Session Information
Contribution
Description: Although the adult literacy field in England, dubbed, the "Cinderella" of education, is numerically dominated by women, gender is an unarticulated subject. Addressing "gender blindness" is important because teachers' labour and knowledge, and learner trajectories, are being tightly controlled under a national agenda, called, Skills For Life (SFL) - placed to free Cinderella to 'go to the ball.' She will be rewarded if she can release the "gremlins" from the grips of seven million low-literates and embed into them particular literacy skills in so far as it leads to workforce participation --- and punished, if she can't. As a servant, rather than a knowledge worker, she is linked to the school system, sweeping up its mess: "The teacher is positioned as technician" (Hamilton, Macrae, & Tett, 2001, p. 33). This gendered narrative needs to be deconstructed, in light of its rationale: social inclusion. Although recent critiques of SFL target its ideological and structural limitations (Papen, 2005; Appleby, 2006; Clarke, 2002), none focus on gender. The author will use a feminist post-structural framework (Haraway, 1991; Tisdell, 1998; Barr, 1999) to deconstruct the normative discourse (Papen, 2005).
Methodology: An interpretative interactionist method (Denzin, 2002) will be used to examine the gendered SFL policy. This methodology supports post-structural frameworks in so far as it focuses on representation of identity, and utilizes elements of voice, positionality, metaphors, narrative, and symbols to unearth contradictions beneath the rhetoric. The data sources consist of three major policy papers as well as research (2000-2006) on teachers and student participants. Furthermore, international critiques of gendered literacy policies will be consulted. These critiques use content analysis and discourse analysis to illuminate the implicit gendering of literacy policies (Sparks, 2001), as with medicalized policy language (Horsman, 2000), the positioning of teachers as caregivers. (Luttrell, 1996), and prevailing transmission models (Cuban and Hayes, 1996).
Conclusions: The instrumentalism of SFL configures gender superficially, focusing on "what works" rather than as a tool for analysis and transformation. The author will present and analyze subtext narratives that challenge the dominant discourse--with three stories about gender invisibility. The author re-envisions an adult literacy field in England with transformed characters, in a parable about gender equity and literacy.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.