Resources for teachers and parents about children’s books that challenge gender stereotypes Read the full story

Gender and Education Association Biennial Conference 2013

Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University

Tuesday 23^rd- Friday 26^th April 2013

Confirmed keynote speakers:

- Prof. Lisa Adkins, University of Newcastle, Australia (What Do Wages Do? Feminist Theory After the Financial Crisis)

- Prof. Val Gillies, Weeks Centre, LSBU (From Baby Brain to Conduct Disorder: the New Determinism in the Classroom)

- Bidisha: From Eastern Primitivism to Western Decadence? Overcoming the Notion of Cultural Differences in Gender, Race and Class Politics

Plenary Panel:

- Dr Tracey Reynolds, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU

- Dr Jin Haritaworn, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

- Dr Kay Inckle, Trinity College Dublin

- Dr Jayne Osgood, London Metropolitan University

- Dr Vanita Sundaram, University of York

Performance:

- Dr Claudia Brazzle, Liverpool Hope University

- Teddy Nygh, Director of Riot From Wrong and Co-Founder of Fully Focused

The ninth international Gender and Education Association conference, Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure axes of intersectional inequalities. In considering diversity in education, this conference will explore the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. It will ask important questions about the role of feminist research at a time when education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse.

Book your place

If you are paying by debit or credit card, please book online using Eventbrite at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/4743075667

If you wish to receive an invoice or have any queries, please email enterprise-events@lsbu.ac.uk

Conference Fee

£380 – Standard conference booking fee – Member*

£420 – Standard conference booking fee – Non-member

£150 – Standard day rate

* To obtain your discount code, necessary for member discount, please contact Alice Jesmont (a.jesmont@lancaster.ac.uk)

As a practicing middle school English Language Arts teacher and researcher in the Northeastern US, I am interested in the stories adolescents tell about their lives. To this end, my research in classrooms is ethnographic and privileges the stories girls tell about their experiences of being marginalized, silenced, and punished, often by other girls. One story in particular has resonated with me, and I have come to refer to this story as “The Story of the Sluts” – thus named, however crudely, because that is how the story was presented to me by the girls who told it. It all came about when Lily (a pseudonym), an eighth grade student, was meeting with me during a writing conference about revisions for a short story she was writing in my class. During this writing conference, it came out that a party had taken place the previous weekend. Lily explained that two of my other students, Melanie and Kelly, had gone ‘into the woods’ with two boys who also attended our school. Read the full story

It is an overcast Friday in mid-October as the Cardiff University contingent (that’s us!) pull up outside a rated-but-dated business hotel in Newport; we are attending the #KeepingItReal conference for teenage girls, run by the South Wales charity Full Circle, who seek to support aspiration in young people, and as we find our way into the conference suite the atmosphere of excitement and enthusiasm is already building. A large room is decked out as if an awards ceremony is about to take place, with over a dozen huge round tables, bedecked with linen and festive balloons, arranged in front of a stage where a sound check is underway. The walls are lined with exhibitors from local charities promoting sexual health, domestic violence services, and education opportunities, and what we thought to be a big purple bouncy castle in the corner turns out to be an inflatable ‘Big Brother Diary Room’ for the teenage attendees to record their thoughts about their lives and the conference away from adult eyes. No bouncing for us then, we sigh, and set up our stall nearby.  Filling the table with pamphlets and adverts for our gender and sexualities research group, we also lay out our GEA leaflets and journal copies, later eagerly seized by both teachers and charity representatives alike. Read the full story

Back in the late eighties I was one of two girls out of thirty pupils in my 5^th form Physics class. While girls were happy to take up the Biology and Modern Language options, in my Physics class I languished- ignored by the boys that did not care to pair up for experiments with lens and pendulums with these odd girls that had bizarrely chosen this apparently most ‘male’ of subjects. Sadly, my experience in the Physics lab mirrored that of the sports playing field. Last to be picked, my teenage love of hockey and Physics soon waned.  It seems little has unfortunately changed in the intervening decades. Read the full story

On 17 July 2012, fifty women teacher trade unionists from 11 countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen) met in Amaan, Jordan. They were meeting to decide whether they wanted to launch a regional women network under the auspices of Education International, a global trade union federation covering 30 million workers.  They decided that they did.  Read the full story

GEA Policy Officer’s Report, 2012

Read the full story

A brilliant new resource for ‘visualising the educational pathways’ of males and females and for observing the changes in disparities over time has been launched by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Maps, charts and tables relating to pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary level education worldwide can be downloaded from the UNESCO website.

The UK government, following the lead of the US, is devising multiple ways to get more ex-members of the military into our schools – as teachers, mentors, classroom assistants and basic skills tutors. Read the full story