The feminization of teaching and the practice of teaching: threat or opportunity?

Educational Theory

Volumn 56, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 387-405

  Griffiths, Morwenna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 46849103731     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2006.00234.x     Document Type: Review

References (105)

1. Richard Smith, "Paths of Judgement: The Revival of Practical Wisdom," Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (1999): 327-340.
2. Jana Noel, "On the Varieties of Phronesis," Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (1999): 273-289.
3. Joseph Dunne and Shirley Pendlebury, "Practical Reason," in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 200.
4. Ibid., 194-204;
5. and Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1993).
6. Noel, "On the Varieties of Phronesis"; and Smith, "Paths of Judgement."
7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1966), 301.
8. Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (London: Routledge 1995), 16.
9. See L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, eds. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
10. Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum, "Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible," American Educator (Winter 1991), http://www.21learn.org/arch/articles/brown-seely.html.
11. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
12. Roy Pea, "Practices of Distributed Intelligence and Designs for Education," in Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, ed. Gavriel Salomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47-87.
13. Yrjö Engeström, Learning by Expanding: Ten Years After, trans. Falk Seeger (1999), http://lchc.ucsd. edu/MCA/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/ intro.htm.
14. Smith, "Paths of Judgement," 331.
15. Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1971).
16. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).
17. Nicholas Burbules and Paul Smeyers, "Wittgenstein, the Practice of Ethics, and Moral Education," Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2003), 248-257.
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), § 23.
19. Ibid., § 206.
20. Ibid., § 208.
21. Burbules and Smeyers, "Wittgenstein, the Practice of Ethics, andMoral Education," 251.
22. This is a broader definition than the one offered by Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), which has been much discussed in recent philosophy of education. In their paper, " Practice': A Central Educational Concept" (paper presented at the annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society, San Francisco, California, March 2005), Nicolas Burbules and Paul Smeyers persuasively argue for a conception of practice that is closer to the one described by Charles Taylor in Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
23. For further discussion, see Michele Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Haymer and Lorraine Code (London: Routledge, 2003). I discuss her argument later in this section.
24. Examples and arguments demonstrating this can be found in Jane Roland Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape (London: Routledge, 1994);
25. Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self; Wendy Kohli, "A Monstrous Manifesto: 'Philosophers of the World, Create!"' in Philosophy of Education Society 2001, ed. Suzanne Rice (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002);
26. and Maxine Greene and Morwenna Griffiths, "Feminism, Philosophy, and Education: Imagining Public Spaces," in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Blake et al., 76.
27. For more detailed discussions, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (London: Routledge, 1997);
28. and Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
29. Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek, "Why Class Matters," in Class Matters: "Working-Class" Women's Perspectives on Social Class, eds. Christine Zmroczek and Pat Mahony (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997);
30. and Meg Maguire, "'Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward': Working-Class Women Who Teach," Gender and Education 17, no. 1 (2005): 3-18.
31. Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988);
32. Maxine Greene, "The Plays and Ploys of Postmodernism," Philosophy of Education Society 1993, ed. Audrey Thompson (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1994);
33. and Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
34. Greene and Griffiths, "Feminism, Philosophy, and Education," 76.
35. Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 14, 10.
36. Daniel C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books, 1978);
37. and Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
38. To underline the point that feminist philosophy is not about claiming any particular content as feminist, one of the foremost philosophers of embodiment is Maurice Merleau-Ponty - who is not a feminist. Similarly, Plato's dialogues include descriptions of Socrates and his group of male friends as embodied and embedded in their world, as Richard Smith and Pádraig Hogan point out in "The Activity of Philosophy and the Practice of Education," in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Blake et al., 165-180.
39. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991);
40. and Donna Haraway, with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway (New York and London: Routledge, 2000).
41. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).
42. Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 53.
43. Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 179.
44. Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Traveling and Loving Perception," in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 275-290.
45. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
46. Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self.
47. Greene and Griffiths, "Feminism, Philosophy, and Education," 73-92.
48. Carrie Paechter, "Masculinities and Femininities as Communities of Practice," Women's Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 69-77.
49. Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994);
50. and Ruth Hoberman, "Women in the British Museum Reading Room during the Late-Nineteenth Early-Twentieth Centuries: From Quasi- to Counterpublic," Feminist Studies 28, no. 3 (2002): 489-511.
51. Greene and Griffiths, "Feminism, Philosophy, and Education."
52. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1993).
53. Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing.
54. Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape; Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, That's Funny, You Don't Look Like a Teacher! (London: Falmer Press, 1995);
55. Erica McWilliam, "Touchy Subjects: A Risky Inquiry into Pedagogical Pleasure," British Educational Research Journal 22, no. 3 (1996): 305-317;
56. and Erica McWilliam, "Admitting Impediments: Or Things to Do with Bodies in the Classroom," Cambridge Journal of Education 26, no. 3 (1996): 367-378.
57. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986);
58. Jill Blackmore, Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership and Educational Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999);
59. and Simone Galea, "Symbolising the Maternal: A Genealogical Study of Women Educators" (PhD diss., Nottingham Trent University, 2002).
60. See, for instance, Max Biddulph, "The Monochrome Frame: Mural Making As a Methodology for Understanding 'Self,"' in Just Who Do We Think We Are? Methodologies for Autobiography and Self-Study in Teaching, eds. Claudia Mitchell, Sandra Weber, and Kathleen O'Reilly-Scanlon (London: Routledge- Falmer, 2003), 49-57;
61. Mary Manke, "A Queer Path across the Straight Furrows of My Field: A Series of Reflections," in Just Who Do We Think We Are?, eds. Mitchell et al., 193-205.
62. But see Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, "Constructing Meaning, Constructing Selves: Snapshots of Language, Gender and Class from Belten High," in Gender Articulated: Language and the Culturally Constructed Self, eds. Mary Buchholtz and Kira Hall (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 469-507;
63. and Engeström, Learning by Expanding. The processes of gendered power from the point of view of language communities are explored by Deborah Cameron, "Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity," in Language and Masculinity, eds. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 47-64.
64. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 35.
65. There is a rich description of inner-city teenage boys successfully role-playing women in Lynn Raphael Reed, "Troubling Boys and Disturbing Discourses on Masculinity and Schooling," Gender and Education 11, no. 1 (1999): 93-110.
66. Jonathan Salisbury and David Jackson, Challenging Macho Values: Practical Ways of Working with Adolescent Boys (London: Falmer, 1996).
67. Christopher Bantick, "Respecting Boyness Can Get Boys Back to Books," The Age, May 13, 1998;
68. Jennifer Buckingham, "Let's Make a Start to Fix Boy Troubles," New Zealand Herald, November 26, 2003;
69. Steve McCormack, "Classes in Need of Men," The Independent, December 9, 2004;
70. Alanna Mitchell, "Goodbye Mr Chips," The Globe and Mail, January 16, 2004;
71. and Maria Sanchez-Traynor, "The Gender Gap," Greeley Tribune, October 29, 2005. These newspapers are from Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, and the United States, respectively.
72. Cathy Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession in OECD Countries 1980-1995 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2000);
73. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/papers/ feminize/wp-151.htm.
74. Jane Martin, "To 'Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along': Sex, Gender and the Politics of Education on the London School Board, 1870-1904," Gender and Education 12, no. 2 (2000): 169.
75. See also Joni Lovenduski, "Sex, Gender and British Politics," in Women in Politics, eds. Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
76. Martin, "To 'Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along,"' 169.
77. Christine Skelton, "The 'Feminisation of Schooling' or 'Re-masculinizing' Primary Education?" International Studies in Sociology of Education 12, no. 1 (2002): 85;
78. and J. Smith, "We Need More Males in Primary Education! Or Do We?" (paper presented at the conference of the Australian Association for Research and Education, Melbourne, Victoria, November 1999).
79. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession.
80. This statistic comes from the Teachernet Web site, http://www.teachernet. gov.uk (last accessed December 2005). There were no figures for secondary schools for 1985.
81. Virginia Postrel, "In Their Hiring of Teachers, Do the Nation's Public Schools Get What They Pay for?" New York Times,March 25, 2004.
82. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession.
83. Ibid.
84. Maguire, "'Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward."'
85. Gaby Weiner and Daniel Kalló s, "Positively Women: Professionalism and Practice in Teaching and Teacher Education" (paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, April 2000), http://www.educ.umu.se/∼gaby/positively-women. html.
86. Elizabeth Boyle, "The Feminization of Teaching in America" (Louis Kampf writing prize essay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), http://web.mit.edu/womens-studies/www/writingPrize/ eb04.html.
87. John L. Rury "Who Became Teachers? The Social Characteristics of Teachers in American History," in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 16.
88. Bruce Carrington, Peter Tymms, and Christine Merrell, "Role Models, School Improvement and the 'Gender Gap' - Do Men Bring out the Best in Boys and Women the Best in Girls?" (paper presented at the conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, 2005);
89. Wayne Martino and Deborah Berrill, "Boys, Schooling and Masculinity: Interrogating the 'Right' Way to Educate Boys," Educational Review 55, no. 2 (2003): 99-117;
90. Rob Pattman, "Boys, Masculinity and Early Years Work - What Do We Know?" (paper presented at the Research in Practice Inter-professional Conference, Birmingham, England, 2003), http://www.rip.org.uk/learningevents/ ip-reports/earlyyears.asp#6; and Nola Alloway, Peter Freebody, Pam Gilbert, and Sandy Muspratt, Boys, Literacy and Schooling: Expanding the Repertoires of Practice (Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training, 2002).
91. Elina Lahelma, "Lack of Male Teachers - Problem for Students or Teachers?" Pedagogy, Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (2000): 173-186.
92. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
93. Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall, and Ian Menter, "Threshold Assessment and Performance Management: Modernising or Masculinising Teaching in England?" Gender and Education 16, no. 2 (2004): 131-149.
94. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession.
95. Blackmore, Troubling Women.
96. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood, "Man of the World: Emerging Representations of Global Genders" (Paper presented at the conference, "Travelling Policy/Local Spaces: Globalisation, Identities and Education Policy in Europe," Keele University, June 2001), http://www.keele.ac.uk/ depts/ed/ events/ conf-pdf/cPaperMacAnGhaill.pdf.
97. Maguire, "'Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward"'; and Heidi Mirza and Diane Reay, "Redefining Citizenship: Black Women Educators and the 'Third Space,"' in Challenging Democracy: International Perspectives on Gender, Education and Citizenship, eds. Madeleine Arnot and Jo-Anne W. Dillabough (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), 58-72.
98. Syble Morgan, personal conversation with author, Birmingham, England, November 6, 1998.
99. See, for instance, Tony Sewell, Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black Boys Survive Modern Schooling (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1997);
100. and Reed, "Troubling Boys and Disturbing Discourses on Masculinity and Schooling"; Louise Archer and Hiromi Yamashita, "Theorising Inner-City Masculinities: 'Race,' Class, Gender and Education," Gender and Education 15, no. 2 (2003): 115-132.
101. In the ILO report, part of the definition used for " feminization" includes the term "subsequent low status." It points out that while teaching may provide relatively good salaries for women, this is true only in relation to other occupations that are open to them. Salaries for women are not good in relation to salaries typical of all occupations open to men. Wylie points out that a 1997 OECD report stated that nursing and teaching work in the public sector "tend to combine a high level of employment opportunities for women with a below-average wage penalty - that is, a wage premium in comparison to the average gender pay ratio" (Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession).
102. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession.
103. Joyce Goodman, "A Question of Management Style: Women School Governors, 1800-1862," Gender and Education 9, no. 2 (1997): 149-160;
104. Lynne Walker, "Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London," in New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, ed. Rosa Ainley (London: Routledge, 1998);
105. and Martin, "To 'Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along'," 165-181.