‘If I Were a Boy…’: Constructing Knowledge about Gender Issues in Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

This paper is an effort to explore my own understanding about gender issues in society generally and the nature of the gender relations project for education and teacher education specifically. As an educational psychologist, I am already preoccupied with questions about human growth and development—including how and why people develop interpersonal skills and predispositions for creativity and achievement. As a teacher-educator, I am also preoccupied with questions about pedagogy.

To develop my own interpretive account of “how gender works,” I examine experiences of my own life, my friends' lives, my students' work, my research study participants, and other researchers' findings. I find perspectives from feminist psychoanalytic theories and poststructuralist theory most helpful for making sense of the wide-ranging “data” of my inquiry. In this interpretive journey of constructing my own knowledge about gender issues, I explore the dynamics of concrete social relations that contribute to the gendered development of values, emotions, personal strengths, personal practical skills for assertiveness, sense of self, and presence or power. I also focus specifically on the nature of these concrete social relations in classrooms.

As a teacher-educator I recognize that my students must also construct their own knowledge and be predisposed to understand their classrooms as research sites. I review the kinds of course assignments I have used to support their inquiry process and highlight ways in which gender issues spontaneously surface within their inquiries. The tensions, however, between good pedagogic practice and more adequately addressing gender issues remain problematic.