Conference Agenda

Context/ background

Gender is becoming a volatile, slippery category, un-pin-downable for some young people, a descriptor that seems increasingly inclined to escape beyond assumptions of binary, categorical gender associated with masculinity/ femininity; boy/girl, male/ female with their concomitant expectations, limitations, and privileges. When young people are given opportunities to move beyond discourse to explore gender through non-verbal means, shimmering affects, materials, atmospherics, embodied capacities and potentialities begin to interfere with straightforward explanations of gender. And yet, at the same time that some young people are pushing beyond the bounds of gender, old and new patterns of gendered violence and exclusions continue to impact educational experiences of many.

Gender has recently been target of poltical attention in Australia, with particular concern expressed by conservative politicians and media. This has led to direct interference and blocking of research pertaining to gender and schooling. However, our research with historical policy actors indicates that even at the zenith of gender equity policy, political obstructionism was a common feature of gender equity work for policy actors and others seeking to create change.

Research Questions

This paper reports on a component of the "Gender Majers: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Prac'ces in Australian Secondary Schooling" (ARCD) research conducted with ACT school students/teachers, NSW recent school graduates and historical policy actors who worked on GE policies in the past. (This paper focuses on the first two cohorts). Our key research questions are:

1. How is gender articulated, experienced and understood by young people, teachers, school executives and policy makers?
2. How has gender-related policy for schools changed over time since 1990s?
3. How can gender-related equity policy be reframed and refreshed for contenporary schooling?

This paper responds to Qs 1& 3).

Conceptual farmework

The focus on gender will contribute to international research in gender, sexualities and schooling. To reconsider gender as an organising category of social life, whilst acknowledging its theoretical destabilisation, demands conceptual elasticity, and new theoretical frameworks offer a route through this theoretical impasse. Such frameworks require meticulous attention to empirical contexts, which include, but do not privilege, the accounts of human participants, and that include, but are not limited to, rational explanations. They demand tracings of constitutive flows and relations of discourses, practices, feelings, things, bodies and relations in order to map how bodies are positioned in relation to each other and other bodies, including non-human ‘bodies’ such as bodies of knowledge, media and technologies, and including in reseach events such as focus groups and interviews. Thus our work draws on feminist poststructuralisms, queer theories and new materialisms in order to focus on gender as a continuous ‘becoming’ that operates within, but is not limited to, existing material, discursive and relational practices.

This paper weaves through the accounts of gender and secondary schooling that young people and their teachers in ACT, and recent school leavers in NSW shared with researchers in the Gender Matters research project. It lingers with contradictions, failures and glimmers of inclusive localised practices where young people advocate for and begin to create gender safe and inclusive schools for all genders.

This paper focuses on the cross-sectional application of the gender perspective in a hermeneutic phenomenological (HP) research, centered on the political participation of young women. Specifically, the selection of the sample will be explained.

Gender Perspective in the Research

Biglia and Verges (2016) establish a series of criteria and questions that help to reflect on the application of the gender perspective in the three stages of a research, and regarding the choice of the sample they point out "Have the differences between women and men as research subjects been considered? Are we taking for granted the equivalence between sex and gender? How has the sample been defined?" (pp. 21-22, our translation). In our research, the high degree of awareness of the existence of these differences has led us to select a sample of 18–35-year-olds who are or feel themselves to be women. In this sense, we embrace the advances in feminist phenomenology (FP), which assumes that the so-called "identity categories" (race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.) reveal that structures that appear to be universal (such as, for example, the perception of space and time) are not so (Ahmed, 2007; O'Byrne, 2020). On the other hand, according to Sans Martín (2015), we assume that women are the subject of phenomenological verification when talking about them/us. In this sense, our research team in this part of the study is formed, exclusively, by women.

Feminist Phenomenology

At first, the study sample was raised without analytical taking into account the gender category, as we understood that phenomenology aspires to find the essence of participation and that as such it gender-neutral, since the phenomenological approach seems to advocate for the essences of the phenomenon being studied (Ayala- Carabajo, 2017). That is, the study sample included both men and women.

Delving into the subject and under the prism of a FP, we sought to elucidate whether the gender category and other identity categories such as race and class should occupy an important place or whether, on the contrary, above them is a universality that flattens these identities.

Under the prism of hermeneutic phenomenology (HP) we can aspire to find structures of meaning that are above ethnicity, class, and gender. However, from the FP it is considered that these three categories cannot be omitted (Sáenz, 2014). In fact, what it does is to introduce into this thinking and method these three realities.

The HP aims to uncover the structures of meaning of the phenomenon of study by implicitly or explicitly assuming the universal human. For FP both mind and body are part of individual and collective historicity, a historicity that shapes that mind and body.

Identity categories structure lived experience. Therefore, there are no structures of meaning that are not mediated by the manifestations of each person in his or her relationship with the world, a relationship in which sexual difference (having the experience of a man-boy or woman-girl body) acquires an importance defined by that body embodied in a specific way. The body mediates the relationship with the world from the first moment.

There is a plethora of laws and plans that contemplate the incorporation of a gender perspective in education in Catalonia, along the same line with what is happening in the national and the international context, as the introduction of gender perspectives in education has become central in the global education policy field (Jacquot, 2015). However, little is known about what actors in secondary schools –namely teachers, principals, and students– do regarding a gender perspective in education, as the enactment of policies is always subject to individual interpretation as well as to complex social interactions between the respective actors involved (Ball et al., 2012). This article seeks to analyse how the policy mandates in this regard are interpreted and translated in Catalan secondary schools. Drawing on 15 focus groups with representatives of teachers, students, management teams and families (N=103) from 12 secondary schools in the region, the paper explores the multifaceted or even contradictory processes that occur during the ‘implementation’ of policies, considering the specificities of each context and the social interactions that take place.

Using the analytical framework by Braun et al. (2011), the results show how the material, the situated, the external, and particularly, the professional context, shape the enactment of gender policies in Catalan education. To explore what happens in secondary schools regarding gender, it is key to look at the ways in which secondary-school actors re-signify the policy orientations considering their agency in context. In this regard, the article introduces an analytical view that situates teachers and school leaders as agents who, mediated by their habitus (Musofer & Lingard, 2020), are immersed in a continuous process of interpretation, appropriation and negotiation of educational policies in their specific contexts. Therefore, the article highlights the importance of the professional context as many instances in this study show the extent to which introducing gender in the curriculum is up to the individual teachers. The fact that the efforts to include gender perspectives in schools is due to the school level actor's informed decision to do so, rather than a result of the official curriculum, has consequences such as the feelings of loneliness and misalignment with the school strategy. The analysis on the material context allowed for a more specific understanding on not only how secondary school actors interpret the content taught in classrooms, but also how their enactment spills over into the ways the classroom and school space is interpreted from a gender perspective. The sense of urgency amongst secondary schools to create gender commissions or groups following the recommendations by the Catalan Department of Education appears as the main influential external context. However, this external pressure is controversial as there is still no legal requirement by the Department about the existence of such commissions and their functions and responsibilities. In relation to the situated contexts, an urban-rural divide was identified, as well as the importance of a sustainable coordination with and support from the local administration as a driver to develop gender-sensitive practices. Alongside the text, the article discusses the ways and under which conditions there is also policymaking processes within the schools.

Finally, the results proof true the assumption of this paper regarding the importance of taking context seriously when implementing gender-sensitive policies. This is to say, having analysed the contextual factors and mechanisms intervening in the enactment of gender-sensitive education, it is evident that among the multiple roles of school actors (principals, teachers, students, families, and others) there is the role of policymaking. Thus, far from a top-down approach, this article evinces that gender-sensitive policies are also made at the bottom level of the education system: the schools.