Teaching InclusivelyChanging Pedagogical

Spacesdrawing on:

Formations of Gender and Higher Education Pedagogies (GaP)

Professor Penny Jane Burke

GaP Principal Investigator andProfessor Gill Crozier

About GaP

GaP funded by the HEA’s National Teaching Fellowship Scheme

Team includes: Professor Penny Jane Burke, NTF, (PI), Professor Gill Crozier, Professor Becky Francis, Dr Barbara Read Julie Hall, Jo Peat, Professor Louise Archer, Carolyn Gallop, Administrator

The research team reflects the methodological framework in that we aim to explicitly bring together theory and practice and so we have members from a learning and teaching unit as well as academic researchers

What is the project about?

This research project:

Explores the relationship between HE pedagogies and identity formations of gender, class and race

Contributes to WP policy by paying close attention to pedagogical issues beyond entry to HE

Provides a qualitative account of gendered experiences of HE practices and relations

Gives attention to complex formations of masculinities and femininities in pedagogical relations and practices.

The research explores:

The different ways that current HE teaching practices address issues of diversity, equity and inclusion

The ways that students and teachers experience the different teaching & learning practices being used in HE

How gender and other identities (e.g. age, class and ‘race’) shape and constrain teaching & learning experiences, relations and practices.

Theoretical Framework

Broadening engagement with teaching and learning in HE – pedagogies as a concept to contest mainstream discourses

Pedagogies are shaped by identity formations but are also gendered, classed and racialised practices

Gender intersects with other social identities and inequalities – tied to complex power relations and to changing pedagogical contexts

Draws attention to important interconnections between formations of masculinity, femininity and other social, generational and cultural differences, which profoundly shape student dispositions to and experiences of learning & teaching

Innovative research design

Aims to engage HE students and teachers in considerations about pedagogical practices, experiences and relations

Creates dialogic spaces for reflexivity about taken for granted practices & assumptions

Participatory approaches to get HE teachers and students involved with discussions about the development of inclusive pedagogies to challenge inequalities & exclusions

Methods

Two year qualitative study (Sept 2010 – July 2012)

multi-method, case study approach ‘Riverside University’

collect in-depth data about pedagogical practices, experiences and relations and complex formations of identity 64 students across six subject areas were individually

interviewed (History/Classics, Business Studies/ Computing, Creative

Writing, Sports Science, Dance, Philosophy) HE teachers across six subject areas have participated in

focus group discussions of their pedagogical practices 20 observations undertaken of pedagogical practices and

relations

Participatory methods

Methods aiming to create spaces of reflexivity & dialogue with the research participants, include Identifying group of Executive Student Consultants

participating intensively across a range of methods and project activities

Student forums and workshops National student-led seminar student film clips Written reflections Informal discussions with programme teams &

individual lecturers, Kings College London workshops with new group of HE

students and teachers to interrogate data

Summary of themes/findings

Pedagogies are shaped by the different and competing power relations, together with the changing contexts in which teaching and learning takes place and the identities and relations of teachers and students are situated.

Pedagogies are thus both influenced /shaped by and influence in turn, complex identity formations, epistemologies, and processes of who has the ‘right’ to participate in HE.

Pedagogies do not simply reflect classed, gendered or racialised identities but pedagogies themselves are classed, gendered and raced, bound up with historical notions of ways of being and doing HE.

Summary continued…

Widening Participation for all its limitations, has increased and diversified the student body in UK universities. Some of our findings are a reflection of the adjustment – or not – to these changed university circumstances. Coupled with these changes is the enduring impact of neo-liberal policies.

We have identified emerging problems of instrumentalism; issues of retention; stereotyping working class students as problematic and high risk. Such concerns have often reduced pedagogies to instrumentalist practices.

Tutors are reflexive often trying to develop innovative practice but they are under immense pressures from the university requirements, policy imperatives and student as consumer demands.

For some tutors they have not adapted to a changing student composition. Conflicts of expectations and tensions over role and purpose arise.

Summary continued…

There are issues around student participation and the gendered, classed and raced nature of this. There are tutor and student anxieties for different purposes and evidence of student ‘resistance’ or opt out, either in terms of their silence or by contrast their noise and perceived ‘unruly’ behaviour.

We have found a range of gendered behaviour in the teaching as well as gendered behaviour in the learning and socialising processes. But on both counts there is little recognition of this . Students in particular think there are no gender issues.

Students talk of a sense of inadequacy in relation to perceptions of ‘ability’, what being ‘clever’ is; expectations of ‘how to behave’. Lack of cultural/educational capital or sense of educational entitlement – the always looking over the shoulder – ‘have I right to be here’? (“Illegitimate subjects” in the HE space). All of these issues beg the question about student empowerment and agency. Creating oral space is not enough.

Summary continued… Being given voice is often anxiety inducing .What is an acceptable student

voice and what isn’t? This relates to who is acceptable and who isn’t acceptable for HE study/HE entry. There are classed, and raced/ethnicised implications here but also gendered implications generally and also in relation to subject choice.

Exclusion and participation are in constant tension throughout the university experience both in the academic but also in the social milieu. Both of these dimensions interrelate and interact to support and/ or constrain students’ academic progress; their acquisition of the arguably requisite capitals. Social mix is a theme that runs throughout literature on race/ethnicity and class issues and here in our study also this has come to the fore both in the learning context but also the social. Black working class males are criticised by other white students (predominantly middle class) for separating themselves off; being noisy and in the lecture theatre, disruptive. There is a sense that these working class Black students are out of place/in the wrong place. No one quite knows how to relate to them.

Fellow students often construct ‘them’ as exotic and white middle class students vacillate between “finding it hilarious, fascinating” and entertaining”. Some describe their fellow students as coming from backgrounds which are unreal; like “the kind of thing you see in a soap opera” ;“It’s kind of like the programme ‘How the Other Half Lives’.

Reflections…

What is clearly revealed by this research is the level of angst and identity struggles, struggles for recognition and struggles for success amongst the students but also the tutors. For the students in particular there are multiple layers – the academic, the consumer, the social. The social milieu in HE is surprisingly in some respects, a replication of school social behaviours – the similar notions and importance attached to these of being ‘cool’; the importance of friendship groupings, how you achieve these and with that/those, the recognition of popularity and power/influence and access to capitals – social and cultural, and symbolic.

For the tutors they are caught between on the one hand, the imperatives of the neo-liberal market: to ensure success often defined by limited parameters; to ensure retention; to ensure positive student evaluations; to cope with the demands of large groups at the same time of ensuring personal support/feedback and so on. And on the other their own identifications as academics and the desire for fulfilment and recognition as such, as part of that. As academics and tutors ourselves the lived contradiction of ideal practice and practices evoked by the harsh realities of interpersonal relations, profoundly resonate.

internalising processes of misrecognition

Discussions can make me feel anxious. I am scared of being stupid like and then no one says something and I am thinking it and the lecturer points it out. Then I think I should have said it to show how clever I was but I didn’t and no one else did. But I am just too scared to put my hand up or just say it. Sometimes I even feel nauseous –like I want to be sick just to say a sentence. And I’m not a shy person but I’m just very nervous (female student).

‘shame’ is a social emotion

[Shame] exists with reference to how we anticipate others may see and reject us’ – but it is experienced as internalized disappointment with self i.e. it exists with reference to how we judge our own shortcomings, feelings of failure or inadequacy (Raphael Reed et al, 2007: 19).

‘feminisation’ of teaching and learning

Part of me thinks it’s not my job to look after them. I have a husband and 2 children at home that I have to look after, I have to get these students through, I’m not their mother, I have no intention of being their mother … and sometimes I get really cross that there is an expectation from the university, from my PC and from society, that I am going to mind these students. (Female lecturer)

I feel because of retention rates and all these systems which are in place when you first … I am expected to be caring, more caring than I actually want to be. (Male lecturer)

Fear…and emotion as a tool

It’s perhaps fear of taking initiative … is it fear … have we created that perhaps a bit? (Male lecturer).

There’s something about some courses that’s feeding into that passivity, this kind of ‘I’ll just stand at the front and talk and you’ll just listen. (Female Lecturer)

Emotions as ‘tools that can be used by subjects in the project of life and career enhancement’ (Goleman, 1995 in Ahmed, 2004)

problem of differentiation & proximity

Female Student: And here [university] seems like heaven in this respect, no matter if you are a girl or a boy if you talk you are listened to, you are heard. So it’s so much different [than school]. We have two girls in our class, they are so loud, they are so…they don’t pay attention, seriously they couldn’t care less about what we are talking [about], and they continue to interrupt and stuff. There are guys that don’t give anything to the course, but still it’s not because they are guys or girls, because they are people like that, they don’t care (Female student).

marking out difference

I would say, it sounds so bad, I would say like maybe eighty percent, this is just me, this is a guestimate, eighty percent of people who come from a lower class, whose parents didn’t go to university, might not address learning in general with as quite a passion as those who maybe came from middleclass, or those who had their parents who went to university. Like going back to what I said when I came here I saw university as the way to finish it, because college wasn’t. I went to a secondary school which although it was state it was quite top end, we had the PM’s children there, and from there you always had high expectations bred into that sort of way of thinking. You moved into that way of thinking, that that is the way forward, and that is a normal thing to do, whereas people who went to other schools might not see it like that, like some say oh, I can get a job without a degree, they don’t really…or they say I only need three GCSEs, they don’t aim for high enough because they don’t know any higher (Male Student)).

Gender, Silence & Voice Male Lecturer 1: I can hear blokes. Again I can usually hear their chatter let’s say

more acutely more than I can hear some female chatter simply because of the difference in pitch. 

Male Lecturer 2: I really can’t tolerate talking. It really drives me nuts and I will stop a lecture and they know. Whereas in the old days I used to just get louder and louder and they got louder and it got out of control. But I think you learn as a lecturer how to control a group. And if they’re too quiet you…

Female Lecturer 1: I think after 20 minutes you put a question to them. It gives them an opportunity to talk to each other otherwise I know that their attention span is not all that great so it’s best to give them a bit of a breathing space.

Male Lecturer 3: Actually my experience is thinking about the power dynamics in Business Studies as well ‘cause I think we all think, I don’t think any of us would think we have to go in and manage that space because as a lecturer it’s not about allowing silences and not allowing silence and telling them when they can speak and when they can’t. But there is that dynamic about independent learning and reflective learning – probably you go into a situation and you are the manager, if you have power.

Female Lecturer 1: The only power they have is to walk out.

(Staff Focus Group Discussion)

Re/constructing the ‘Other’

…they are the same group who’s actually been making noises - so affecting the students’ hearing, and the problem, sometimes, you find its the same group time and time again. When you warn the first time, come the following week, and exactly the same. So the question we raised as well, before, how far you can go to say OK, enough is enough…I mean I’ve done it, I think, twice or three times, and one of them is going and complain to the boss, you know. But I mean I have nothing to hide, you know. (Male Lecturer).

Diversity & Gender

diversity – seen sometimes as a form of contamination of HE culture -- challenge to traditional forms of (White, middle class) patriarchal authority reinforced in university spaces

the ‘ideal’ student might be seen as the quiet and disciplined subject of the authoritative male professor, privileging feminine subjectivities

(women might be seen as easier to control, more obedient and docile and thus less likely to pose a threat to the authority of the lecturer)

Pedagogies & the perpetuation of a politics of misrecognition

But it’s impossible to educate, you know, in the sense that we don’t have time to sit down and navel gaze about how we can engage these people better in order to do this, that and the other or do we look right back at our admissions criteria and say, ‘ok, we only choose the ones who are like us.’? (Female lecturer)

Some reflections…

Intersections of gender with other, (often pathologized) identities inflame problematic anxieties about ‘lowering of standards’ & the neoliberal imperative for HE to produce disciplined subjects or ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1977)

Gender always embodied - only certain bodies can be positioned as legitimate/valuable/authoritative in relation to hegemonic patriarchal discourses

poses a challenge for the inclusion of men from ‘Other’ kinds of social backgrounds, e.g. often derisive constructions of working-class and Black masculinities

HE pedagogies require reformation to address such complex issues in ways that reject the highly problematic claim that masculinity is in crisis due to the “feminisation of higher education”.

Teaching InclusivelyChanging Pedagogical

Spacesdrawing on:

Formations of Gender and Higher Education Pedagogies (GaP)

Professor Penny Jane Burke

GaP Principal Investigator andProfessor Gill Crozier

Teaching Inclusively

Aim – to develop a resource for lecturers and educational developers underpinned by the Freirean concept of PRAXIS

Emphasises the dialogic relationship between critical reflection and action

Conceptual resources are essential for reshaping both understanding and action and this is an iterative and cyclical process – reflection-action and action-reflection

Critical pedagogies…

Inequalities - embedded in historical structures of exclusion, marginalisation and relations of oppression

The dismantling of inequalities require strategies underpinned by critical theories & practices --commitment to social transformation and change.

Think Pieces

Provide conceptual tools to help think through some of the complex challenges that might confront us in different pedagogical contexts and spaces

Offer resources to challenge those dominant assumptions, discourses and practices that exacerbate and reproduce inequalities in HE

Aim to contribute to inclusive teaching practices whilst acknowledging the complexity of power, difference and identity formation

Activities

related to the think pieces in order to provide a structure and framework for engaging these concepts in relation to your own practice.

might be used individually and/or in groups or communities of practice forums

aims to enable you to engage with the concepts in relation to the specific challenges you face, in the particular pedagogical contexts in which you teach