Literature Review Lite (Please excuse any formatting irregularities, WordPress is not keen on Word formatting)
In the current climate of emphasis on student performance, testing, and standardization, education scholars interested in the spheres of literature and gender have focused their efforts on literacy and the differences in literacy performance between male and female students. The research exclusively addresses the problem from the perspective of instructors and curriculum designers; very little attention is given to the students’ perceptions and understandings of literature and gender. The debatable imbalance between the genders in the literature classroom is attributed to societal factors: social practices, family life, and cultural norms and attitudes. However, academics are conflicted as to whether the classroom is a passive reflector or a creator of those cultures. Moreover, academics are torn whether literacy intervention and gender education is important for both genders, or if boys are suffering from an overreaction of equality and educational reform and possible feminization of education. Very little input from the students or commentary of any sort from the youth is provided or examined in the body of scholarship, unfortunately.
Marjorie F. Orellana’s “Literacy as a Gendered Social Practice: Tasks, Texts, Talk, and Take-up,” (1995) takes a broad look at literacy and gender; she explores the nature of those subjects in theoretical manner, aiming at not a singular, definitive answer, but further questions and larger ideas about the roles of gender and literacy in society, and how they may or may not intersect. Orellana focuses largely on the values associated with literacy and how those values are gendered. Orellana’s research includes a special focus on the Spanish-speaking Latino community, a largely under-represented community in general literacy research, let alone in issues of gender and literacy. The article embraces the sociocultural perspective of literacy:
… the belief that people acquire literacy by interacting with others using the printed word for meaningful tasks within particular social contexts. Leaners are viewed as active participants in knowledge creation who acquire the kinds of literacy skills that are valued and promoted within their communities. (p. 677)
Orellana’s scholarship and exploration within the issue hinges on two questions: “How does gender construct literacy?” and “How does literacy construct gender?” and her work intertwines the two questions and explores the complicated between the two – are they inextricably linked or merely perceived as linked because of our social conditioning and stigmas. Like almost all of the literacy scholars, Orellana focuses on the perspective of the adults in the situation, very little attention is paid to the students’ emotions and perceptions regarding gender and literature beyond their own literacy performance. Importantly, Orellana does not present her research and writing as an end point, but rather a starting point for larger conversations and questions about the role of gender in literacies in and beyond the classroom.
William Brozo and Ronald Schmelzer use their article “Wildmen, Warriors, and Lovers: Reaching boys through Archetypal Literature,” (1997) as an opportunity for advocacy amidst what they believe to be an imbalance between male and female achievement in the classroom, because current education methods do not address the unique needs and preferences of male learners. Brozo and Schmelzer seize upon classic titles with positive male role models embodying various male archetypes (pilgrim, patriarch, warrior, etc…) and believe that these titles can serve double-duty as pieces of curriculum that could hold male readers’ interest and motivate them to read and provide inspiration and modeling of responsible male behavior, needed in the current atmosphere of absentee fathers, domestic violence and abuse, substance and drug dependence. Brozo and Schmelzer raise the fascinating point that “… it is nearly axiomatic that boys will be taught to read in school by females…” (p. 5) They continue with their analysis, “While there are no hard data to suggest that this fact alone has an inimical effect on boys’ reading achievement, it may have an insidious effect on their perceptions of and attitudes toward reading.” (ibid) For Brozo and Schmelzer, gender has lead to an imbalance in the classroom, but that imbalance can be addressed and mined for social benefit with targeted male instruction and accessible literature for boys which feature positive male protagonists.
The belief that there is an achievement gap between males and females in academic performance is not unique to the United States; other nations, including Australia, Canada, England, and New Zealand have seen movements to protect and better serve male minds in the classroom, which has become a feminized place because of educational reform and the prevalence of female teachers and female-centric curriculum. However, Nola Alloway seeks to debunk what she believes is the misinformed perception of male underachievement and anti-male bias in the classroom in her article “Swimming Against the Tide: Boys, Literacies, and Schooling: An Australian Story.” (2007) Alloway contends that while the issue of student learning and performance can easily be simplified into boys vs. girls, the issue is much more nuanced, and educators and scholars should be investigating “which boys” and “which girls” are underserved and falling behind, rather than making sweeping, simplistic generalizations. (p. 591) Alloway points to socio-economic disadvantage as the main determinant in literacy and general academic performance, and cautions against the tendency of the news media and other outside parties to make claims about gender imbalances and hyper-feminization, which are detrimental to female students, teachers, and all women, and do nothing to advance gender relations and understanding.
Kathy Sanford echoes Alloway’s arguments about the cultural overreaction and misperception of anti-male classrooms and curriculum in her article “Gendered Literacy Experiences: The Effects of Expectation and Opportunity for Boys’ and Girls’ Learning.” (2005) Sanford acknowledges the concern for boys in education in the western world and continues, “And while the literacy of boys is of great concern to me as an educator, I am struck by the ease and speed with which girls are again made invisible in concerns of education, ignored in the general call for improved literacy skills.” (p. 302) Unlike the other educational researchers, Sanford does not couch her research in achievement, but rather focuses on her yearlong observation and investigation of two middle school literature classrooms. Sanford does spend some time discussing the ripe opportunities in literature and literature classrooms to explore gender identities and encourage students to question and further investigate those identities and their own biases, but her suggestions are prescriptive and in reaction to the lack of discussion and exploration she saw in the classrooms she observed. Throughout her observation the classrooms addressed gender as a static, predetermined, unquestioned thing in which things were done certain ways and girls should be encouraged in girl activities and boys should be encouraged in boy activities, without any second-guessing or questioning. However, outside of school students faced a variety of environments and support structures regarding gender, yet:
These unique opportunities that shape students’ lives are not always acknowledged in school. School expectations tend to draw on (often stereotypical) generalizations about the interests of boys and girls and how they learn. These unexamined stereotypes shape teachers’ expectations of the students in their classes, limiting opportunities for them to explore and define alternative realities. (p. 306)
Sanford locates difficulty in the teachers’ perceptions of “institutional structure” and constraints on what they are able to teach and how they can conduct their classrooms. The article challenges the teachers’ statements by exploring whether it is the nature of the status quo or unacknowledged gender biases that is limiting teachers.
Moving away from the preoccupations on student performance and achievement that dominate the discussion of education in the 21st century, Myra Barrs suggests that the differences between boys and girls in literature classrooms should be approached from the perspective that girls reading well is a positive, and that help for the boys may not come from introducing “boy-friendly” measures and standards in her work “Gendered Literacy?” (2000) In examining and understanding what girls doing as successful readers, “we must look beyond questions of accuracy and fluency, and consider much more deeply what is involved in thoughtful and responsive reading.” (p. 288) Barrs is one of the few scholars to address the perspective of the students, which aligns with her emphasis on reader-response theory and emotional response. In her observation of students and classrooms, Barrs notices that boys struggle with the emotional empathy and response necessary for thoughtful reading and digestion; lower-achieving males in particular prefer non-fiction so their inability to emotionally process and respond to the work is less noticeable amid cold hard facts. (Ibid) Offering analysis of contemporary scholarship and educational politics, Barrs surmises
The challenge for educators now should be how to make these forms of thinking and feeling more accessible to boys, not how to narrow down the reading task so that it is all about comprehension of content. (p. 289)
Full of interesting tidbits and ideas, Barrs provides the astute observation that in the classrooms she studied, males who read proficiently were always from households with a dedicated reader, yet proficient females were from a variety of households and seemed to gain their reading experiences and perceptions through socialization at school. (p. 291) For boys, what happens inside of the classroom is complicated by homelife and attitudes and behaviors toward literacy. Barrs does a fantastic job of expanding the gender gap in literacy beyond boys versus girls into a thoughtful examination of underlying matters and issues inside of and outside of the classroom.
These resources offer a complex view of gender issues in literature and literacy. Interestingly, the studies and scholarship within these articles rarely address the perceptions of the students about gender and literature, or their own reading habits, rather the students are considered in an abstract manner, as subjects of research, not future literate men and women. Sanford’s work comes the closest to advocating for greater student involvement and metacognition about student perceptions and behaviors regarding gender and literature; but the current trend in literacy research seems to focus on curriculum and classroom instruction, instead of student attitudes and interest.
References
Alloway, N. (2007). Swimming against the Tide: Boys, Literacies, and Schooling – An Australian Story. Canadian Journal of Education, 30(2), 582–605. Retrieved from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/20466651
Barrs, M. (2000). Gendered Literacy? Language Arts, 77(4), 287–293.
Brozo, W. G., & Schmelzer, R. V. (1997). Wildmen, Warriors, and Lovers: Reaching Boys through Archetypal Literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 41(1), 4–11. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026293 .
Orellana, M. F. (1995). Literacy as a Gendered Social Practice: Tasks, Texts, Talk, and Take-Up. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 674–708. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/748194.
Sanford, K. (2005). Gendered literacy experiences: The effects of expectation and opportunity for boys’ and girls’ learning. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(4), 302–315. doi:10.1598/JAAL.49.4.4
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