Rethinking single-sex teaching / Gabrielle Ivinson and Patricia Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ivinson, Gabrielle.

Contributor:

Murphy, Patricia, 1952-

Series:

Educating boys, learning gender

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Single-sex schools.

Sex differences in education.

Physical Description:

xi, 205 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Maidenhead, England ; New York : Open University Press, [2007]

Summary:

The retreat to single-sex classes in co-educational comprehensive schools in the UK reflects a long history where educational policy and practice has made explicit the belief that boys and girls are different in how they learn and what they should learn. However, there is also a common assumption that there is equality in what is made available to learn and, if there is not, then single-sex organisation achieves this.

The authors challenge this opinion and offer a fresh and theoretically informed look at the debate about single-sex teaching, presenting insights from research about the intended and unintended consequences of gender division in schools. Drawing on classroom observations and in-depth interviews with teachers and students, the book illustrates the effect of single-sex classrooms on learners and on the versions of subject knowledge made available to them.

In exploring the differences in teaching practices between boys' and girls' classrooms, in relation to subjects such as Science, English, Drama, and Design and Technology, the authors highlight how single-sex teaching can, inadvertently, create circumstances which limit rather than open up students' access to subject knowledge.

The authors offer conceptual tools for investigating the knowledge-gender dynamic, advocating that learning will expand if teachers work with gender to help students to cross boundaries into non-traditional gender territories within subject lessons. Rethinking Single-Sex Teaching is thought-provoking reading for teachers, head teachers, academics and policy makers.

Contents:

Constituting the problem: the role of cultural beliefs 1

Single-sex organization and views of gender 4

The theoretical framing: gender and learning 5

The focus 10

1 Schooling and the curriculum: a history of single-sex organization 14

Knowledge and the school curriculum 15

Reasons for the single-sex strategy 24

Evidence, beliefs and benefits 34

Pedagogic futures 39

2 Understanding the knowledge-gender dynamic in classroom practice 40

Palmers School: the response to gender and learning 40

A social practice view of learning 41

Cultural legacies of contemporary pedagogic practices 51

Gender story 1: the public and the private 53

Gender story 2: a new system of investigation 55

3 Reworking knowledge: teachers' beliefs and practices 58

Understanding practice 58

Overt gender shaping in practice 62

Legacies: managing competing demands 68

Reviewing accounts of the knowledge-gender dynamic 82

4 Inside the classroom: mathematics, science, and design and technology 85

Mathematics: feeding the boys? 86

Gender story 3: fathers and male teachers 89

Science: performing the magic 90

Resistant materials: breaking down boundaries? 103

Masculine identities: pedagogy and learning 115

5 Inside the classroom: English, drama and art 119

English: changing the subject 119

Gender story 4: the bourgeois mother and women teachers 126

Drama: freedom and moral control 126

Art: reforming threatened identities 138

Feminine identities: pedagogy and learning 142

6 Students' gendered experiences 145

Boundary crossings recounted 146

Performing for whom? 155

Gender story 5: passing as a lady 160

Peer group culture: surveillance and silence 161

Mediating public and private identities 166

7 Renegotiating the knowledge-gender dynamic 169

The invisible made visible 170

The sociocultural toolkit revisited 171

Findings, reflections and implications for learning 174

Opening up knowledge frontiers 178.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [182]-193) and index.

ISBN:

9780335220410

033522041X

0335220401

9780335220403

OCLC:

144224945