Interpretive Frameworks Introduction ]
Perhaps the longest standing debate in the area of gender equity revolves around the issue of whether observed differences between girls and boys reflect an inevitability determined by biological givens, or whether such differences are socially, culturally and historically constituted.Alloway 1995:14
While this project was primarily about how teachers worked towards gender equity, it was also, inevitably, about teachers' perceptions of gender, or what is referred to here as their 'interpretive frameworks'. This section is devoted to exploring the interpretive frameworks through which the teachers in this study made sense of what they were finding out and how this influenced what they did about gender equity.
As more research and educational innovation have been located within the school, teachers' knowledge has come into sharper focus. This is particularly so in the area of gender equity where, as suggested in the previous section, what teachers know can be quite extensive even though it has not always been made explicit. As discussions on gender equity have become more commonplace, they have highlighted very significant differences in the extent and nature of teachers' perceptions of the area. The differences can exist with respect to teachers' perceptions of gender, of equity, of why girls and boys are like they are and why there is variation in their school and post-school experiences and achievements.
It should be noted that teachers' interpretive frameworks can influence the whole process of gender equity reform. They can influence the issues that are identified as being problematic, the sorts of data that are collected, the data gathering strategies, as well as what happens as a consequence. Even more fundamentally, they can determine whether the problem/s are identified at all. In the early history of gender equity reform, especially when the focus was on the education of girls, a not too infrequent response from schools was 'we have no gender problems at our school'. Today, schools are more likely to recognise when there is a problem and there is likely to be a much livelier discussion of gender equity needs of both girls and boys. And what the livelier discussion often highlights are the vastly disparate interpretive frameworks teachers bring to bear on gender equity reform.
In this study, a number of different interpretive frameworks could be identified. Teachers' perceptions on gender equity did not necessarily fall neatly into any one framework. Often teachers drew on a number of explanations and as a consequence attended to gender issues in multiple ways. Despite this multiplicity of interpretations, the following offer a useful way of organising the interpretive frameworks emerging from this study. Wherever possible, the themes that are picked out are in the language used by principals and teachers themselves.
In very broad terms, teachers' interpretive frameworks could be seen to fall into two broad categories; those that rely on 'natural' explanations and those that rely on sociologically derived explanations.
What follows is an examination of a number of examples to illustrate the range of interpretations in this study, together with the implications for action of those interpretations.