Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology
Gender Issues in the Classroom
Download 9.82 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- THE CLASSROOM CLIMATE
- Gender Bias in Student-Teacher Interactions
- Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments 265
- GENDER EQUITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENTS
- Gender and Identity in the Primary Grades
- Bad Boys and Silent Girls
- Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments 267
264 Gender Issues in the Classroom sociology, psychology, foreign languages, and fine arts. Girls take more AP courses in English, biology, and foreign lan- guages. More girls than boys take voluntary AP tests to earn college credit; in fact, African American girls are far more likely to take AP exams than are African American boys (by a factor of almost two to one). Girls, however, receive fewer scores of 3 or higher, the score needed to receive college credit. This is true even in subjects like English in which girls traditionally earn top grades. Girls lag behind boys in partic- ipation in AP physical science classes and in computer sci- ence and computer design classes. Girls make up only a small percentage of students in computer science and computer design classes. In 1996, girls comprised only 17% of AP test takers in computer science. In the college-bound population, males of all racial and ethnic backgrounds score higher than do females on the math section and on the verbal section of the Scholastic Achieve- ment Test (SAT) (AAUW, 1998a). The gender gaps are widest among high-achieving students. On the verbal section of the American College Testing Program (ACT), girls outscore boys on the verbal section. THE CLASSROOM CLIMATE The research on gender issues in the classrooms describes dif- ferential treatment of males and females who sit the same classroom, use the same materials, and work with the same teacher. The central questions remains To what extent do
Gender bias in student-teacher interactions has been docu- mented in classrooms from kindergarten through the end of high school. Areas of gender-differentiated instruction include: • Teacher questions and student responses. • Types of teacher questions and sanctions. • Student voice or air time, so to speak. • Teacher attention to student appearance. • Amount of wait time. • Teacher-student coaching. • Teacher assigned jobs. A significant finding has been that classroom teachers engage boys in question-and-answer periods more frequently than they engage girls. Involving boys more actively in the classroom dialogue has been seen as a way to control male be- havior in the classroom and has often been a response to male aggressiveness. Studies found that in classroom discourse, boys frequently raised their hands—sometimes impulsively and sometimes without even knowing the answer. Con- versely, studies found that girls tended not to raise their hands as often; when they did, they were overlooked frequently and male students were chosen instead. Teachers, when asked to monitor their interactions with students, consciously changed this pattern, but only after active participation in a gender workshop or related intervention. Several teacher education institutions offer courses addressing gender issues in the classroom, and pre- and postcourse assessments indicate that teachers make adjustments to their own student interactions after learning the ways in which their unintentionally biased behaviors affect girls and boys’ self-concepts in classrooms. For example, in teacher training courses on gender and schooling, teachers are asked to examine their classroom in- teractions and to tape themselves. Often, they notice that they call on boys more frequently for responses and coach boys for correct responses more frequently than they do with girls. Teachers tend to change their interactions when they are made aware of their practices. For example, some elementary school teachers tend to praise girls for how they dress and wear their hair. In courses and workshops, however, teachers are encouraged to extend more praise to girls’ problem- solving skills and performance in class. Similarly, teachers are encouraged to acknowledge boys’ skills in working well in co- operative groups and to praise their capacity to work in a team within the classroom context. Teachers report that they change those behaviors when made aware of them (Koch, 1998a).
A related finding revealed that teachers tended to ask boys more open-ended, thought-provoking questions than they asked girls, demonstrating the expectation that boys were capable of greater abstract thinking. As noted later in this chapter, these findings become exaggerated in different sub- ject area classes in middle and high school, especially math- ematics, science, and technology. Several studies revealed that although the classroom helpers selected by teachers are carefully selected girls, the boys are more likely to demonstrate and use technical equip- ment and actively engage with materials during experiments. When girls exhibited boisterous behavior and impulsively called out a response, they were reprimanded in ways in which boys who routinely exhibited the same behaviors were not. One study described third-grade elementary school girls as suffering from overcontrol, a term used to indicate the silence of girls and their reluctance to ask questions even when they did not understand a concept (Harvard Education Newsletter, 1989).
Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments 265 Research studies affirm repeatedly that males receive more of all types of the teacher’s attention in classrooms and are given more time to talk in class from preschool through high school. Teachers tend to offer more praise, criticism, remedi- ation, and acceptance to boys than to girls. Although males receive harsher punishment than do females for the same of- fense, females are often unduly punished when they exhibit male social behavior. Teachers are often invested in the si- lence of the girls. Girls tend not to call attention to themselves and to be quiet, social, and well behaved in classrooms. Even when they are sure of an answer, they are not apt to volunteer. Teachers often sanction so-called good girl behavior in ele- mentary classrooms as a way of maintaining their vision of proper classroom management. Teachers tend to offer differ- ent types of praise—rewarding girls for their appearance or the appearance of their work and praising boys for the ways in which they solve a problem or accomplish a task. Girls learn early on that their appearance matters in ways that are not valid for the boys. Being pretty, cute, thin, charming, alluring, well-dressed, and sexy are attributes to which girls aspire because such attributes are valued by adults and media messages. Classrooms reinforce those values when girls are praised for appearance and dress on a consistent basis. When asking the class questions, teachers tend to exhibit longer wait times for boys than for girls. Wait time refers to the period of time between asking a question and calling on a student for a response. Research has found that wait time is an important teacher technique for encouraging full participa- tion of all students and promoting higher order thinking rather than simple recall (Rowe, 1987). Whereas some researchers assert that teachers give males longer wait time than they give females to keep males’ interest and manage classroom behav- ior, other researchers believe that teachers expect more ab- stract or higher order thinking from the males and that those expectations are manifested in longer wait times. Studies re- veal that teachers tend to coach boys for the correct answers through prodding and cajoling, but they go on to the next stu- dent when a girl has an incorrect response (Sadker & Sadker, 1994; Sandler, Silverberg, & Hall, 1996). Most teachers believe that they treat girls and boys the same; research reveals that they frequently do not. The teacher’s gender has little bearing on the outcome; it is the gender of the student that determines the differential behav- ior (Sadker & Sadker, 1994).
The classroom is a place where students are socialized into behaving in certain ways. Children arrive at school with early gender socialization patterns that often influence the life of the classroom. The structure and climate created in the class- room need to mitigate these social differences in order to cap- italize on strengths of each gender and build skills that may be lacking due to stereotyping. One study explored the lives of girls and boys in kindergarten classrooms (Greenberg, 1985). Observations of early childhood teachers reveal that girls are praised in kindergarten for arriving to school willing and able to conform to classroom structures and rules. Teach- ers spend more time socializing boys into classroom life, and the result is that girls get less teacher attention. Boys receive what they need—additional work on obeying rules, follow- ing classroom protocols, controlling unruly impulses, and establishing the preconditions for learning. Girls’ needs are more subtle and tend to be overlooked. For example, most girls arrive into kindergarten with better development of fine motor skills than most boys have. They often do not have as well-developed gross motor skills, al- though that steadily improved in the 1990s with the institu- tionalization of organized sports for girls. Early childhood environments would serve little girls well by exposing them purposefully to activities requiring large motor skills, ranging from block corner activities to climbing and running during recess. Instead, researchers noted that the activities girls needed most in early childhood were relegated to free play or recess time. The needs of boys, however, were met during the instructional class time (Klein, 1985). Segregated play in early educational environments does not meet the needs of both genders. For example, one study revealed that boys wanted to enter the doll corner but only got there by invading as superheroes (Paley, 1993). For boys, this type of aggressive behavior can be lessened—not accentuated—by doll corner play. Other studies explore the affect on playtime of setting up the early childhood class- room in ways that encourage cooperative play between girls and boys (Gallas, 1998; Greenberg, 1985; Schlank & Metzger, 1997). One study followed a group of kindergarten boys whose boys-only club exclusively limited enrollment to athletic boys (Best, 1983). Belonging to the boys’ club was directly correlated with higher achievement. This type of all- boys group adversely affects those who do not belong. Furthermore, segregated play activities are encouraged by heavy media promotion of so-called girls’ toys and boys’ toys; this further differentiates interactions and communi- cation styles of girls and boys. This differentiation disad- vantages girls and boys as they participate in learning communities because it limits the range of behaviors, skills, speech patterns, communication styles, and ways of knowing to same gender groupings. Early childhood classrooms that are structured to maximize boy-girl interaction during free time as well as instructional time help both girls and boys to develop with fewer restrictions.
266 Gender Issues in the Classroom In one kindergarten classroom, a girls’ group was building a tall tower in the block corner when it suddenly fell over; they left the task in dismay. A group of boys had built a tower and knocked it down purposely for the sheer joy of building it back up again. Risk taking and building confidence are im- portant attributes for all students to acquire. Testing ideas and risking error are significant components of learning. Simi- larly, the kind of family-like communication that occurs in the doll corner provides important experiences for little boys who are not traditionally socialized to develop their verbal expression skills in ways in which girls are (Best, 1983; Greenberg, 1985; Paley, 1993). Boys need to recognize the value and importance of atti- tudes and competencies stereotypically associated with the feminine. Girls need to acquire many of the attitudes and competencies associated with the masculine. Classrooms are places where mixed-gender grouping can foster an apprecia- tion for qualities each gender has been socialized to acquire from birth. Instead, gender teachings (McIntosh, 2000) are full of inherited ideas that comprise a set of rules each biological sex must follow. These rules are invented, differ across cultures, and can change over time. As the years go on, girls and boys come to see their gender teachings (e.g., boys don’t cry) as a part of their sex and hence natural for their sex. To the extent that early childhood classrooms can begin to deconstruct restricted notions about how to be a boy or how to be a girl, it is possible to achieve gender-equitable learning communities. Although progress was made in the last decade of the twentieth century, the White Western soci- etal belief persists that the sexes are somehow opposite. Classroom communities that reflect this belief tacitly encourage separate gender play, with boys persisting in the block corner and girls remaining in the dramatic play or house corner. This chapter is informed by the belief that classroom communities can challenge existing beliefs of what is natural for girls and boys and hence broaden oppor- tunities for children. Gender and Identity in the Primary Grades “Girls are usually sitting in a tree when they are told, ‘Girls don’t climb trees’. . . Women who do not climb, literally or figuratively, come to feel it is natural to the female sex that women do not ‘climb’” (McIntosh, 2000, p. 1). This quote represents an important connection between the messages girls and boys receive about what they can and cannot do and the abilities they refine as they mature. How do teachers and the classroom climates they create encourage girls and boys to move beyond gender-stereotyped expectations and expand their abilities? This section explores the effects of sex-role stereotyping and social roles on the behavior of girls and boys in classrooms.
Social stereotyping and bias influence children’s self- concepts and attitudes toward others. Although sweeping generalizations currently categorize the lives of little boys and little girls, this chapter seeks to highlight the tendency toward oversimplification that the field of gender equity— well-intentioned and significant—has wrought upon class- room contexts. At age 30 months, children are learning to use gender labels (boy-girl) and by 3–5 years of age, children try to fig- ure out if they will remain a boy or a girl or if that is subject to change. They possess internalized gender roles (Derman- Sparks, 1989) and arrive at school having already acquired a set of values, attitudes, and expectations of what girls and boys can do. Research findings reveal that teacher attitudes and interactions and the ways in which the classroom com- munity is established can reinforce prevailing gender norms, positing masculine as opposite to feminine, or they can ex- pand the boundaries of sex role stereotyping by providing all children with a wide range of experiences and possibilities. We know that the differences among boys and among girls are far greater than the actual differences between the sexes (Golumbok & Fivusch, 1996). Much of what we know as gender teachings may be unnatural for individual children of either sex. For example, a very artistic boy may be dis- couraged from refining his talents by adults whose expecta- tions are that as a young boy, he should be playing ball rather than drawing pictures. Consequently, a gender agenda becomes crucial to the primary teacher as he or she sets out to actively listen to the voices of girls and boys and empower them with new possibilities. Children differentiate between appropriate be- haviors for girls and boys in the areas of physical appearance, toy choices, play activities, and peer preferences (AAUW, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1986). Consequently, children are placed in a suboptimal position—wanting to participate in activities that they perceive they should not want because of their sex. These conflicts between personal likes and doing what they are led to think they should do need to be made visible in the primary grades and throughout schooling. Unfortunately, much of the gender equity research has revealed that boys dominate and silence girls and that teach- ers collude with this agenda. This teacher collusion— allowing boys to dominate—ignores the complexities of small children’s behaviors, conflicts, and needs for accep- tance. A gender agenda in a primary classroom would include Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments 267 using gender-inclusive language, arranging the primary classroom in a way that encourages mixed-gender play, and providing children with classroom rules that disallow exclu- sions by gender. For example, explicitly stating that all chil- dren can play with all toys in all activity areas and that no children may be kept from playing because of something they cannot change—such as gender, skin color, or disability are two rules that provide children with the freedom to explore all areas and try out many different roles (Schlank & Metzger, 1997). Karen Gallas (1998), however, in her extended classroom research work with her own first and second graders, reminds us that the construction of a gender-balanced classroom is a goal that reflects incomplete understandings of classroom life and denies the cultural dynamic of today’s classrooms (p. 3). Although proactive methods of instruction to promote gender consciousness and employ gender-neutral materials are tools that can help teachers, Gallas asserts that in fact the social cli- mate of the classroom is highly complex and that teachers are well served by exploring the conditions within their own classrooms that promote certain social relations over others. In other words, to be gender equitable, primary teachers need to know how the dynamics of gender identity and power re- lations plays out in their specific classroom contexts. There are no simple formulas for creating equitable classroom environments. Gallas’s research presents a more complex response to cre- ating equitable climates; she describes the underlying causes of boy dominance in her 7- and 8-year-olds and the purposes they serve for attaining power in the classroom (Gallas, 1994, 1998). Boys appear to suffer more from their early indoctri- nation into school structures than do girls. Sitting and listen- ing for long periods of time is seen as possible—even easy—for girls and torture for boys. Working quietly on a pro- ject and taking turns almost seems to satisfy the girls, whereas it becomes an occasion for shouting out, pushing, or running for the boys. Gallas describes the so-called bad boys in her first- and second-grade classes as those outspoken boys who use physical and verbal intrusions in the classroom to rebel against prevailing power. She notes, as others have (Best, 1983; Paley, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1994), that while signal- ing their power, these boys are also lost to the community of learning. Boys who are more physical and verbal also tend to spend more time attempting to garner adulation from the less aggressive boys and popular girls; consequently, they pay the price of isolation from the community of the classroom. As they [bad boys] develop and refine their ability to use lan- guage to critique, judge, and embarrass, they also disrupt ins- truction, intimidate classmates, and force a code of detachment on themselves that denies their potential as learners and thinkers. (Gallas, 1998, p. 35) Silence can be another way to negotiate power in the gender relations of the first-grade classroom. The gender stereotype pervading elementary school classrooms provides images of silent girls and bad boys. Boys may be quiet and shy, but they are rarely silent, whereas girls who are silent or whose voices are so low they are barely audible are not uncommon. One oversimplification of this phenomenon includes the belief that girls are silenced by the boys and somehow—if the teacher only intervenes—the girls will no longer be so quiet. Another oversimplification describes the gendered di- chotomies of classroom discourse as originating in the class- room, as though the gender relations suppress the girls’ voices. There is a lack of research on girls’ silence, and an acceptance of their silence in the early grades remains. As a result, early childhood teachers see the need to manage the boys while the girls remain compliant and quiet. Teachers do not attempt to examine the possible causes of the girls’ silences because the silences are not seen as problematic. In fact, girls’ silences serve to isolate them from a learning community and leave them out of the loop in the same way that boys’ aggression isolates boys. Some classroom re- searchers have observed that for girls, the shrinking from the limelight of the classroom is connected to many complex factors—not just the reluctance to call attention to them- selves. For some girls, remaining silent in the face of a class- room dynamic that includes outspoken and judgmental boys can be the only way they feel psychologically safe. Bad boys, like most children, are not naturally mean-spirited; they are experimental. They are small social scientists studying the effects of their behavior on others. (Gallas, 1998, p. 44) Hence, the status of dominance among the children often determines who gets to have public voice in the classroom. Understanding how a child’s classroom status can determine how that child gets to dominate the public voice in the class- room allows teachers the opportunity to reflect on those who are most frequently heard in the classroom—not only as a taken-for-granted gender issue, but also through the lens of social relations within and between genders in the class- rooms. Because having a public voice is important to the de- velopment of all children, studying the classroom contexts that provide or discourage opportunities for voice is a neces- sary prerequisite to exploring the inner lives of silent girls and mediating the behaviors of outspoken boys. Although researchers have observed patterns of girl and boy behaviors in early childhood environments that conform
|
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling