Gender and school

A post about Goffman's Dramaturgical Analysis and considering (a little) it's application in schools. Also a bit about online identities and the exhibitional approach, but more on that in another post. It was suggested to me once that I could, as a teacher, build a presence around school by putting a pin in the sole of my shoes. The idea is that even when you’re not seen, you’re heard – omnipresent and surveillant. The ‘tap tap’ of the teacher’s shoes like the ripples in a glass signalling the coming of T-Rex on  Jurassic Park . It means that if you’re ‘good’ then before you’ve turned a corner any trouble will have fled, and maybe it even extends your aura. I tried it for a while in an echoey building and I reckon it worked.  Within education there must exist hundreds of tricks that are employed to help build a persona. Pupils might need to mask emotions in order to maintain the characters they take on, and teachers might have to feign them so as not to upset students, or to h...

 A post about the 'Gender Gap in Attainment', gender regime and Erikson's stages in psychosocial development. Potentially of interest to school and department managers.  I’m having a slightly weird experience trying to write this in the school library surrounded by 5th year pupils who are working on a Design Technology project (to be clear, I do have a free period, so I’m doing this on my time), whilst searching up on the computers about the moment of fertilisation. Hopefully I’ll find a biologist to check this, but from what I’ve read, the genetic makeup of the pupils around me was fixed within about 24 hours of sperm and egg cells meeting and their biological sex was determined by their chromosomes. In terms of the most significant days in a person’s life, that one has got to come right up there: so much about your physical characteristics, cognitive function, susceptibility to different physical and mental illnesses and all sort of other things, is formed for your future...

A post about  Culture, Performativity,   Essentialist Masculinity  and  D ifférance .  Also about boarding, which I think can be great when done right. I became interested in masculinities through working in boarding schools with teenage boys. I moved to a boarding school for the first time about 10 years ago, and moved to living in the boarding house with the boys about two years later, thereafter spending 7 years living in two different boarding houses, in two different schools (in two different countries). It was a really cool experience, pretty full on as its sort of 24 hours a day that anything could happen, but hugely rewarding. It was also a great place to bring up children, and I know that my kids loved having so many ‘older brothers’ to play with when they wanted. The role of a housemaster (that’s what I was doing) is really diverse: you are the main caregiver for the boys there, you oversee their academic progress, their health, happiness and thei...

A post about Gender Role theory and body-reflexive practice, UPDATE: this was written a long while back before I had really read enough to understand what I'm writing, so apologies for anything that might be way off the mark. I’m writing from the sidelines of a rugby pitch on a Sunday morning, watching my son Jonah playing. He’s seven and I think he’s enjoying himself. He loves hanging out with people, struggles a bit to get out of the door when we have to go, but is always smiling by the end. I love a bit of sport and the other classic ‘dad activities’ (this week I put together a shed in which I plan to listen to the radio and drink beer). I’ve got two daughters who are at home with my wife Naomi at the moment, and who do gymnastics and brownies. How is it that we have got to this point where we have everyone filling their stereotypical roles in the family, despite both Naomi and me being (we thought) aware of gender stereotyping and really keen to make sure that we gave each of ...