Reading #1
Do the concepts explored in the reading resonate with you, from your experience as a student or from your experience trying to support your students and the classroom community during your practicum? Reflect upon those resonances (or lack of resonances)
When I first read the paper the first thing that struck me was the following quote: ‘widely circulating
models of gender and school success, which are shifting sociohistorically to portray boys as less academically promising.’ I sometimes wonder whether we really learn form history. From what I can gather, there seem to be lots of overcorrections that have come throughout history. Perhaps the over-correction that resulted in the idea behind the quote is the hard push of feminism. When humans tend to see some imbalance, usually it results in an overcorrection disguised as equity. The whole paper didn't resonate with me as Wortham's study is not scientific. The scientific method was invented in order for us not to fool ourselves and seek the truth. Even scientists are unable to truly hold back their biases, hence we have peer-review and experiment replication. Wortham's study therefore is anecdotal at best and unless it's replicated multiple times, with a proper hypothesis and prediction, then it's truth value is questionable.
Reading #2: Symbolic worlds in time/spaces of practice: Identities and transformations Book chapter by Dorothy Holland
Yes, very interesting insights. I was first introduced to anthropological ethnographic studies when I was in grad school, and I struggled with the "validity" question as well. When humans are involved in social enterprises, there are zillions of variables that cannot be "controlled" as one would control variables in a scientific experiment. So, there are "apparent/possible trends", "apparent/possible patterns", "possible cause/effect, but maybe not?". It's definitely a different mind-set than science training instilled in us. Nonetheless, it provokes thinking and exploration of ideas. There has been a lot of research over the past few decades into whether processes in schools impact boys negatively. This became a research trend because academic outcomes of boys (exam scores), on average, were in decline. e.g. the "sit still and be quiet" classroom rules.... But, the generalizations are problematic. I think as a kid I probably tolerated being expected to "sit still and be quiet", but I certainly didn't thrive in that context -- Perhaps I was less likely to outwardly "misbehave" than some of the boys, but I appreciated their "disruptions" of the painfully boring routines -- Perhaps it was just social conditioning that gave the boys more social licence to "act out" when things were not ok? My guess is that things that were probably included in Wortham's research, but were not referenced in this short review, are things like "engagement/interaction mapping" of the classroom -- tracking which students speak up, how often, what they say, and the type of response they receive from the teacher. The review implies that there was very little "male voice" amongst the students, so it was difficult (impossible?) to dig deeper into the data to make sense of why the boys spoke up significantly less frequently than girls. Whereas, there was measurably more "female voice" in the classroom discourse. That's just data though -- getting to the "cause/effect" is a whole other challenge! Interesting stuff -
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