The Little Things That Educate You In Gender Personal Lives ]
Many of us can point to significant events or stages in our own lives which have made a difference to the ways we think and the directions we have taken. Sometimes the realisation is immediate, for others it is only on reflection that the significance of our experiences and their influences are recognised.
STAGES IN LIFE
In summing up why she was committed to making changes in the school, one teacher linked her experiences and her thinking to the stages in her concerns for gender equity:
I have a strong commitment to social justice. And I've been through times where as a woman I've been quite depowered, through the whole divorce process and single parenting and so on. I feel that I went through an enormous shift in my way of being in the world, in terms of coming to the end of the line in terms of the fairy stories, the female myths. I had to start rebuilding and rediscovered the feminism that I'd had in my student days. I found that it was moving in the direction that I wanted, and I wanted to take the girls with me.... And the boys - I have a great love for the boys and I hate to see them damaging themselves in the way that they are and, interestingly, I find myself having to work more with the boys than with the girls. I have done a lot of work with the girls to empower and to help them to assert themselves through situations; but it's been the boys that have dominated and monopolised more of my thinking and actions.
In response to a suggestion that working with boys to change behaviours sometimes means asking them to give up some of their traditionally accepted power and status, this teacher again referred to her own experiences:
... and if you take the power away you leave them with an empty shell. I'm in my forties, and I've been aware of the men who've suffered, but I know a lot of men who've worked through it and who are now working alongside women to find ways of sharing the power. I've remarried, by the way!
LIVING IN THE BUSH
One woman talked about the contrasts in her life. She had grown up with what she describes as 'supportive and empowering experiences' at home and at school. Then she moved to a new life in the country. When asked about her interest in gender equity she indicated:
I would say I'd been interested in a nebulous way for years and years and years. I was a city girl and I married and went to live in the bush. That's a bit of a far away thing when you go out to the country; it's more like the 19th century. The men are the only people who know anything about things like the price of stock. I'd gone to an all girls' Catholic school, where I got a fair thrust about women can achieve. And the support from home, from my parents reinforced my school experience....I still find it really interesting when we go back to [country town]. It's like a bit of a time warp, going and seeing how women are positioned in the country. They're not totally well positioned in the city on any continuum, but their positions are narrower in rural areas.
LINKING TO STUDENTS' STORIES
Another teacher talked about how her honesty about her own life experiences when discussing issues raised in literature, enabled her to empathise with students and gain their trust to discuss their personal experiences.
... I think by being incredibly honest with kids, you share things that have happened to you ... I think too that sometimes the more traumatic your background is the more sensitive you are to these issues.
For this teacher, the students' personal stories were not only a source of data to determine student needs, they have kept her committed to working with gender issues as a part of her professional responsibility:
Where I think it started in this school was when I was teaching literature which lends itself to intimate discussions about everything. The same questions keep coming up over and over again when you are dealing with conflict in literature, and the dramas and life experiences of the students ... What that leads to is every time these kids are in crisis, who do they come to? They come to their literature teacher. Every time there was a gender problem these kids would always come to me, whether it was about somebody being on 'dope', somebody had attempted suicide, somebody is depressed, somebody is being harassed by another student, somebody is being harassed by teachers.... I felt that I was being bombarded with the misery that was going on around me and I was incredibly sensitive to all the issues that I could see happening - not just to students but also with the adults as well. It seemed so obvious to me that if you cared about your students you would want to make a change. It's like being aware that they don't know how to do a sentence or a paragraph, there is something in you as a teacher saying 'I want to change that'. Well the same applies with all these emotional issues. You don't want to keep hearing year after year that the same things are happening and not being able to anything. I am just one of those people who if I see that there is a need and it doesn't matter what it is, and I can change it, I want to do something about it. I can't get complacent about things.