Overview

Although the academic success of girls has greatly improved in recent years, children's classroom interactions remain strongly gendered. This book investigates primary school children's constructions of gender in relation to their own lives and the issue of adult occupations. Becky Francis marries the lively data she collected from dialogue and role-play by children in primary schools with a new theoretical framework combining aspects of post-structuralism with feminism. She shows how children, in their desire for secure gender identity, actively construct the genders as opposite, through ritualised and stereotypical forms of talk and behaviour. Their oppositional constructions of masculine and feminine manifest in sexist incidents and affect children's power positions in the classroom. The author concludes that the only way to address the power inequalities is to deconstruct the notion of gender as relational, and she suggests how this can be achieved in primary classrooms. This is an important book for everyone who works in primary schools and for the trainers of primary school teachers.

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9781858560977

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...An exceptionally useful contribution to the growing lineage of post-structuralist analyses of schooling. Gender and Education ...A clear and persuasive analysis of the issues... Educational Research

Author Information

Becky Francis is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of Research in the Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London. She was previously Director of the Pearson Think Tank, and Director of Education at the RSA. In 2016 she becomes Director of the UCL Institute of Education.

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