Gender Research

To understand what is taught and learned in schools, curriculum researchers must explore understandings of masculinity and femininity because they are interwoven with formal school subjects, sports and clubs, and discipline and authority. Gender has always been a dimension of schooling with some differentiation, and often segregation, of females and males common worldwide. Popular beliefs attribute differences between males and females to biology, but bodily processes are objects of social practice. Research has documented the mutability, socially constructedness, and historical specificity of what counts as male and female and as masculine and feminine. Schools are invoked in current assessments of gains toward and unfulfilled hopes of gender equality. Schools are now understood as places that produce gendered beings and understandings rather than just responding to preexisting differences in girls and boys. Masculinities and femininities are produced in schools in complex interactions with other accented differences, such as race/ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, disability or ability, and language. Almost every aspect of schooling has been linked to gender: single-sex and coeducational practices, academics, sports, romance, and sexuality. Although gendered assumptions continue to be challenged and revised, their commonsense quality (we can see anatomical and behavioral differences between boys and girls!) makes them comfortable and comforting. And when we presume sharp differences between males and females, we are likely to see such distinctions. The durability of marked gender differences can be traced to their intertextual character—that is, the fact that narratives, language, emotions, and morality about gender differences operate across many popular culture, political, economic, legal, religious, and family arenas of life. And many people, including researchers and educators, have investments in maintaining intelligible masculinities and femininities, which exhibit coherence among (biological) sex, gender, sexual practices, and desires.