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Life experiences and background are obviously key ingredients of the person that we are, of our sense of self. To the degree that we invest our 'self' in our teaching, experience and background therefore shape our practice.

Goodson, 1991:144

Writing about `Teachers' lives and educational research', Goodson talks about the amount of personal data teachers constantly 'import' into discussions about schools, their organisation and curriculum issues and laments the lack of teachers' voices in the reporting of educational research.

In this study, with a focus on teachers' interpretive frameworks, the principals and teachers often 'imported' data from their own lives and willingly shared their many and varied insights about students, schools and gender. Frequently they acknowledged that their perceptions of gender issues and their commitment to working with students in this area came from their own personal experiences, either in their professional or their private lives. These experiences have shaped their understandings of gender and of its importance, providing the filters through which they interpreted what they were currently observing.

For several teachers, their awareness was heightened, or their commitment strengthened, because they were parents and were aware of the barriers or influences their children had to deal with as girls or boys. Others spoke about relating to the students because of their own gendered experiences while they themselves were students. As one teacher said:

If you start to examine yourself, and that's probably where you have to start from, you have to see that you too have been conditioned. So then when you start relating to the kids you've got to realise that they too have had a lot of those same experiences.