Smart girls traversing assemblages of gender and class in Australian secondary mathematics classrooms

ABSTRACT

I examine experiences of former Australian schoolgirls in relation to mathematics during secondary school. This research scrutinises misunderstandings about success and impact on subject choice that can result in post-schooling trajectories that limit what girls can do in their lives beyond school. I examine ways affective relationality, as a sense of embodied belonging, may influence participation in subjects. I frame the discussion using the Baradian concept of intra-action, a co-production that engages an ethic of non-coincidence. For these participants, a reductive high-stakes testing environment and aspirations to become a master subject evoke a powerful not good enough assemblage. The responsibility to achieve enough success incites a soliciting of a particular self in affective regulation. The dread of not excelling in mathematics was often too much to endure thus participants chose to discontinue studying mathematics. They understood this as a sensible solution to prevent vulnerability, as not good enough.

KEYWORDS:

• Schoolgirl
• mathematics
• affect
• inequity
• subject choice
• intra-action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Melissa Joy Wolfe works at Monash University as a lecturer in Visual Art and Media education. Her research focus stems from creative filmic research methodology specifically for utilization in educational research that takes account of gender, socio-economic status and public pedagogical practice. She pragmatically applies Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism as a conceptual framework. Wolfe’s 2015 film, Girls’ Tales: Experiences of Schooling, was developed as a pre-service teaching aid and was released in December 2015 through Ronin Films. Wolfe’s research interests in education encompass a filmic synthesis of aesthetics, affect, gender, and participatory creative methods.

Notes

1. Empirical is understood as a post-structuralist account of exploring possible connections as opposed to binaries, where nothing is sedimentary and everything is entangled and of consequence (St. Pierre 2013).

2. Karen Barad contests representational thinking that posits a non-relation between entities. Relational ontology is the core of agential realism that ‘investigates the material discursive boundary-making practices that produce ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality’ (2007, 93). The agential cut as difference, distinguishes between boys and girls in action as a performative of masculine and feminine. Masculine and feminine traits do not exist until they are performed and distinguish the student. The effect of this distinction is that other possibilities are erased.

3. The establishment of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) in 2008 developed a National Curriculum for Foundation to Year 10 for implementation by 2013 (Donnelly and Wiltshire 2014) while States and Territories control the senior years of schooling.