Interpretive Frameworks Moving Frameworks ]
A cautionary note needs to be made about the above exploration of teachers' interpretive frameworks and their categorisation on the basis of natural and sociologically-based explanations. The sub-divisions have been useful as a way of organising the various explanations teachers used to make sense of something as complex as gender equity. They are also useful in highlighting the major differences in the interpretations and some of their consequences for action.
However, there is a danger in assuming that teachers' interpretations of gender, and of the data they gather about it always neatly slot into these categories. Often they do not and often they may even appear to be contradictory as teachers respond to the ever changing and unpredictable scene of school and gender dynamics. An interesting aspect that emerged in this study was the moving across interpretive frameworks as teachers dealt with new data or grappled with contradictory evidence.
In the following section, several examples are given which illustrate how teachers moved across different interpretive frameworks to accommodate data that seemed to give mixed messages and move about without any readily apparent internal consistency.
EXAMPLE ONE: ON POWER GAMES
The first example relates to what the teacher-cum-participant observer saw as power plays. It is an example of one teacher's ongoing and keen observations of relationships between girls and boys. In gender relationships, the issue of power differentials between girls and boys is an important one and the following account is of the teacher's observations of an interaction at a school social, an incident which highlighted for her, power dynamics she had been observing over a period of time. Her account started off with:
It's very hard, because in primary school, the girls mature so much earlier than do the boys. They can finish their primary school when all of them are twelve, and most of the girls have actually started menstruating ....
The first explanation about the boy/girl relationships at the school put the analysis into a biological interpretive framework attributing the situation to developmental differences; girls mature at a faster rate than do boys.
Now, the girls are getting pretty edgy and aware of the opposite sex and at a time when the boys aren't really, so I often find the girls take the boys and try to get their attention.
In the unravelling of relationships between girls and boys, the girls' biological maturity has social implications. So without too much elaboration the scenario was moving from the biological to the sociological. But of further interest ...
That gives the boys this lovely power-base. Like, I was at a school social where there were four or five girls all pulling up a boy to dance with them. And I thought he was really being harassed, because he was being so unwilling. So I walked over and said, 'Girls, leave ___ alone, it's obvious he doesn't want to dance, and you're harassing him,' and he looked at me and said, 'Oh, no, Mrs ___, I don't mind at all.' And they're doing it again: they're giving him this real power to say, 'You know, I don't mind all these girls giving me this attention, and I'm enjoying it all.'
The interpretation of what was happening when the more mature girls seemingly began to 'harass' the boys is interesting. Even though she admonished the girls for harassing the boy, it would appear that from a construction of gender framework, the teacher might have anticipated the boy's rejection of her intervention. He was enjoying the attention. And the teacher saw, (and apparently not for the first time), what was another playing out of a power game between girls and boys.
So, I think our girls need a lot more education yet. I think the power is there, and I don't know whether it's to do with the different levels of maturity or whether it's more to do with the fact that it's in their home lives, especially in this area. You do see a lot more of the men with power than females.
The final comments are illustrative of the sort of moving about through the various ways the scene could be interpreted. Apart from the fact that 'our girls need a lot more education', and one might assume it is education about how gender relations are constructed, the final sentence suggests the complex interplay of reasons to explain the emerging scene. It could be that the power play had to do with different levels of maturity, and/or that it had to do with socialisation within the family, and/or the construction of gender and power differentials between men and women.
EXAMPLE TWO: ON GENERAL ISSUES
The second example comes from a school where a core of committed staff, with the support of the school administration, had been spearheading the school's gender equity reforms. The illustration of the changing frameworks emerges from a discussion about differences in staff perceptions:
Students are really quite affirmative when it comes to expressing their views. Lots of these issues tend to come through the English Department. The female staff in the English Department have been involved in issues of gender and equal opportunity and equity issues for many years so they are continually raising the issues.
Though the talk was very broadly about the generation of equity issues, a clue was given about key staff and their gender equity background. It was not uncommon that the catalyst for gender equity reforms was staff who stand out for their knowledge of and commitment to gender equity. Often these people were women who had been concerned about the education of girls. Many of these were familiar with the various interpretive frameworks discussed above and, in their exploration of gender issues, were now including understandings from a construction of gender perspective.
Once again, the Humanities area is where you see these issues coming through. They raise them. A lot of staff talk about them but not in terms of gender. Sometimes they raise issues and discuss things that I see as being gender issues but perhaps they don't. They might be talking about issues of behaviour in the classroom or performance of boys and girls or performance and behaviour of a certain group of boys. Or maybe they are talking about managing a student behaviour problem and I see those as being inextricably linked to gender whereas perhaps they don't see that initially.
In terms of interpretive frameworks about gender, the comments are revealing. For the commentator, what he saw as gender issues was not even recognised by other teachers as being linked to gender. This non-recognition of what, to the converted, are obvious gender issues is not all that uncommon. As in the above case, issues of classroom behaviour, performance of boys and girls or performance and behaviour of a certain group of boys are often not perceived to be gender linked. And yet, from the perspective of the teacher cited initially in this example, it is essential for schools to integrate gender enquiry and gender reform into regular programs and procedures.
In this study there was much evidence that schools were integrating their gender programs into the regular school activities and several specific examples of schools linking gender investigations to their managing student behaviour programs. Where gender is not linked in this way, the question arises ... How do schools explain sex based differentials in such things as behaviour and achievement? According to the example being cited:
They see it in some ways as natural behaviour and in other ways they just see it as a problem that needs resolving. Sometimes they see it as an academic problem or a management of behaviour problem.
As indicated, if the problem is not seen in gender terms, it is likely to be turned on itself and defined in its own terms - as an academic or a behaviour problem ...
So it's not a matter of how do we change this behaviour in relation to their views of masculinity and femininity. It's how do we change their behaviour in relation to the authority of the classroom or how do we change their behaviour in relation to getting them to approach their work differently.
It is obvious from the above scenario, that the interpretation of the problems raised can differ markedly. In situations such as the above, especially where obvious differences can be discerned on the basis of sex, if the gender dimension is not recognised, important opportunities may be lost. In the first place, the school may not be able to deal effectively with the immediate problems of behaviour management and/or academic performance. In addition, the opportunity is lost to deal with the broader issue of the construction of gender.
EXAMPLE THREE: WHAT DO YOU THINK IS HAPPENING HERE?
The next example comes from an all-boys' school with concerns about aggressive behaviour. The following discussion began with a teacher talking about the boys' behaviour and gender.
You know, when you're out there on the footy field, doing the normal thing, you don't necessarily start to look at the gender issues. To put it in a Pastoral Care issue is a good way for staff to be in-serviced; by having to deal with the questions up front, face to face with the students in a special way, rather than a visceral way.
The interviewer queried why the 'footy field' was not an appropriate place to begin looking at gender issues. The immediate answer was that it was easier dealt with away from a site associated with very masculine activities and also that it was easier for females than for males to challenge stereotypical masculinities. However, the question must have been a teaser.
If I could just go back to the footy question. The response [of the staff] generally is, 'Why challenge what is natural?' I think a lot of staff actually feel that.
It is not unexpected that behaviour on the footy field should be interpreted through a biologically determined framework and seen as 'natural' and unproblematic in terms of gender. But, beyond the footy field, other incidents of extreme adolescent risk taking behaviour were adding a graphic dimension to the problem.
... and what has actually happened over the last six months is that we've lost six of our ex-students, who have left school in the last two years, and have died. Now it's not that they took their own lives willingly, but they were put in high risk situations, driving and things like that. There was a horrific thing that happened in North Adelaide, where a car went over a bridge into the River Torrens and those guys were about 21/22. We're starting to see more and more, and the more you look at it the more you see this high risk youth male death rate. And it's not necessarily suicide, but it is ...
Statistics on things such as male violence, imprisonment, road fatalities and youth suicide are drawing attention to the negative effects of boys' risk taking behaviour. While boys' disruptive behaviour may, in the past, have gone unchallenged, and even been seen by some as good grounding for adulthood, the stark consequences of such behaviour are now sounding alarm bells.
And I think that's been quite eye opening, and they're seeing a connection between what we do here and the way students behave the pushing, the shoving ... You know, this is a life and death situation. I don't know if you've read 'Manhood' by Steve Biddulph? Very early in the book there are statistics about murders and gaol and car-crashes and divorce, and they're very powerful, both for the students and the male staff. And I think that makes us really look at ourselves very closely.
As in this instance, it is becoming more common for concerns about violence, extreme risk taking in males to be linked to boys' disruptive classroom behaviour and to boys' under-achievement in certain curriculum areas. In the above discussion, apart from pointing to the alarming nature of the problem, it is not clear whether the analysis goes beyond an 'it's natural' explanation.
The ensuing discussion suggests that there are as many questions being raised as there are answers. At issue for this teacher is the linking of male behaviour per se to such dramatic statistics.
But I think to make a link between that and male behaviour ... you don't necessarily say, 'Because you're a male, you'll die!' You do look at the situation and say, 'There are the statistics, what do you think is happening here?'I've got a few problems with Biddulph in terms that he goes through the being essentially male, and from a gender studies point of view, I don't know how sound that is. But the permission that he gives for men to speak I think is very good and very populist as well.
While the statistics on male behaviour may be clear cut, interpretation of what they mean is less so. It is interesting to note that what began as a quandary about 'what's natural' on the footy field has gone much deeper into looking at what it means to be male in our society. And, currently that is a critical question for many.
I think that we're at a difficult stage of transition, where we're trying to say is that there is a range of possibilities in being masculine. However, at the same time we're giving mixed messages about, 'It's tough out there, it's hard out there ...'
Talk about the range of possibilities in being masculine now locates the interpretation well within a construction of gender framework. And it is here that the data and the teacher's own experiences and observations reignite the ongoing reflections.
But I wonder whether he does have a point about ... For me, I'm still trying to work out how much of that essential nature is there. On the one hand I feel that you can be anything, on the other hand, working where I do and seeing what I do, and even my own urges or my own intrinsic ... I don't know whether it's intrinsic ... the restlessness ... that he would attribute to being essentially masculine. It's really hard to see how much you're constructed and how much you aren't.
POST-SCRIPT
The issue of male risk taking is currently very topical. In much of the earlier work on gender equity, a major concern was with girls lacking self esteem and not feeling confident to take risks to the same extent as boys. Girls were seen to be better behaved and more compliant than the boys. All of this highlighted the image of the confident, adventurous, risk taking boy. The current focus on extreme risk taking behaviour of boys, as cited above, appears to confirm that perception.
However there is another side to that story. Several teachers in this study pointed to another dimension to student risk taking behaviour. What was being suggested was that there appear to be different domains of risk taking for girls and boys. While the scenario described above may exemplify a certain form of risk taking behaviour, several teachers in the study pointed to other forms of risk taking that were more characteristic of girls.
One principal, for example, talked about taking school groups away on overseas tours and noted that 'the girls would always jump at the opportunity and there are always only three or four boys who want to go'. When the students went to Japan where they would be staying with a family that couldn't speak the same language, the boys were neither ready nor able to face that sort of situation. However, even though the girls were nervous about going, they were keen to go. Interestingly, in the year the school went to the United States of America, 'there were a lot of boys who wanted to go because they felt comfortable with the American culture'.
It is likely that the whole issue of boys' risk taking and disruptive behaviour will continue to fuel the discussion of the construction of gender. And, obviously, the image of the compliant, cautious, unadventurous girls is changing. In this study there was much to suggest that girls were increasingly being seen as confident and willing to take leadership roles. Though it was beyond the scope of this study, comparisons between girls and boys risk taking behaviour suggest themselves. It appears to be more likely that boys engage in potentially self destructive risk taking, whereas girls' risk taking is more likely to be in areas of self enhancement. It also appears that boys' risk taking relies more, than does girls' risk taking, on peer group sanctions. Discussions of risk taking would do well to keep in mind these various gender dimensions.