How often do we hear the phrase, "This would be a great text for boys", when discussing novel choices for teaching? I've been guilty of it, and many of the teachers around me have too. Maybe you have as well... I don't really know you, though, so I wouldn't want to say for sure.
Sarah McDonald talked about this at the AATE/ALEA National Conference today as being reflective of the 'Boy Crisis' fed to us by the media. McDonald is an English teacher, Vice-President of the South Australia English Teachers' Association, and an active researcher at Flinders University of gender construction in relation to the discipline of English. She identifies the 'Boy Crisis' as focused mostly on 'literacy and reading as markers for underachievement in boys', and outlines some of the problematic discourse that surrounds the deficit in the reading habits of young males. McDonald has also established a helpful timeline that demonstrates how this terminology emerged:
- Policies on providing equal learning opportunities for girls began to emerge in the 1980s in response to the 1973 Karmel Report.
- By 1993, data starts demonstrating that girls are ahead of boys in most areas.
- The media begins to ask "What about the boys?"
McDonald seeks to identify the ongoing issue in the conversations around this issue, and pinpoints this through the assertion that the way we approach literacy for boys is very much a perpetuation of 'constructions of hegemonic masculinity'. She substantiates this through analysis of websites designed to get boys reading, and the way they reinforce assumptions about masculinity and, in particular, assumptions about masculinity in relation to literacy.
The sites that McDonald cites are:
It's interesting as these websites are representative of a metanarrative that surrounds comparatively poor literacy rates amongst boys in Australia.
Celebrated Australian author James Moloney, in the first of the aforementioned websites, demonstrates quite a lot of the problematic behaviour surrounding boys and the practice of reading. This includes the positioning of mothers and female teachers as those to primarily blame for the construction of gender in this area. According to McDonald, Moloney suggests that 'boyish' texts centre around the gross, the dirty, the gory, and the curse-wordy, and that female adults play a big role in censoring this stuff due to their own value judgements in regards to this content. Boy-interests are 'subversive' and this is why they don't get to read the things they 'like'.
The problem here, of course, is that it's a generalisation. The attachment of particular genres to particular biological sexes is part of the construction of masculinity as a gender stereotype. In the presentation, McDonald hilariously points out the ludicrousness of the idea that a book about sport will appeal to those who play sport. It's laughable because anyone could see that the two activities have little to do with one another - playing sport and reading about sport are as closely related as going to the gym and conducting chemistry experiments on vitamin compounds. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the liking of sport shouldn't have anything to do with gender or biological sex.
Sarah McDonald's presentation today, whilst informative and intellectually stimulating, could have gone a lot longer - I just wanted to hear more about her research! The above information feels like the tip of the iceberg and she evidently had a lot more to speak about.
I don't know what the solution to the above problem is, but I do know that I will be thinking a lot more carefully about which texts "would be a great text for boys".
No comments:
Post a Comment