Dr Jane McGregor
Reproducing gender in the school as a workplace
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006
This paper is in draft form and the author would welcome any comments or discussion
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Reproducing gender in the school as a workplace.
Dr Jane McGregor
Abstract
Gender is a critical dimension of enquiry into the spatiality of the school as a workplace. Orthodox approaches to such studies in educational and organisational literature frequently neglect the significance of gender, assuming an apparently neutral stance exemplified by the use of totalising terms such as ‘teachers’ (or staff). This is a weakness of both methodological and theoretical importance. Such androcentric filters obscure the manner in which gender and space are fundamentally and mutually implicated in the (re)production of social and power relations through everyday discourses and practices in schools.
This paper draws on work in the sociology of education and feminist geographies which suggest that gender and sexuality are constructed and contested through institutional (and other) spaces, with our understanding of this coloured by dominant notions of what it means to be a woman - or man, boy or girl . In exploring the mutual constitution of geographies and gender, it is suggested that rather than homogeneous categories or pre-given identities played out in a physical context, different masculinities and femininities are fashioned in and through particular spaces and places (Laurie et al., 1999). Thus place makes a difference to the masculinities and femininities created and expressed through a ‘local’ culture.
Place in this conception is a unique and dynamic juxtaposition of relations articulated with wider ‘global’ processes (Massey, 2005). Spaces are also active in the construction of identities and genders through the everyday performances that recursively bring them into being. Cultural discourses that encode spaces as gendered, for example, ‘home’ or the ‘food and textiles department’ then influence the meaning that people make of spatial practices. Schools as highly specialised institutions illustrate this particularly well.
The paper draws on a four year study into the spatiality of two secondary schools in England. This employed a variety of image-based methods but also surveys to explore who worked with whom, where, when and for what purpose. This work on schools as workplaces for adults has particular resonance and relevance as the government ‘Building Schools for the Future’ project, which aims to remodel all state secondary schools, gathers momentum.
1.0Introduction
A growing literature demonstrates that schools are active in (re)producing genders and sexualities (Epstein, 1997, Kenway et al., 1998, Mac an Ghaill, 1994) through sanctioning certain forms of behaviour, drawing on, and confirming or challenging wider social discourses and dominant definitions. However, schools as organisations are typically constructed as somehow asexual which renders such processes invisible, allowing hegemonic regimes and practices which, it is argued systematically privilege boys and men, to persist (Lesko, 2000; Holloway et al., 2000). Schooling and schools influence the identity work, perceptions and attitudes of individuals and groups, as well as orientation to learning, and so have an important part in the choices that are made in relation to further education, employment and domestic roles, all of which intersect strongly with gender(Arnot, 2001, Cohen, 1996, David et al., 1997). There is also increasing evidence that gender is a significant dimension of school reform efforts (Blackmore,1999; Datnow, 1998; Hubbard, 2000).Gender is thus a critical dimension of enquiry into the school as a workplace for adults
The relational lens of spatiality focused through gender is especially useful in making that most familiar of institutions unfamiliar (Delamont, 1992). Spatialityis the term used for the social production and meaning made of space, as discussed in more detail in the next section. Studying spatial practices in schools moves beyond notions of decontextualised gender identities, adding a further dimension to the understanding of how powerful gender discourses are constructed and maintained (Ivinson & Murphy, 2001). Filtering an investigation through gender further assists in an understanding of the spatiality of the school as a workplace and the maintenance of power-geometries that, for example, subordinate certain women and men
The Study
The empirical material used to illustrate these concepts is drawn from case studies exploring the spatiality of the workplace, which was developed from earlier work on teacher collaboration. Two schools were originally selected on the basis of the ways staff characterised the schools as workplaces. At Brythnoth (a pseudonym) this was summed up by comments such as ‘As a staff we don’t hang together’(McGregor, 2000) while Kingbourn was described generally as a positive and collaborative environment.
Brythnoth was an 11-18 comprehensive Community College created from the amalgamation of two existing schools in 1986. The staff and students of the secondary school moved to the present site on the edge of a cathedral town in a rural area. In the academic year 2000/1 there were around a thousand students of whom 130 were in the post-compulsory sixth form (16-18 year olds), housed in a new building on the site. As also the case at Kingbourn, there were few students coming from ethnic minority back grounds, however, the catchment area had pockets of significant social and economic deprivation, particularly in the rural villages and housing areas for conurbation overspill.
Kingbourn was a large and expanding comprehensive Community College for 13-18 year-olds with over 1,500 students in 200/01, one third of whom made up the Sixth form. The students were drawn from largely prosperous suburbanised rural villages. The proportion of students entitled to free school meals was low and only 12% were recognised to have special educational needs. Performance in examinations was well above national averages and the statutory ‘Ofsted’ Inspection report at the time judged it to be ‘an excellent school’. The school was also a Specialist College of Media Arts and a Training School for student teachers. Unlike Brythnoth, which faced deficit budgets in the four years preceeding the study, Kingbourn was relatively wealthy, a situation enhanced by the sale of land surrounding it for new housing.
Micro-ethnographic methods of investigation included mapping and documenting the physical space of the schools and observing patterns of use and interaction (e.g. through photography, seating plans in the staffroom and document collection). To elicit the subjective meanings people attach to events and spaces – ‘the imagined social worlds that they think they inhabit’ (Hammersley, 1998,p.8), some teachers were asked to photograph their workplace as the basis for further discussion (Prosser & Warburton, 1999) while others created ‘mental maps’ or drawings representing their view of the school. Fifty staff were interviewed in total – and 35 ‘conversations’ recorded in various places and times(McGregor, 2004a).
Although most teachers in both study schools were initially reluctant to identify gendered aspects of the workplace, it became apparent through fieldwork that these not only existed, but also were important in explaining patterns of spatiality. This paper begins with a brief discussion of the conceptual frameworks employed and reviews the evolving approaches to the study of gender and the workplace. While there is increasing recognition of schools as major sites for gender construction, there has been relatively little work on this in the school as a workplace for adults. The intersection of gender, the workplace and school space is explored through taking a number of ‘slices’ through the spatiality of the school focussing on two major dimensions, firstly of the ‘power geometries’ clearly apparent in the multiple and shifting entanglements of gender, social class and age and secondly the intersection of gender, space and the curriculum.
The gendering of organisations can be reflected in the division of labour (Gherardi, 1994), which may have a spatial expression and constitution. This is explored here through the fixed location of canteen or office staff, and the more temporal segregation of part-time teachers and Learning Support Assistants (LSAs). An important area of work for feminists in education has focused on the relationship between gender and the curriculum and this is addressed through the intersection with space. This reveals that certain places/spaces, for example design and technology (D&T) rooms, are gender coded, thus expressing the mutual construction of the social and material particularly strongly within hierarchies of power/knowledge in subject disciplines. In such ‘gendered locales’ (Shilling, 1991) assemblages of people, materials and practises express and embody power relations which begin and end well beyond the space-time of the classroom.
2.0Conceptual frameworks
The analytic framework of spatiality is used to explore the mutual constitution of gender and space in the school, where space is performed through social relations (of power). I particularly draw on the perspective of feminist geographers and educationalists, which explores the social location of power relations in everyday experiences and places (Acker, 1994; Coffey & Delamont, 2000; McDowell, 1999, 2005; Rose, 1993a,1999). I do not take a single feminist standpoint, suggesting the value of locally specific insights, which challenge essentialised notions of males and females in schools (Griffiths, 1995, McDowell, 1992, Rose, 1993a). Rather than use gender as a fundamental analytical category there should be a discussion of genders; however, lack of ‘space’ in the paper precludes a full exploration of this (Holland et al., 1995, Lather, 1995).
Concepts from post modernism can be used to build feminist analyses of teachers’ work, with complex layered concepts of identity formation and power which investigate ‘ways in which gender, power, difference, subject and agency are constituted, though not determined by discourse’ (Coffey & Delamont, 2000, p.12, my emphases). Such perspectives highlight the often-contradictory interaction of power, authority and influence in the spatial construction of gender relations. Although focusing deliberately on women teachers, Coffey and Delamont’s further comment relates to all staff in schools;
‘By viewing individuals as powerful and powerless in different discursive spaces (Blackmore 1999) we can begin to develop new feminist understandings of the relationships between gender and power in teaching and the everyday realities of (women) teachers’ (Coffey & Delamont, 2000, p.13).
The study here was underpinned by a Foucaultian conception of power as a constellation of relations rather than a possession. The premise is that if power operates at the level of micro-relations and resistances, it may be expressed through control over organisational space and spatial manifestations of hegemonic versions of masculinity and femininity. Power in this conception is distributed through and constitutive of, the social world in complex ways, it is neither necessarily positive or negative;
‘Power is not something that is aquired, seized or shared, something that one holds onto or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations’(Foucault, 1978, p.94).
Lateral modalities of power such as collaboration or negotiation operate alongside more overtly spatialised forms which reflect the construction and mediation of power relations between different groups, where individuals may be seen as differently positioned within a ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1999a). The very organisation of the school through the timetable and physical layout imposes rhythms and constraints on all bodies within a repetitive cycle. Many school rules and practices are connected to spatiality and embodiement, determining the use of space by students, for example, by regulating the areas they are allowed access to. Teachers draw on the production of space to exercise their authority and maintain particular power relations, through regulating movement, noise and even light while students also use space in enacting their resistances(Shilling, 1991; Gordon & Lahelma, 1996, McGregor,2004b).
New understandings of space developing throughout the Social Sciences and increasingly in education (Edwards & Usher, 2000, 2003) are that it is not merely the physical backdrop to social action or a metaphor for the social environment. Instead, space is seen as relational, both producing and a product of inter-connecting social practices. It is ‘a moment in the intersection of configured social relations’(Massey, 1994,p.265). The spatial and the social are reciprocally constructedthrough materially embedded practices and performances that create and maintain everyday social relations, including gender (Rose, 1999). Space is literally made through our interactions.
Consequently, space is not pre-given, static or completed, it is always in the process of becoming. In her influential work, Doreen Massey (Massey, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c) uses the term ‘space-time’ to emphasise the dynamic interrelations which comprise space. Social relations and processes do sediment into certain patterns, reflected in persistent physical and organisational (and power) structures such as the classroom. But, if we take the perspective that schools are particular configurations of socio-spatial relations, we see that they are also therefore being continually remade. If spatiality is therefore performed and is constitutive of gender/power relations An understanding of this openness is critical in imagining possibilities of reframing power relationships in the processes of education, schooling and educational reform.
Sothe geographical imaginationsuggests that the location and physical construction of the workplace recursively interacts with the social and gender construction of work and workers, and the relations of power between them. We may thus ask ‘How is space implicated in the construction of unequal gender relations? What is the interaction between gender and space in the school as a workplace?’The aim here is to suggest spatial stories about the construction of gender difference, to explore and expose these power relations in schools as workplaces.
3.0Studying gender and the workplace
Over the last 30 years, the conceptualisations and representations of the workplace and workers have changed considerably. McDowell, on whose work this section particularly draws, suggests that the ‘unsexed worker, labour power unencumbered by a body or any other social attributes (McDowell, 1997, p.23)has disappeared from most of the literature. A focus on the lived experience of workers marked by gender, ethnicity, age and so on, is now an important element in research on organisations. In the 1970s however, workers were largely portrayed as entering the labour market with established gender attributes and women’s occupational segregation was generally only noted, or explained through theories of patriarchy (Maddock, 1999).
Occupations and organisations were more commonly described as gender-neutral containers for gendered workers, rather than as constructed and negotiated through social practices and variable through time-space, as illustrated by the changing gender assignment of secretarial work over time and the mutable aspects of masculinity and femininity this foregrounds. A large body of work now reveals how ‘natural’, i.e. essentialised, attributes of femininity such as caring or dexterity are set up against masculine attributes to organise labour processes and differentially reward workers on the basis of their gender, linking to wider economic processes and ‘globalisation’ (Wright, 2000, Hanson & Pratt,1995). In the mid-1990s there was a move away from a ‘gender-in organisation’ model to ‘theorising institutions themselves as embedded with gendered meanings and structured by social relations of sexuality’ (McDowell, 1997, p.2). Feminist geographers such as Massey (1994,1998) Rose ( 1993b) and Hanson & Pratt ( 1995), drew attention, for instance, to the spatial orderings influenced by women’s domestic responsibilities and male-dominated employment such as the ‘high-tech’ industry.
Early work on organisations as saturated with male power began by looking at how women were ‘othered’ in the workplace, and only relatively recently has the social construction of masculinities (and to a lesser degree, femininities) been documented (Harlow & Hearn, 1995, Laurie et al., 1999, Rothschild & Davies, 2000). A wider move in feminist-inspired scholarship in this area seeks to understand the complexities of gendered subjectivities and how they are constructed in, and vary between, different sites with institutional structures and practices creating and sustaining particular versions of gender (Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Connell, 1987). For example, ‘What it means to be masculine in the Fens is not the same as Lancashire’(Massey, 1994 p.178)and presumably what it means to be masculine in French lessons is not the same as in science.
McDowell lists the development of research on the gendering of work from diverse disciplines, drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, with considerable interdisciplinary movement of ideas. However, she suggests that the significance of gender as an important factor in the study of the workplace in geography has until recently ‘been assumed rather than investigated’, despite the way in which workplace interactions are now taken to gender men and women in multiple ways:
‘The workplace is one arena where discursive practices construct acceptable versions of ‘men’‘ and ‘women’; particular gendered appearances and sets of social relations that are seen as appropriate to the practices and structures of that institution’
(McDowell, 1997, p.165).
Thus, investigating some of the micro-scale practices constructing spatiality and gender in particular school settings suggests further areas for investigation.
Gender, space and schools
Certain ethnographic studies of schools (Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Gordon et al., 2000a; Connell, 1987), have illustrated the complex and shifting intersection between gender(s), power and space by focusing on the operation of micro-powers and resistances through which hegemonic versions of masculinity and femininity are played out. Micro-political analyses (Ball, 1987; Paechter & Head, 1996) have also focused on this level of interaction, but generally without an overtly spatial focus.
The intersection of space and gender in schools has been explicitly addressed through sociology (Coffey & Delamont, 2000, Paechter, 1998b, Shilling, 1991). Feminist studies have noted the spatial dimensions to the construction of gender (Askew & Ross, 1988; Dixon, 1997; Thorne, 1993). The literature on masculinity and schooling focuses on the social construction of masculinities, illustrating how they intersect and are expressed differently between class, ethnic, sexuality and other groupings in different space-times (Lesko, 2000; McGregor, 2003a). Work on the sociology of place and gender is thus active in developing new theoretical tools with which to re-conceptualise context, including those of spatiality and Actor-Network Theory(Latour, 1999).