Reading, Writing, and Talking Gender in Literacy Learning

Barbara J. Guzzetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135854218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Until now, there has been no systematic analysis or review of the research on gender and literacy. With all the media attention and research surveys surrounding gender bias and the inequities that continue to flourish in education, a synthesis of the research studies was needed to raise awareness of gender issues in learning and literacy, to provide successful interventions and recommendations to educators, and to point out the direction for future inquiries by examining the unanswered questions of the existing research. For the convenience of readers, the studies are organized by genre: gender and discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literacy autobiography.
Published by International Reading Association

CHAPTER 1

Our Stories Our Intentions, and Our Methods: An Introduction

As European American, middle-class women and as researchers, we have observed how gender is produced and constructed in our lives and through our literacy practices. We have also seen how the power of social context influences literacy along stereotypical gender (or “gendered”) lines. Our investigations in classrooms as university researchers and teacher researchers led us to attempt to make sense of those experiences in light of others’ research and, consequently, to write this review of the literature on gender and literacies.

Our conversations with each other about our experiences and investigations showed us how gender affects students’ literacy development and participation at all grade levels. For example, Barbara Guzzetti's (1996a, 1996b, 2001) research in high school science classes documented language patterns that marginalized females in their activity and talk about that activity in whole-class and small-group discussions. Barbara spent 2 years observing daily three sections of physics and honors physics classes composed of juniors and seniors who were college bound. She also spent a year observing freshmen in physical science, who were not college bound. Together with the physics teacher, Wayne Williams, and with some direction from his female students, Barbara documented discourse patterns the young men in these classes used to their advantage. These language patterns included interruptions, gaze aversion, and competitively gaining and holding the conversational floor, behaviors documented by researchers in other countries as well (see Tromel-Plotz, 1985, for a description of her observations in Denmark, or Cherland, 1994, for a report of her observations in Canada). Barbara and Wayne attempted to disrupt these gendered practices by grouping by gender for small-group labs, which did result in more symmetrical participation for females.

Barbara's observations in these science classes gave her the impetus to develop and offer a new graduate seminar class—Gender, Culture and Literacy—designed to raise awareness of how gender and culture affect literacy development and practice. In this course, participants reflected on their own gendered literacy practices in light of insights gained from class readings and discussions. A student in the first section of this class, Margaret Gritsavage (1997a), conducted an analysis of fellow graduate students’ talk in class sessions. An analysis of the discourse of classroom talk showed that as Barbara as instructor intentionally gave up that role to become a coparticipant and facilitator, the relinquished power was taken up by the oldest male student in the class, Carl. Analysis of audiorecorded conversations from each session revealed how Carl dominated classroom discussions. He accomplished this with an asymmetrical number of conversational turns and the inordinate length of these turns, as well as by using interruptions to gain and maintain control of the conversational floor.

Another professor who came to observe the class, Carole Edelsky, also pointed out the ways in which Carl took up a power position in the class. For example, because Barbara wanted to be seen as facilitator and not as dispenser of information, she gave up the traditional seat at the head of the table to sit along the sides. Carole noticed that Carl occupied the seat at the head of the table, causing Barbara to realize that he took this seat at every session.

Further analysis of the audiorecordings also showed that Carl's conversational content, as well as his conversational style, showed gendered patterns. For example, at the beginning of each class, students often told stories of how they became aware of gender inequities inside and outside their own classrooms. Carl often dominated these discussions, casting himself as a hero. One such discussion focused on a female teacher in the school where he was teaching, and included a lengthy account of how he took over her class when she had a breakdown and settled her students and assumed her responsibilities. The content of Carl's talk reflected the common story line in gendered texts of women as victims and men as rescuers.

This experience caused Barbara to realize that simply reading and talking about gendered texts and talk was insufficient to change ingrained, gendered language behaviors. Although the primary purpose of the class was to raise participants’ awareness of gendered texts and talk, there was still an underlying expectation that these students’ heightened awareness would facilitate personal change. Barbara was reminded of a report of a study conducted by Donna Alvermann and her colleagues, including Josephine Young (who was then a doctoral student), in which they characterized disrupting gendered discourse as “easy to think about, difficult to do” (Alvermann, Commeyras, Young, Randall, & Hinson, 1997).

Like Barbara and Margaret, Josephine also examined males’ gendered discourse. She (Young, 2000) conducted research for her doctoral dissertation by focusing on boys’ reactions to texts that presented gendered and nongendered forms of masculinity. Josephine homeschooled her two young adolescent sons and two boys from next door for half the school year. During that time, she explored the boys’ discourses about texts through activities that focused on masculinity. As the boys talked, they became more aware of the practice of masculinity and how masculine traits were portrayed in texts.

Josephine found that adolescent males’ active displays of heterosexual, masculine practices hindered their participation in a critical analysis of stereotypical gender representations in texts. These boys were not always aware on their own of gendered identities and inequities in texts. Their conversations also revealed the influence of power relations among themselves, as well as within society, which contributed to their gendered preference for and interpretation of texts and their participation in literacy activity.

As a first year teacher, Laurie Fyfe (1999) also observed gendered behaviors in elementary school. Laurie observed a group of students in her fourth-grade classroom construct gender as they discussed a Chinese version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” She noticed how children as young as 9 years old upheld gender stereotypes in how they interpreted the story. The children were unable to credit a female with having saved the day.

In an analysis of graduate students’ literacy autobiographies, Marie Hardenbrook (1997) also discovered how gender influences reading. In another section of the Gender, Culture and Literacy class, Marie analyzed fellow students’ reports of their experiences with electronic or computer text. Her analysis showed that reading and writing as a gendered practice was most prevalent in participants’ reports of their experiences with electronic text. Women reported limited use of the computer (either used for e-mail access or not at all). Men, however, reported a much wider range of activities with electronic text, which included record keeping, Internet use (access to online catalogs), and use of CDs.

The investigations we (the authors of this book) undertook are described in more detail in the appropriate sections throughout this book. Despite our diverse experiences related to gender and literacy, our commonality was that each of us had been put in a position of learner through our roles as teachers or researchers. Our observations taught us how language and social contexts work to construct and reproduce gendered practice. What we had learned so far from our own observations surprised and interested us enough to come together to gain additional insights from the observations of others.

Others’ Research

Given our experiences, we searched the literature to find how our observations compared to those of other researchers and teachers. We wanted to determine if our experiences were unique or typical of other U.S. classrooms. We were not surprised to find that there has been much national publicity about gender bias (asymmetrical opportunities for learning between the sexes) in classrooms.

We found that U.S. news reports like Dateline NBC's “Failing in Fairness” (1994) and national surveys of research by the American Association of University Women (e.g., American Institutes for Research, 1998; Haag, 1999) called attention to the ways in which students, particularly females, were often marginalized in instructional activity and talk about that activity. The American Association of Colleges (Hall & Sandler, 1982) presented results of a survey of a portion of the research on gender and education to publicize gender inequities in classrooms. Recent reports have drawn attention to how boys also were marginalized in classes such as language arts (e.g, Davies, 1997; Reed, 1999).

As a result, research on gender and literacy has become an agenda for researchers. Literacy researchers exploring literacy as a gendered social practice have found classroom discussion to be one of the most common ways in which those with less power are marginalized in instructional activity and talk about that activity (e.g., Alvermann, 1993; Alvermann & Commeyras, 1994; Orellana, 1995) (see Chapter 2). Researchers have investigated males’ and females’ discussions of texts and concepts in text in various content areas (e.g., literature and science), in a variety of settings (small group and whole class), in various grouping patterns (mixed-sex or same-sex), and with a variety of ages (e.g., high school and graduate students).

Literacy researchers also have examined the influence of gender on reading in a variety of ways. For example, several studies were conducted to determine males and females’ reading preferences (e.g., Bardsley, 1999; Broughton, 1998; Brown, 1997; Christian-Smith, 1993) (see Chapter 3). These studies revealed students’ gendered choices of trade books. Another area of inquiry has been the influence of gender on students’ responses to fiction and nonfiction trade books, particularly in studies of literature response (e.g., Cherland, 1992, 1994; Davies, 1993; Nauman, 1997). Attempts to teach students to read against the text, or to read critically and challenge gender stereotypes, have been conducted with both groups of males (e.g., Young, 2000) and mixed-sex groups (e.g., Davies, 1989, 1993).

Researchers are also investigating the influence of gender on students’ writing (see Chapter 4). The literature on gender and writing reveals that students’ selection of topic, genre, and voice is usually divided by gender boundaries. As early as 1975, Donald Graves found differences in the free-choice writing topics of second-grade boys and girls. The girls in his study wrote frequently about themes and topics related to home, family, and friends. Boys wrote about themes and topics such as current events and sports. Graves's (1975) findings were repeated in other quantitative or experimental research throughout the 1980s (e.g., Many, 1989; Trepanier-Street & Ramatowski, 1999). Since then, qualitative or observational studies (e.g., Hunt, 1995; Kamler, 1994; MacGillivray & Martinez, 1998) have focused specifically on topic choice and gendered writing practices, such as voice and genre selection, which identify the same patterns in gendered writing as Graves found. More recent studies have focused on writing as a way to construct gendered identifiers and how gender influences writing evaluations (e.g., Cleary, 1996; Peterson, 1998).

A growing number of researchers are also exploring how gender influences students’ readings of electronic texts, including their online discussions and writings (see Chapter 5). For example, Cynthia Lewis and Bettina Fabos (1999) explored middle school females’ use of instant messaging. In addition, Marion Fey (1997, 1998) explored gender influences in her college students’ online writings and discussions. In a feminist research project, Alice Christie (1995) attempted to change gendered patterns of students’ writings by using online texts. Projects like these are practically significant because of documentation of greater electronic access taken, assumed by, or given to males (Gerver, 1984; Nielsen, 1994, 1998); teachers’ steering of females to gender stereotypical uses of computer text, such as word processing (Nelson, 1990); and reports of sexual harassment with electronic text (Spender, 1995).

Another growing area of study focuses on the influence of gender on literacy development as revealed in literacy autobiographies (see Chapter 6). For example, literacy researchers reflected on their own gendered literacy development (Erickson et al., 1997), as have other researchers (Jackson, 1989/1990). Other investigators noted the influence of gender on literacy development by analyzing the literacy autobiographies of graduate students in literacy (e.g., Gritsavage, 1997; Guzzetti, 1997; Hardenbrook, 1997) or undergraduates in college composition (Sohn, 1998).

Our Purpose

Before now, the literature on gender and literacy had not been systematically analyzed or reviewed. We believed that a synthesis of these studies would be useful for several reasons. First, we thought that an analysis of findings within and across studies would raise awareness of gender issues in learning and practicing literacy, and add to our collective knowledge of the phenomena discovered in our own investigations. Second, we wanted to publicize successful interventions and recommendations for practice that would be useful for teachers and teacher educators. Third, we wanted to find direction for our future inquiries, as well as provide direction to other researchers in gender and literacy by examining the unanswered questions of the existing research. Therefore, we undertook the task of systematically analyzing the literature on gender and literacy.

We confined our project to a review of the observational or qualitative research, particularly the feminist research, on gender and literacies by following procedures outlined for integrative reviews (see Jackson, 1980). Our review also became a critical review in that we systematically analyzed studies from a particular perspective or framework, identifying the silences in these studies, as well as the findings of these studies. Other critical reviews on different topics in literacy have been conducted by researchers such as Donna Alvermann (1986) and Marjorie Siegel (1989). Our review was intended to integrate the literature on gender literacies—discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literacy autobiography. In doing so, we anticipated being able to discover themes or patterns across studies that would lend new insights for the field.

Our Beliefs

We read various feminist theories and talked about them among ourselves until we could find a common theoretical ground on which to base our interpretation of the research. We conducted our review believing that gender pertains to the behaviors one performs to establish an association between one's sex and one's gender (Goffman, 1977). These behaviors (talking, dressing, body language) are embedded in all social interactions and informed by social contexts. Gender, then, refers to the accomplishment of managing the social activities individuals do to proclaim membership in a particular gender. Gender is something we do as we talk, act, read, and write in ways that constitute us as masculine or feminine within social structures (West & Zimmerman, 1987).

“Doing gender” produces and reproduces social differences between what is considered male and female. These differences are fairly stable along gender lines and become recognized as stereotypical or gendered. That does not mean, however, that there are any essential properties that exist outside of culturally and socially constructed categories of gender (Stanley & Wise, 1993). Instead, these differences begin to seem natural or essential because they are reproduced time and time again in our interactions with others and with texts (Butler, 1990). Like most feminists (Stanley & Wise, 1993), we do not distinguish between sex and gender because doing and reproducing gender happens from birth; therefore, we use the terms gender and sex interchangeably.

With these beliefs in mind, we analyzed the studies in this synthesis from the perspective of a feminist sociology, as explicated by Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (1993). This view of feminism was most consistent with our personal beliefs, was the most inclusive of the feminist theories we examined, and was compatible with the purpose of the review. This perspective within feminist sociology recognizes the researcher as interwoven with, changed by, and affecting the research; sees men and men's behaviors in their interactions with women as appropriate for study by feminists; presents a social-constructivist and nonessentialist view of gender; acknowledges multiple subjectivities; and purports that men, in their oppression of women, are themselves oppressed. For example, it was found that when males dominated instructional conversations they failed to learn a valuable educational tool—the skill of active listening (Guzzetti & Williams, 1996a, 1996b).

Our examples demonstrate how language and social contexts work to construct and reproduce gendered practices. As teachers, we believe that it is important to build students’ awareness of how language constructs gender. We also believe that it is important to offer students opportunities to explore gendered identities in and through reading, writing, and discussion, and to deconstruct the categories of male and female. Although we find stereotypical categories of male and female limiting and work to deconstruct them, we believe, like Stanley and Wise (1993), that until women (and some men) are no longer oppressed, it is important to recognize categories of gender:

[F]eminism should be concerned with the multiple and continual fractures that occur between experience and gender categories. This is partly because of the need to break hierarchical relationship of super- and subordination between them that when the two clash, it is experience which I [we] see as wrong, (p. 206)

In other words, we need categories so that we can compare them to our own experiences and uncover the possibilities of gender.

Limitations of Our Review

Our prior experiences as teachers, learners, and researchers shaped beliefs that influenced our interest in and conduct of this review. In some ways, those experiences facilitated our review. For example, our prior knowledge facilitated direction to pieces of the literature and to recommendations from individual researchers conducting these lines of inquiry. In other ways, however, our experiences limited our critical analysis because our beliefs led to a single framework. That framework is not all inclusive, nor does it necessarily match all the multiple frameworks we found in these studies. We do believe, however, that the filters we used to guide our data collection and analysis are compatible with the tenets of qualitative re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes from the Series Editors
• Review Board
• Chapter 1 Our Stories, Our Intensions, and Our Methods: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Studies on Gender and Discussion
• Chapter 3 Studies on Gender and Reading
• Chapter 4 Studies on Gender and Writing
• Chapter 5 Studies on Gender and Electronic Text
• Chapter 6 Studies on Gender and Literacy Autobiography
• Chapter 7 Cross Genre Summary, Recommendations, and Reflections
• Appendix A Bibliography of studies on Gender and Discussion
• Appendix B Bibliography of studies on Gender and Reading
• Appendix C Bibliography of studies on Gender and Writing
• Appendix D Bibliography of studies on Gender and Electronic Text
• Appendix E Bibliography of studies on Gender and Literacy Autobiography
• Appendix F Coding Forum
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index