Impact of Gender on Childhood

I have chosen to look more specifically at the way education and gender, through the way you are educated dependant on gender, can together impact on childhood.  The three research papers from the course material that are to be included are; ‘Gender’,   Pattmann and Kehily; ‘Flexible Identities: Exploring Race and Gender Issues   amongst a Group of Immigrant Pupils in an Inner-city Comprehensive School’,   Rassool; ‘Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School’,Thorne.  The materials selected from my own research are from e-journals on the Open Library.  These are; ‘Girls   cannot think as boys do: socialising children through the Zimbabwean school system’,   Gordon; ‘The education MDGs: achieving gender equality through curriculum and   pedagogy change’, Aikman, Unterhalter and Challender.     The discussion will begin with a brief outline of the research and journals, including the main findings and points made.  Contrasts will be made of the literature, critically evaluating and comparing the focus of the literature, the methods used and the findings.  Consideration will be made of the strengths and weaknesses of each article, the validity of their findings in comparison to other research and the literature that presents the best arguments.  Questions will then be raised about what was left out and which methods were most appropriate.  The conclusion will be a summary of the findings, highlighting the gaps in the research and personal conclusions about the work that has been looked at.       

  Main Discussion

  The first article I have read is by Rassool.   It considers the impact of gender and race expectations of students in an inner-city school and the impact that stereotypical expectations can have on their education and development, and how the stereotypes compare to the reality.  The methodology used was to research groups of immigrant young people, some who had been born in Britain to immigrant parents, during their PSHE lessons.  They charted their life history, shared this with the group, individuals were interviewed using tape recorders.  A qualitative approach was taken to data collection and presentation of the findings.  In relation to gender, Rassool’s main finding that the girls who participated in the study found living in a different culture liberating as there are less restrictions. (Rassool, 1999). Rassool admits that the study was limited by the choice of approach but met the requirements of the study.  However, although the study was based in education, the focus seems to be more about social aspects of young people’s lives and their roles in the community.  One of the initial questions that Rassool wanted to answer with this study was the young people construct the process of schooling.  However, this did not appear to be fully answered from the research that Rassool conducted.  The title of the paper suggests that the study is about race and gender, yet there are only two paragraphs devoted to gender and these are about the girls’ perspectives and not the boys.  Rassool also criticizes the data collection used.  Video recordings rather than tape recordings would have identified the young people better and provided the grounds for following a story through.  Overall, although Rassool’s study is very interesting, because the range of questions fir the research was so wide and the study was conducted on such a small scale, I felt that some questions were only dealt with very briefly and that the findings weren’t very detailed, offering a number of opinions rather than a definite answer. The second article that I have read is a study by Thorne intending to learn about the children’s interactions with each other within the school setting.  Like Rassool, Thorne used a qualitative approach to data collection and presentation of findings.  Thorne observed the children in the classroom and took notes of these observations. Thorne also observed the children in their recreation time.  Unlike Rassool, Thorne’s research questions were less varied and more specific, relating to the interactions of the children in relation to their gender.  Also, Thorne studied a wider age range of children and young people and had more participants in the research, observing in two different school settings over a number of months.  In fact, Thorne gathered so many findings that not all were to be pursued due to time limitations.  However, like Rassool, much of findings are based on personal opinions and interpretations of the interactions of the children.  Also, Thorne’s study was conducted fifteen years ago and the results may differ in today’s society.  It is questionable whether these results would still be valid today.  (Thorne, 1993) The third article that I have studied is by Rosemary Gordon.  She looks at how children in Zimbabwe are socialised into adult gender roles and the roles that schools play in this.  Her aim is to suggest to people that education of this manner doesn’t contribute to children’s development and gender equity.  She compares this to Western gender roles and the influence that these have on education in Zimbabwe.  She explains that the curriculum is differentiated according to gender and that males dominate the structure of education.  Gordon also suggests that educational material can have an effect on exposure to gender stereotypes.  She refers to a survey conducted with male pupils, asking for their opinions on the roles of men and women in life and levels of intelligence of the genders.  Even where boys responded that girls were equally intelligent, they counteracted this response by saying they were intelligent in different areas, boys in maths and science, girls in food and fashion.  (Gordon, 1998). Unlike Rassool and Thorne, Gordon does not rely solely on qualitative evidence, offering some quantitative data alongside this in the form of percentages of responses to the survey questions.  Also, whereas Rassool and Thorne are writing about a single piece of research that they have undertaken, this article by Gordon draws on several pieces of research that she has conducted as well as drawing findings from the work of others and comparing these to her own findings.  Gordon’s work also differs from the others as their research was looking at young people in Western society and Gordon is looking at an entirely different culture, although she does draw some comparison with Western stereotypes. The fourth article is another which I have found through my own research by Aikman, Unterhalter and Challender, 2005. Like Gordon’s article, this also looks at curriculum and gender.  However, in contrast to Gordon’s study, this article suggests that there is a need for gender sensitive curricula to improve the outcome of girls’ education.   The information presented in the article is drawn from discussions in two seminars rather than from conducting a study as the other articles have. Similarly to Gordon, this articles focus is not of Western children, but children in Mozambique.  It considers a case study of the abuse of school girls in Mozambique, those responsible and the changes that need to be made to ensure that this change occurs.  Their arguments are presented using a combination of text and tables.  For what is quite a lengthy article, they offer a rather concise conclusion, presenting their main findings.  They suggest that in Mozambique, girls achievement is limited and that schools contribute to the gender injustice. The final article to be considered is from the course material, Gender, Pattman and Kehily, 2004.  This article tackles a wide range of issues relating to gender and difficulties that may arise in research relating to gender.  Although, unlike the other articles, it doesn’t particularly target gender in education as a main topic of conversation, it does refer to studies relating to gender in school settings as support for the arguments made.  On reading these studies within the article, it made me realise the relevance of studies into gender taking place in an educational setting, as it gives researchers insight into the behaviour of children in both structured time (classroom) and unstructured time (playground).  This article was not as informative as other articles in relation to gender in education.  However, it offered a greater variety of information.  The article was written specifically to inform Open University students of the implications of gender in research and it achieves this purpose well.  In terms of answering the question I defined at the beginning of this discussion, the contribution that this article makes is limited.  The findings of these articles could have been improved in a number of ways. Rassooll’s study could have used a larger number of participants to ensure that the results were more conclusive.  Also, the way the data was collected would have increased the validity of the research.  Also, some quantitative evidence could have been used alongside the quantitative evidence to support the findings, to make them less opinion based.  Similarly, Thorne could have used some quantitative evidence to further support her arguments.  Although, I particularly liked the way that Thorne collected too much data just in case it later offered relevance to support the findings.  In the articles by Gordon and Aikman, Unterhalter and Challender, they both offered a large amount of quite varied information in their articles, yet offered a very brief conclusion, that although concise, did not appear to fully summarise the arguments that had been made. In the case of Aikman, Unterhalter and Challender, the conclusion was a single paragraph.  The final article by Pattman and Kehily is harder to criticise in this way as it was not a study but a collection of studies to support the information being presented.