‘It’s not something that we think about with regard to curriculum.’ Exploring gender and equality awareness in higher education curriculum and pedagogy

ABSTRACT

In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary higher education where gender and feminist content and approaches are present and absent. This research set out to develop insight through a cross-disciplinary, qualitative case study including documentary analysis alongside staff and student interviews. Findings highlighted contradictions, including that people often claim to champion gender and diversity generally whilst simultaneously rejecting responsibility for the same issues in their own teaching. These insights identify challenges, including attribution of responsibility for inequalities around the representation of gender as belonging elsewhere, with others, in terms of both teaching spaces and temporality.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender mainstreaming
• higher education
• pedagogy
• curriculum
• equality

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the staff and students who gave so generously of their time to contribute to this work through agreeing for their departments to be part of the research and particularly to those who agreed to be interviewed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The research received ethical approval from the relevant UK Higher Education Institution Ethics Committee on 1st March 2020. The approval number has been provided to Gender and Education but is withheld here for purposes of anonymity.

Notes

1

Table

Note: NR = gender not reported.

2 Athena SWAN was established in 2005 to support women in Science subjects in higher education. In 2015 it was expanded to other disciplinary areas. The charter now recognises work undertaken to address gender equality more broadly, and not just barriers to progression that affect women.

3 Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Sussex Researcher Development Fund: [grant number PA015-04].

Notes on contributors

Tamsin Hinton-Smith

Tamsin Hinton-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Sussex, where she is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Gender Studies. She is a sociologist of gender and education, with key interests around identities and inequalities in participation and experiences, including as relate to inclusivity of educational pedagogies. Tamsin’s funded research into higher education includes around lone and teenage parents; socioeconomic inequality and disadvantaged geographical areas; young people leaving the care system; and people from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller backgrounds. Her international work has included partnership around higher education and inclusive pedagogies in Cambodia, Hungary, Nigeria and Spain. Tamsin’s wider active research interests include around feminist pedagogic approaches to writing and people’s experiences of families. She has researched and published on men’s experiences of participating in prison writing groups, and her most recent book is Families in Transition (2019, Bingley: Emerald) by Murray, McDonnell, Hinton-Smith and Ferreira.

Rosa Marvell

Rosa Marvell is an early career researcher whose interests include dynamics of social inclusion in post-compulsory education and learning/work trajectories. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Student Success & Progression at Oxford Brookes University.

Charlotte Morris

Charlotte Morris is Lecturer in Education and Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. Research interests relate to gendered lives across the domains of work, care, intimacy and education. She previously taught across Sociology, Education and Gender Studies at the University of Sussex where she completed a PhD Gender Studies in 2014. She has held posts as Research Fellow with the Centre for Higher Education & Equity Research and as a researcher in the field of learning and teaching in higher education at Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Brighton. She has completed projects in the field of widening participation, postgraduate learning, student disabilities, mental health and wellbeing, student parents and carers and experiences of early career women academics. Currently she is writing on feminist pedagogical responses to ‘post-truth’ populist contexts.

Kimberley Brayson

Kimberley Brayson is Lecturer in Law and Director of Learning and Teaching in the Leicester Law School at the University of Leicester. Prior to this Kimberley was Senior Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Sussex.