
institution, it’s a gendered institution.
Education is gendered through both norms and policies. Policies like
gendered honorifics for teachers (“Mr.”
and “Ms.”), gender-specific dress codes, and gender segregated classes, like
separate sex education units for girls and boys, make gender an organizing principle of schooling.
Meanwhile, informal norms further make
gender part of the routine practice of school. There is no policy
requiring that the girls populate the
monkey bars and boys populate the sports fields at recess, for instance, but that may be how
kids distribute themselves nonetheless.3
Many American elementary school playgrounds feature this kind of
“geography of gender,” but the importance of gender often fades once students
return to the classroom, where students
are rarely seated by gender but instead seated
alphabetically or arranged in other ways conducive to an orderly
classroom.4 In education, as well as
other institutions, the importance of gender varies.5 Kindergarten play
kitchens and AP math classes, for example, may be more gendered than nap time and Algebra I. Gender salience—the
relevance of gender across contexts,
activities, and spaces—rises and falls across the different parts of the institutional landscape.
Wade, Lisa. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions
(Second Edition) (p. 196). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
sorting allows us to require—with both policies and
norms—that men and women play the same
sports in different ways. Both women and men play hockey, for instance, but whereas men are
allowed to “check” (body slam) one
another, it is against the rules for women to do so and punishable with
penalties. Likewise, tackle football is
the province of “real men”; women (and “lesser men”) are allowed to play “flag” (also sometimes
called “powder puff”) football. At the
Olympics, female competitors in BMX, or bicycle motocross, ride a shorter course with less difficult obstacles than
their male counterparts; so do the women
who compete in slalom, downhill, and cross-country skiing.35 In the case of baseball, women are sorted into a related
but different game, softball, with its
own equipment and rules. These differing policies—especially those that
forbid women to be as physically
aggressive or take on the same challenges—mean
that women and men are required to do sports both differently and
unequally, with women doing a lesser
version. Whether women and girls could play or ride the way men and boys do
remains an open question this way; the rules ensure that we’ll never know. The different aesthetic expectations for male
and female athletes, sometimes encoded in judging guidelines, also create
sports that reinforce beliefs about men’s and women’s talents and abilities.
Writing about the feminine apologetic in figure skating, sociologist Abigail
Feder keenly observed that one of a
female skater’s most useful talents is the ability to disguise the
incredible athleticism required and,
instead, make it look effortless.36 Whereas male figure skaters have been valued for appearing
powerful and aggressive on the ice, the
judging norms for female figure skaters frown upon this.
Wade, Lisa. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions
(Second Edition) (p. 206). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
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