Mapping gendered affects: an inquiry into student feelings on entry to an Australian selective STEM high school

ABSTRACT

This paper emerged from an original concern regarding female under-representation in STEM fields. My concern soon morphed into considering what it feels like to be(come) as a girl student in school. Feelings produced during pedagogical events impact students’ ability to continue with their engagement, participation in, and choices about, their schooling and life trajectories. I inquire into teenagers’ accounts of pedagogical encounters that produced feelings of happiness, discomfort, fear, and anxiety. Drawing on theories of affect, new materialism and posthumanism, I think through the material consequences of negative affects felt by girls whilst undergoing school experiences and consider how these may be amplified in subjects and trajectories traditionally dominated by boys. This paper creates a cartography with Year 10 students’ felt experiences recorded through a questionnaire at an Australian selective STEM school. Student responses illustrate how pedagogical processes are complicit in the ‘making of’ gender as both binary and hierarchical, and how gendered affects have consequences. I speculate that attention to providing affirming affective pedagogical events may amplify girls’ and other disadvantaged students’ capacity so they may grow to feel just as entitled to success within boy-dominated spaces such as STEM.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• cartography
• gender
• inequity
• pedagogy
• schoolgirl

Acknowledgement

I thank the reviewers and editors for their sage reviews of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Joy Wolfe

Dr Melissa Joy Wolfe is a Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University who works in creative education and applies a research framework emerging from engagement with feminist new materialist, posthuman, and affect theories. Her research method of re/active documentary centers on utilizing affirming affective pedagogies that promote equity, with a focus on notions of gender. Her accolades include, the International Visual Sociology Association Prosser ECR award (2016), the Australian Association for Research in Education ECR Award (2016), the Mollie Holman award for best education thesis (2016) Monash University, and a commendation award from the Australian Association of Educational Research (2017). Her filmic research and publications are available on her academic website affectionsthatmatter.com.au.