The “Facts of the Case”: Gender Equity for Boys as a Public Policy Issue

Looking Back, Taking Stock, Moving Forward: Investigating Gender in TESOL

“…Yet simplistic notions of including voices can mask more subtle and powerful hierarchies and even reinforce them. At a time when gender and education researchers are being urged to include the experiences of boys and men as well as or instead of girls and women (Yates, 2000), structural analyses of gendered relations are needed to counter essentializing and discriminatory practices. Kuzmic (2000) illustrates how including women in social studies textbooks has merely reinforced traditional gender hierarchies that privilege maleness:…”

Getting boys’ education ‘right’: the Australian Government’s Parliamentary Inquiry Report as an exemplary instance of recuperative masculinity politics

“…Much has been written about this 'backlash' in education (Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998;Lingard & Douglas, 1999;Yates, 2000;Martino & Meyenn, 2001;Mills, 2003). However, it is worth briefly re-covering some of this territory.…”

Possibilities in the Boy Turn? Comparative Lessons from Australia and Iceland

“…Unfortunately, much contemporary educational policy today throughout the nations of the global north works with the assumption that the feminist project has been completed and, in some more rabid arguments, that it has "gone too far," and that boys are the new disadvantaged in schooling (Yates, 2000). Within this "turn" towards boys as the new disadvantaged there is a tendency not to disaggregate the performance data.…”

“…Robinson (2000) has written about how what she calls an "identity politics of the dominant" was utilised by white men in response to perceived challenges to masculine dominance by a range of liberation movements to do with gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, and so on. This backlash, and in particular the mythopoetic strand of it, found fertile soil in largely middle-class homes where men did feel challenged by feminism (Yates, 2000) and in households where single mothers were unsure about how to engage with their sons. Its impact in education in Australia can be seen in the movement to increase male teachers in schools, to recognise that boys and girls have essentially different learning styles and needs, and in the desire to remasculinise classrooms and pedagogies.…”