Children's Literacy Practices and Preferences

Harry Potter and Beyond

Jane Sunderland, Steven Dempster, Joanne Thistlethwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317554721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Over the past few decades there have been intense debates in education surrounding children's literacy achievement and ways to promote reading, particularly that of boys. The Harry Potter book series has been received enthusiastically by very many children, boys and girls alike, but has also been constructed in popular and media discourses as a children's, particularly a boys', literacy saviour. Children's Literacy Practices and Preferences: Harry Potter and Beyond provides empirical evidence of young people's reported literacy practices and views on reading, and of how they see how the Harry Potter series as having impacted their own literacy. The volume explores and debunks some of the myths surrounding Harry Potter and literacy, and contextualizes these within children's wider reading.

1 Children’s Literacies, ‘Reading Failure’ and Gender

1.1 Introduction

The story begins in 1997, when a British publisher circulated 500 copies of a children’s novel about a boy wizard, which previously had been rejected by 12 other publishers (Gunelius, 2008). Since then, the seven-book Harry Potter series has become a global brand worth, in 2011, US$15 billion (Aquino, 2011¹), spawning eight multi-million dollar films, a film set tour in London, a Florida theme park and merchandise ranging from confectionery to computer games. However, for many journalists, educationalists and parents, the real magic of Harry Potter is its purported transfiguring effect on children’s reading. Harry is a hero not only in the magical world where he vanquishes Lord Voldemort, but also in the non-fictional one where he has apparently triumphed over children’s antipathy towards books in general, and assuaged concerns about boys’ reading in particular.

This ‘Harry Potter effect’ (Hopper, 2005: 117) has generated a great deal of media attention and has prompted the research detailed in this book. Our research arose from our dissatisfaction with how many of the media claims surrounding the ‘magic’ of Potter appeared to rely on assertion and anecdote. We examine these claims in detail in Chapter 3. The aim of this introductory chapter is to contextualise our study of children’s literacies and the special place Harry Potter has had in children’s reading (particularly in the UK) over the last two decades. Its foci are, firstly, to explain how we employ the concepts of gender, discourse and literacies in this book; and, secondly, to examine critically the boys’ ‘underachievement’ and ‘differently literate’ debates (Millard, 1997). We identify and deconstruct key assumptions regarding what it means to ‘be literate’ (Section 1.3), and examine the influence gender is believed to have on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements (1.2) and their literacy practices (1.4). Given that our empirical data were generated within schools in England, the following discussion draws largely on evidence from UK² sources, although we also refer to research undertaken in Australia, Canada and the USA.

1.2 Gender and School Achievement

In the UK, interest in the ‘Harry Potter effect’ relates to concerns regarding boys’ achievements relative to those of girls. J. K. Rowling’s first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), arrived in bookstores at around the same time as national and international datasets were evidencing boys’ lower attainments in formal assessments and school-leaving qualifications. While there have long been suggestions of a ‘gender gap’ favouring girls in England’s schools (see, e.g., Arnot et al., 1998; Epstein et al., 1998; Jackson, 2006), the 1992 introduction of ‘league tables’ of examination results brought the issue into sharper focus.

In England, the ‘benchmark’ of achievement for those leaving school at 16 is five or more General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSE) at grades A* to C.³ Since 1990, there has been an annual increase of children reaching this benchmark: in 1990, only 35% of school leavers attained at least five GCSEs at grades A* to C (DFE, 2011); by 2013, this had risen to 82% (DFE, 2014). Percentages of girls gaining these grades have constantly remained higher than those of boys. For example, in 1990, 38% of girls and 31% of boys attained the GCSE benchmark; while in 2012, this was attained by 78% of boys and 85% of girls (DFE, 2011). These data refer to candidates gaining any five GCSEs at grades A* to C.

By contrast, percentages of pupils attaining five GCSEs at these grades including mathematics and English (often the minimum qualifications required by employers and further educational providers) are somewhat lower. In 2013, 59% of England’s 16-year-olds reached this standard: 65% of all girls entered for GCSE, and 54% of boys (DFE, 2014). Similar gender gaps have been identified in the USA (National Assessment of Education Progress, 2009⁴), Australia (Pont et al., 2013) and Canada (Watson, 2011), while PISA data (Program for International Student Assessment) collated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2014) highlight that 15-year-old girls annually outperform boys in reading tests in every OECD country.

In England, National Curriculum assessments (‘SATs’) undertaken at ages 7 and 11 suggest that girls’ lead over boys is established early in their educational careers. For example, in 2010, at the end of Key Stage 1,⁵ 87% of girls achieved the expected level of attainment in writing compared to 76% of boys (DFE, 2010). At KS2 in 2013, higher percentages of girls than boys met or exceeded the expected level of attainment (Level 4) in all assessed areas (reading, science, grammar, punctuation and spelling) except mathematics. In mathematics, equal percentages of boys and girls attained Level 4 or above (87%), a trend evident since 2010, prior to which boys had a slight lead of one or two percentage points. However, higher percentages of 11-year-old boys than girls attained Level 5 in mathematics:⁶ in 2013, 43% of boys and 39% of girls achieved these grades (DFE, 2013a). Hence, despite international concerns about boys’ ‘underachievement’, primary school boys continue to outperform girls in what is traditionally perceived as a ‘masculine’ subject and maintain this advantage in secondary, further and higher education (Mendick, 2006; OECD, 2011). Girls meanwhile excel in literacy-based subjects because, or so it has been argued, their brains apparently develop in ways that facilitate their performance in verbal reasoning tasks (Segal, 1997), and they are ‘naturally’ more empathetic, introspective and creative than boys (Lucey, 2001).

Gender essentialism

The tendentious nature of the claims made at the close of the preceding paragraph highlights the problems of popular explanations of gender differences in educational achievement. Commentators offer numerous explanations for why boys ‘underachieve’ (itself a contentious term), particularly in literacy activities. Such explanations often draw, however, on essentialist assumptions regarding gender. ‘Gender essentialism’ predominates in westernised thinking about males and females. Its main tenet is that because male and female bodies differ biologically, there are corresponding ‘natural’ differences in males’ and females’ aptitudes, attitudes and behaviours, and how they self-perceive and self-present (Butler, 1999; Connell, 1995; Hicks, 2008). Popular books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray, 1992) reflect and perpetuate essentialist gender thinking.

While people tend to draw on behaviours and attitudes they perceive are ‘appropriate’ for their biological sex, social scientists have long questioned the notion that genes and genitalia determine an individual’s gendered self. This harks back to a distinction between sex as biological and gender as social that gained currency in social science in the 1950s and 1960s in the seminal (and often controversial) studies of hermaphrodites, cross-dressers and transsexuals (e.g., Stoller, 1968). This was given further impetus by second wave western feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which built on de Beauvoir’s notion that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (1988: 295).

We assert that gender is predominantly social; more convincing explanations of how gendered thinking impacts on behaviours and self-identifications conceptualise gender as learned and constructed through discourses encountered in various social contexts. Whilst this contextuality lends fluidity to how individuals define and perform masculinities and femininities, these definitions and performances are also constrained by an overarching discursive ‘gender binary’ that polarises males and masculinities, and females and femininities. We return to this below. Firstly we briefly outline how we conceptualise discourse. This informs the understandings of gender in relation to social and literacy practices that are employed within this book.

Discourses and gender

Discourse refers broadly to contextualised forms of communication through which humans frame meanings about the world, and which can be spoken, written, photographic or symbolic (Papen, 2005). Discourses aim to communicate and constitute particular versions of ‘reality’ to influence how individuals think, behave and construct identities in social contexts (Foucault, 1978; Sunderland, 2004). Discourses are instantiated through certain linguistic or visual features within specific social contexts. While these instantiations can be unique to specific social settings, they often relate to wider historical, social and cultural values communicated by agents (e.g., parents, siblings, peers) and institutions such as education, religion and the media. Locally produced discourses may be resistant to as well as constitutive of the status quo.

Paechter (2001: 41) highlights that discourses construct ‘realities’ by rendering certain opinions or assumptions regarding the world as “self-evidently true”. As well as structuring how we “think about things” (ibid.), these ‘truths’ also constrain the ways in which individuals can act and interact in the social world. The power of discourses to influence thinking and behaviour is the way they appear to provide believable or persuasive versions of social reality. Although these may draw on empirical evidence, they can also be coloured by preconceptions, misconceptions and prejudices, and often relate to structures of power, hegemony and the interests of groups and individuals.

In terms of gender, biological sex differences form the basis for many westernised discourses concerning gender: in particular that of ‘gender as difference’ (see Sunderland, 2004). Normative discourses construct masculinities in opposition to femininities (e.g., Connell, 1995) and prescribe, proscribe and legitimate certain behaviours for boys and men to mark out their ‘differences’ from girls and women. Boys may, therefore, reject behaviours considered as ‘feminine’ to gain position as ‘appropriately’ masculine. Family members, peers and teachers reward children for ‘appropriate’ gender behaviours and penalise them for ‘inappropriate’ ones. Thus, girls tend to be rewarded for empathy, sweetness and submissiveness, and boys for daring, stoicism and toughness (Kimmel, 2008; McHale et al., 2003). Moreover, boys tend to be more rigidly policed by parents to act in ‘gender appropriate’ ways.

Why gender essentialism cannot explain ‘underachievement’

We encounter two main difficulties when we attempt to examine boys’ underachievement via essentialist discourses. The first is that saying boys ‘fail’ academically ‘because they are boys’ may establish and legitimate other, somewhat dubious, discourses about schooling and gender. The second is that essentialism overlooks both inter-gender similarity and intra-gender variation, particularly the influence that socioeconomic status, ethnicity and disadvantage are reported to have on academic achievements, as discussed later.

Epstein et al. (1998) outline three related discourses that capture the nature of ‘causal’ explanations for British boys’ underachievement in the 1990s, which continue to have relevance (see, e.g., Kimmel’s (2008) recent explanations for some American boys’ approaches to studying). The first is “pity the poor boys” (Epstein et al., 1998: 7). This suggests that boys are victims of an education system dominated by female teachers who cannot really understand how boys develop cognitively (Mills, 2003; Skelton, 2012); what tasks will help boys achieve (Connolly, 2004; Skelton, 2001); or what to do when boys’ ‘natural’ ebullience spills over into fighting and aggression. The latter also implicates Epstein et al’s (1998: 9) “boys will be boys” discourse: that certain behaviours are biologically determined, and, thus, difficult to change.

These discourses not only perpetuate a deficit model of female primary teachers who are apparently ‘turning boys off’ learning, but may also influence compensatory strategies that could be injurious to equality of opportunity for both teachers and pupils. One often-espoused strategy is that recruiting more male primary school teachers provides ‘role models’ for boys. Male teachers are ‘naturally’ considered to know what makes boys tick, and more able than female teachers to instil discipline (e.g., Gove, 2010). However, such calls often disregard research that suggests that: teacher gender is largely unrelated to good classroom management, pupil engagement or facilitating learning (Carrington et al., 2008; Martin and Marsh, 2005); some male teachers perpetuate so-called “laddish behaviours” implicated in boys’ scholastic failure (Jackson, 2010; Martino and Frank, 2006); and that a ‘glass escalator’ (Williams, 1992: 253) favouring male primary teachers in terms of promotion rapidly removes men from the classroom and into school management (Coleman, 2004; Cushman, 2008).

Similarly, if we hold that children’s abilities are biologically determined, and boys ‘naturally’ develop at a slower rate than girls, then we either “wait for…[boys] to catch up” (Lloyd, 2011: 38) or provide extra support to counter their assumed biological disadvantages. The former is not a viable option within curricular frameworks that expect children to reach certain attainment levels by certain ages,⁷ which leaves the options of providing extra support or employing pedagogies which harness boys’ ‘natural’ competitiveness and ‘natural’ preference for hands-on and short-term tasks (Connolly, 2004; Lloyd, 2011).

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Children’s Literacies, ‘Reading Failure’ and Gender
• 2 Enter Harry Potter: The Series
• 3 Pottermania: Media Claims and Empirical Studies
• 4 Researching Children’s Literacy in Schools
• 5 Responses to the Harry Potter Book Series
• 6 Reading Practices
• 7 Reading and Learning beyond Harry Potter
• 8 Fan Practices
• 9 Boys’ Literacies?
• 10 Conclusion
• Index