Identity politics, justice and the schooling of Muslim girls: navigating the tensions between multiculturalism, group rights and feminism

This article focuses on the concerns expressed by three female Muslim educators who are support staff at an English comprehensive school. Consistent with the debates associated with multiculturalism, group rights and feminism, the article illuminates spaces of gender constraint and possibility within the discourses shaping these women’s lives and the lives of the Muslim girls they educate. With reference to an initiative at the school designed to support these girls’ greater self-determination – an Islamic discussion group – the article highlights the significance of a justice politics that begins with overcoming relations of status subordination rather than on differentiated group identity.

The program and treatment effect of summer jobs on girls’ post-schooling incomes

Public programs (of disputed effect) offering summer jobs or work while in high school to smooth the transition from school to work is commonplace. In this paper, 1447 girls in their first grade of high school between 1997-2003 and randomly allotted summer jobs via a program in Falun (Sweden) are followed 5-12 years after graduation. The program led to a substantially larger accumulation of income while in high school. The causal effect of the high school income on post-schooling incomes was substantial and statistically significant. The implied elasticity of 0.4 is however potentially inflated dueto heterogeneous effects.

Schooling, normalisation, and gendered bodies : adolescent boys' and girls' experiences of gender and schooling

Dominant discourses construct boys and girls as two homogenous groups in need of particular, and uniform, kinds of interventions (Martino, Mills, & Lingard, 2005, Mills, Martino, & Lingard, 2004; Jones & Myhill, 2004). The boys and girls themselves, however, tell a much more complex story and challenge us to consider very different implications for addressing gender conformity and, more broadly, diversity in schools. In this chapter, the voices of students are used as text to explicate, first, how issues of gender, sexuality, social class, ethnicity and the body are implicated and interweave in girls’ and boys’ social experiences of schooling; and second, what the implications of this interweaving might be for addressing diversity in schools (Connell, 1995; 2002; Martino, 1999, 2000; Pallotta-Chiarolli, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2005). This work draws on and elaborates further our previous published research that investigates issues of gender and schooling. It locates such research within the broader international context of studies conducted into issues of gender and schooling that document student perspectives and voice (Fine & Weiss, 2003; Ferguson, 2001; Renold, 2003; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Lees, 1993; Ornstein, 1995; Thorne, 1993; Mills, 2001; Hey, 1997; Willis,1977; Walker, 1988). The use of student voice as text is considered within that broader context and highlights the significance of gender regimes and power relations in students’ lives at school (Martino & Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2005; 2003; 2002; 2001; Pallotta-Chiarolli, 1998). We illustrate the extent to which the risky business of ‘fitting in’ involves negotiations around normative and transgressive masculinities and femininities and how such practices intersect with sexuality, race/culture, class, and geographical location (see James, 2003; Kumashiro, 2002).

Some of these girls can be real drama queens : issues of gender, sexual harassment and schooling

Since the 1970s many feminists working for gender justice in education have highlighted the predominance and seriousness of sexual harassment in schools and condemned the enduring trivialization of such behaviours. This paper develops this body of work by focusing on how issues of sexual harassment are located within prevailing contemporary western educational contexts that position boys as 'victims' of feminism and 'girl-friendly' schooling. It is argued here that such contexts draw attention away from the powerful spaces that many boys continue to inhabit in schools. Counter to the popular notion that girls no longer face problems in relation to their schooling, the paper foregrounds the voices of four (14-year-old) Grade Eight girls from Tasmania, Australia who detail their disturbing experiences of sexual harassment. Pointing to the grave inadequacies of common remedies used to address these behaviours, such as prescriptive discipline systems that ignore issues of gender and power and boy-friendly remedies that collude in the perpetuation of inequitable gender relations, the paper highlights the imperative of disrupting the erasure of these issues from current dominant equity debates and the urgency of better addressing this problem in schools. Along these lines, the paper calls for teacher practice that acts against the grain of broader anti-feminist and performative school cultures to transform the masculinities of entitlement that contribute to these unacceptable behaviours.

Indigenous girls, social justice, and schooling : addressing issues of disadvantage

Indigenous women and girls in Australia remain highly disadvantaged economically, culturally, and politically. The ways in which schools can better address this disadvantage are the focus of this chapter. The chapter builds on existing research in the area of Indigenous schooling and social justice to add important theoretical and practical insight into supporting Indigenous girls – an equity group whose marginalization (while highly salient) tends to be lost amid broader concerns about Indigeneity. With reference to “Emma’s” story as exemplifying some of the key constraints to the educational attainment of Indigenous girls , the chapter explores how schools might begin to remedy this disadvantage through their engagement with a politics of (1) economic redistribution, (2) cultural recognition, and (3) political representation.

Giving Muslim girls ‘a voice’: the possibilities and limits to challenging patriarchal interpretations of Islam in one English community

This paper presents the philosophies and practices of ‘Laura’, a young English community liaison worker and former religious studies teacher who has recently converted to Islam. Drawing on data generated from a qualitative and predominantly interview‐based research project that investigated issues of pedagogy and social justice in English schools, the focus is on Laura’s efforts to support Muslim girls through an Islamic discussion group. The paper highlights how Laura draws on Islamic beliefs to support the girls’ questioning of patriarchal interpretations of Islam within their Pakistani immigrant community. The paper also provides insight, however, into some of the tensions and limitations of Laura’s liberatory approach in terms of her positioning as white, western, and middle‐class. Against this backdrop, a self‐reflexive approach that is sensitive to how ‘ethnic‐specific sociability’ shapes understandings and enactments of gender is advocated. Such an approach is presented as central in considering how spaces of gender justice might be mobilised within community environments where unprecedented levels of multi‐cultural fragmentation and diversity have amplified tensions and conflict between and amongst racial and religious groups.

‘Some of those girls can be real drama queens’: issues of gender, sexual harassment and schooling

Since the 1970s many feminists working for gender justice in education have highlighted the predominance and seriousness of sexual harassment in schools and condemned the enduring trivialization of such behaviours. This paper develops this body of work by focusing on how issues of sexual harassment are located within prevailing contemporary western educational contexts that position boys as ‘victims’ of feminism and ‘girl‐friendly’ schooling. It is argued here that such contexts draw attention away from the powerful spaces that many boys continue to inhabit in schools. Counter to the popular notion that girls no longer face problems in relation to their schooling, the paper foregrounds the voices of four (14‐year‐old) Grade Eight girls from Tasmania, Australia who detail their disturbing experiences of sexual harassment. Pointing to the grave inadequacies of common remedies used to address these behaviours, such as prescriptive discipline systems that ignore issues of gender and power and boy‐friendly remedies that collude in the perpetuation of inequitable gender relations, the paper highlights the imperative of disrupting the erasure of these issues from current dominant equity debates and the urgency of better addressing this problem in schools. Along these lines, the paper calls for teacher practice that acts against the grain of broader anti‐feminist and performative school cultures to transform the masculinities of entitlement that contribute to these unacceptable behaviours.

Gender and schooling : still making the difference?

This chapter analyses contemporary political responses to the perceived academic success of girls as compared with boys, and the motivations behind what they call the 'what about the boys?' lobby. It argues that the growth of this influential lobby group is emblematic of a feminist backlash in western societies. By exposing some of the theoretical problems with the construction of difference upon which the 'boys in education' case is based, the author constructs an alternative relational approach which urges that the school curriculum should encourage all students to deconstruct gender, and particularly the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is formed and shaped in our society

The paradox of virtue : (re)thinking deviance, anorexia and schooling

In this paper we posit a radical retheorization of anorexia as a form of deviance. We examine how the disciplinary practices and moral technologies typical of contemporary secondary schooling signify and enter into the articulation of three ‘virtue discourses’ (discipline, achievement and healthism), and tease out how these ‘virtue discourses’ play into the formation of the ‘anorexic’ subject. Informed by Foucauldian theory, our analysis draws on our life history interview study with teenage girls diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and their parents. We argue that anorexia can be understood not as a form of deviance but as a ‘paradox of virtue’ involving zealous compliance with and taking up of socially and culturally sanctioned ‘virtue discourses’ that are immanent in schooling and wider society.

'Go Grrrl!' : constructions of femininity in the textual practices of elite girls' schooling

In this paper I consider the utility of discourses of ‘girl power’ for understanding, and complicating, the way youthful femininities are produced in schooling. The paper is concerned with expanding the possibilities for how queer theoretical resources might be utilized within studies of girls and schooling. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’ for understanding, and attending to, the way normative discourses of heterosexuality underpin the school-based production of youthful femininities. The term ‘heterofemininities’ has been used in order to label these school-produced intersections of sex/gender/sexuality. Drawing on discourses of ‘girl power’ that gather around ‘voice’ and responsibility, I propose that the production of ‘hetero-femininities’ within educational contexts might be further explored, and thus complicated, when the significance of discourses of ‘girl power’ is considered. I analyse young women’s discussions of key ‘girl power’ icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls’ school in Australia. In this analysis I explore the intersections of gender/sexuality/girl power that are produced in the young women’s textual practices.

Mobilising spaces of agency through genealogies of race and gender: issues of indigeneity, marginality and schooling

This article presents data from a case study of a non-traditional secondary school for Indigenous girls located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia). The focus is predominantly on the identity and practices of Nicole who is one of the school’s teachers. Nicole’s identity as an Indigenous woman and teacher and the school’s approach to supporting its marginalised students are theorised in relation to particular elements of feminist genealogy. These elements are associated with the possibilities for agency opened up through the subject’s critical reflection on, and resistance of, the discursive relations that constitute the self. The article draws on feminist theories to explicate the potential of such reflection and resistance to disrupt and transform gendered and racist norms and to legitimise alternative constructions of female indigeneity – to that represented in dominant colonial discourse.

National gender equity and schooling policy in Australia: struggles for a non-identitarian feminist politics

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from theNational Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987, to current policy concerns with boys’ educational underperformance. The paper’s key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic rationalism and anti-feminist discourses. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s understandings of distributive and cultural gender justice and her notion of a nonidentitarian feminist politics, the paper critically examines the ways in which such imperatives have re-articulated equity and schooling concerns. Through these lenses, the limitations of the affirmative gender binary politics and remedies that have dominated gender and schooling reform in Australia are highlighted. The paper concludes with an illumination of the gender justice spaces currently being mobilised in Australian schools. Such spaces, it is argued, fostered within a context of increasing autonomy and self-management for schools, are providing avenues for creative and disruptive (pro)feminist activism.

What is the relationship between social governance and schooling?

The most frequently told story charting the rise of mass schooling should be fairly familiar to most of us. This story normally centres around the post-enlightenment social changes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and details how society slowly became more caring and more humane, and how we all decided that rather than simply being fodder for the mills, all children – including those from the working-classes - had the right to an education. The more civilised we became, the more we pushed back the school leaving age, until we eventually developed schools which clearly reflected the values and ambitions of the wider community. After all, are school not simply microcosms of society at large? In addition to this, the form that modern schooling takes is regarded as an unproblematic part of the same story. Of course we should organise our learning in the way we do, with the emphasis on formalised learning spaces, graded curricula, timetables of activities, various forms of assessment, and a clear hierarchy of authority. These features of the contemporary education merely reflect the fact that this is self-evidently the best system available. After all, how else could education possibly be organised?

Aggression in Sexually Abused Trafficked Girls and Efficacy of Intervention

The broad objective of this study was to understand the incidence and severity of aggression among sexually abused girls who were trafficked and who were then further used for commercial sexual exploitation (referred to subsequently as sexually abused trafficked girls). In addition, the impact of counseling for minimizing aggression in these girls was investigated. A group of 120 sexually abused trafficked Indian girls and a group of 120 nonsexually abused Indian girls, aged 13 to 18, participated in the study. The sexually abused trafficked girls were purposively selected from four shelters located in and around Kolkata, India. The nonsexually abused girls were selected randomly from four schools situated near the shelters, and these girls were matched by age with the sexually abused trafficked girls. Data were collected using a Background Information Schedule and a standardized psychological test, that is, The Aggression Scale. Results revealed that 16.7% of the girls were first sexually abused between 6 and 9 years of age, 37.5% between 10 and 13 years of age, and 45.8% between 14 and 17 years of age. Findings further revealed that 4.2% of the sexually abused trafficked girls demonstrated saturated aggression, and 26.7% were highly aggressive, that is, extremely frustrated and rebellious. Across age groups, the sexually abused trafficked girls suffered from more aggression (p < .05), compared with the nonvictimized girls. Psychological interventions, such as individual and group counseling, were found to have a positive impact on the sexually abused trafficked girls. These findings should motivate counselors to deal with sexually abused children. It is also hoped that authorities in welfare homes will understand the importance of counseling for sexually abused trafficked children, and will appoint more counselors for this purpose.