Skirting Around Critical Feminist Rationales for Teaching Women in Social Studies

Abstract

Feminist practices can provide firm theoretical grounding for the kind of social studies that scholars promote, especially in relation to efforts to include women in the curriculum. However, in P–12 social studies education, neither women nor feminism receive much attention. The study described in this article was a discourse analysis of 16 recently published lesson plans that did include women. Through this examination of the rationales and language used to promote teaching about women, the author sheds light on some discursive obstacles inhibiting attention to gender issues in critical feminist ways and argues that by shifting norms in the field, we can realize feminism’s potential to contribute to both social studies and ongoing discussions about women and gender inequity in society.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• discourse analysis
• feminism
• neoliberalism
• women

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Meg Monaghan and Hilary Hughes for their feedback.

Notes

1. The use of “feminism(s)” is an acknowledgement that feminism is a term that does not signify a monolithic or static theoretical field. There are many different kinds of feminisms and feminists. In the rest of this article, I use the word feminism to refer to a broad range of theories that foreground gender inequity as a primary concern.

2. At the time the search was conducted, ERIC did not contain information about articles in Social Education from 2002 or 2003, Social Studies and the Young Learner from 2001 to 2003, and any record of Middle Level Learner. I looked at each of those issues individually to identify any articles pertinent to the search.

3. To construct the gender list, I used the ERIC Thesaurus function to identify any descriptors related to gender. The search included descriptors like “gender bias,” “feminism,” and “sex role.” To develop a list of ERIC descriptors related to instruction that was likely to capture lesson plan oriented pieces, I looked at the lesson plan-type articles published in Social Education in 2008 and collected every instruction-related descriptor assigned to those articles in ERIC. The instruction search included terms like “learning activities,” “simulation” and “primary sources.”

4. The need to examine the intersectionality of gender with other subjectivities, for example, race, class, and sexuality, is a critical component of feminism, as noted in the introduction. In this study, I chose to pay close attention to gender, specifically, women. While this allowed for a deep analysis of how women were addressed in the data, it did not allow for an equally thorough analysis of the intersecting attention to other subjectivities. This is a significant limitation on several levels: first, because women’s experiences are inextricably intertwined with other subjectivities that have material effects on their lives, and second, because many of these lesson plans described women in contexts in which the intersection of their subjectivities was essentially the topic under study. However, this particular study focused primarily on the rationales used to teach these lessons. In my analysis, I found that when a rationale was presented, the subjectivity most likely to be emphasized was gender, even when race, class, religion, or place were equally if not more germane subjectivities to consider in relation to the topic/content presented. This is due, at least in part, to the ways in which the data were selected, but likely has more complex and troubling explanations. Considering the ongoing critiques of the lack of attention to race and sexualities in social studies, for example, these issues are ripe for analysis but beyond the scope of this study.

5. This extends to the propensity to focus on individuals who resisted oppression over attention to collective action of groups, evident, for example, in the separation of Rosa Parks from the local NAACP chapter of which she was a part (Kohl, 2007).

6. CUFA is an affiliate group of the NCSS.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mardi Schmeichel

MARDI SCHMEICHEL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Theory & Practice in the College of Education and Affiliate Faculty in the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. She can be contacted at [email protected].