Whose Knowledge? Teachers' Knowledge ]
Data from this study suggest that tapping into staff knowledge about gender issues was, for many schools, a major part of their gender equity needs analysis. Teachers obviously have an intimate knowledge of school and of the different experiences of girls and boys at school. Their knowledge is current and, in addition, they know school in an historic sense because they themselves were school pupils. While this historic and contemporary knowledge of school and gender equity is an invaluable source of data, teachers' familiarity with schools may mask important clues of gender inequity.
Regular school planning processes
At a general level, staff were involved in providing data through the regular collaborative school planning processes at a whole school or faculty level. Often routine processes were used to highlight concerns which then lead to all or some staff gathering specific data. For example, in one school situation where staff regularly met to discuss school achievements:
... there was a big concern about achievement rates because we are finding that the girls are out-shining the boys, particularly where we have got an assessable level like the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education). That really stands out. We are finding that we have got far more girls, for example, in our chemistry classes than boys, which is interesting. And the same is true with our specialist maths classes, within the top end of the school. We have very few boys doing low grades. It is a very interesting contrast. The boys are very much locked into what is an appropriate subject and if you can't do your maths and your chemistry then you do wood work or metal work. You certainly would not think of doing food technology or a language or history or geography. There are some boys but not in the proportions there should be. There is still very much a mind-set about boys' subjects and girls' subjects.
It is worth noting that in this situation the overall concern had been generated by the principal and had involved other senior administrators in the initial phases of research and action. An initial strategy at this school was a professional development session which involved the presentation of three papers. This not only raised staff awareness but provided more data from staff and became a catalyst for collaborative action.
We presented three papers to our first staff meeting to outline what our concerns were and to get some feedback from the staff. We also tried to pinpoint, from our point of view, what we felt the causes were in terms of what we felt was happening. I think that many of us agreed that we were dealing with an environment outside the school where there was an acceptability of masculinity that was not necessarily a positive masculinity.
Outside experts
The scenario described above draws attention to another important source of information and data on gender equity used extensively by schools - that of the informed other, the expert in the area. One of the papers drew on university research in the area of the education of boys. Throughout the interviews and discussions for this study, many references were made to the work of people who have established national or State profiles in the area of gender equity. These include people working within the various education systems or university academics who have worked with schools either in professional development activities or as coordinators and consultants to projects.
Often also, the outside input had come via staff involved in tertiary studies. This has suggested directions for research and provided background data and research findings on gender matters, as well as insights into the theoretical underpinnings of current understandings of gender. According to one informant:
... quite a number of my colleagues are involved in doing post-graduate work and studies at university. Many of them look at issues within the school and they use the school as their case studies. I have relied fairly heavily, over the last few years, on staff who have come to me and asked whether they can do some research within the school and we have tied that with our own research. Sometimes it has ridden on the back of work being done by my colleagues for their Masters, or whatever. And where we want research to be done we have commissioned it ourselves. We have no problems in doing that from time to time when using questionnaires or surveys of students on particular issues.
In addition, because of the recognition their work has already received, a number of the schools involved in this study have been subjects of academic interest. In one situation, the school based research into a boys' remedial reading group has led into some interesting directions and, according to the informant:
I'm getting closer to actually writing a paper about this because I'm getting moved by my work that I'm doing at Melbourne University. I think that there's a lot more in this than meets the eye. I'm trying to write something up now, initially, and then I think that I'll probably do a lot more work next year and see how much further I go. I would like to take some sample groups of girls in mathematics and see whether I can show the existence of mathematics refusal which you could describe loosely in psycho-dynamic terms as post-stress trauma.
Literature on gender equity
There is a growing literature on gender equity and much of it is very accessible and readable by people with little or no background in the area. Some of it relates generally to issues of gender in society and some to gender in education. There is also a growing body of well informed resources and practical guides to working in gender equity reform. Sometimes the reading has been able to provide the catalyst for schools undertaking their own research into an area. Often though it is interwoven with what is happening at school. The school identifies a problem and as they begin probing it, they seek out relevant literature.
This was the case with a primary school in this study that, in response to a system level Junior Secondary Review, experimented with single sex classes in their upper school (Years 6 & 7). The school also identified teachers to be trained in `Boys and Relationships' programs and bought in appropriate resources so that the teachers could undertake reading in the field. According to the principal, by way of explaining the success of their activities:
Mind you, don't forget we did a lot of reading about this age group, so we actually then did a lot of work together (because there are six class teachers in this area) on what are the needs of this age group .. What are we picking up instinctively about them and what are we reading about the needs of these kids? It became pretty evident from what we were reading that we needed to offer a different kind of time-tabling for this age group; that they needed to have experience of more than one teacher in a more formal way than what we were offering; that they needed to be given more independence with time management, timetabling, all that sort of thing. And we also experimented with single sex classes as well as co-ed. After a couple of years we started to realise that the single sex classes were actually performing better.