276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Boys Don't Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools

£8.495£16.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

We must challenge assumptions, motivations and values… We need a critical dialogue, which can only occur in education spaces based upon universal values or preconditions of hope, modesty, respect, courage and love.” As an English teacher and a feminist, I like to think that I’m quite attuned to the ways in which language reveals certain social assumptions. I’ve spent hours patiently discussing the problems with language like “That’s so gay” and questioning the nature of ‘banter’ with frustrated students who didn’t see the problem. Yet, just in this blog, I’ve used phrases like “challenging boys” and described a low set without mentioning the gender divide, assuming the unequal gender divide of bottom sets to be implicit. As a new HOD, I have tried to ensure that we teach some non-stereotypical texts, but unlike Pinkett, I don’t currently make an effort to use homonormative pronouns in the classroom. I can imagine the way that my classes might respond to his example “Why might a man write his boyfriend a sonnet?” and have been somewhat unwilling to disrupt learning in this way. Although I regularly have the kind of “Why do we assume his love is a woman?” conversations about literature, I definitely haven’t yet normalised the ‘no song and dance’ approach that Pinkett advocates. Boys Don’t Try is also devoted to improving boys’ social and emotional wellbeing, arguing that much low achievement in boys is rooted in social and cultural contexts. To get boys putting pen to paper, teachers need to have relentless high expectations when it comes to what you want them to produce. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

In Boys Don’t Try? Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts directly link boys’ relative educational underachievement to mistaken attempts to aspire to an “outdated, but nonetheless widespread idea” about what it means to be a “real man” and “a brand of masculinity that leaves many boys floundering” - and make no mistake, it is a brand, sold hard yet often unthinkingly, with very real casualties. The message is clear: we have a lot of work to do. Despite the continued debunking of the learning styles theory, the notion that boys benefit from kinaesthetic activities persists. Willingham ( 2009) states:As aresult of this attainment gap, schools up and down the country have invested time and money in training aimed at raising boys’ attainment. Indeed, Ihave sat through anumber of well-intentioned staff INSET sessions during my many years as ateacher, where Ihave been told that boys and girls learn differently, that boys thrive in acompetitive environment and that Ishould consider ways to make my subject more ​ ‘boy-friendly’. However, simply looking around my classroom at the wonderfully different characters Ihad in front of me suggested these solutions were not really solutions at all: boys are not all the same. As Roberts and Pinkett make clear throughout Boys Don’t Try, high expectations are far more useful to build student self-esteem. Similar classes I’ve taught more recently have completed the same tasks as top sets, with often just as good results. Again supporting Roberts’ assertion that setting is rarely just about ability. We often hear teachers saying that boys respond well to praise. Actually, this isn’t always the case. The Research Schools Network is anetwork of schools that support the use of evidence to improve teaching practice.

A “good student” is seen as a compliant one, with boys more frequently sanctioned and girls spending more time on homework. Often boys will opt out of doing work because in the status-driven world of toxic masculinity it’s easier to not try and fail, than it is to try and risk failure. Never try to ‘out-man’ the boys. Using your increased physical size or shouting to beat down bad behaviour is never going to work. Instead, when reprimanding a boy, avoid invading their personal space and remain calm and polite as you demand their compliance. Learning in a home and school environment where the benefit of academic work is encouraged and a work ethic is valued gives students the confidence that comes with the expectation to do better; to achieve.

What about the boys?’ is a common refrain in education circles when discussing academic achievement, particularly in English.

As a reader, it’s a scary moment when it dawns that these strategies were doing more harm than good. The World Cup of Writing created more losers than winners. The sports text reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and prevented students from building cultural capital. In one colleague’s maths lesson, the boys remembered far more about pizza toppings than the formula for calculating the area of a circle. In their new book, Boys Don't Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools, teachers Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts examine the research and drill down to a core conclusion: boys are not hitting their heights because of a fear of failure. He is a strong believer in the school’s role in adding to a student’s “cultural capital” – the idea that we accumulate certain knowledge valued in society that gives us cultural competence and determines our social status. Chapter 7: In the Classroom– Practical tips for the classroom. The seating plan section made me laugh… creating a seating plan really should feature on teacher education courses!If we can encourage boys to really value formal education, help them see it for themselves, it goes a long way to helping them to meaningfully engage and embrace it.” But which boys are affected? It’s really the working-class boys who experience the most difficulties. Working-class boys are more likely to get caught up in a negative dynamic of acting out and being reprimanded and then becoming disengaged.” Boost their 'cultural capital': It might be tempting to get boys in a sports-mad school to write essays about big match finals, but it can be better to open up students' minds to the world and help them find interests and passions they may never have known of. This book is easy to read, but hard to listen to. I’m reassured by the solutions, but frustrated by all the mistakes we’ve been making for so long. If we mask this fear with the bravura of ‘not trying,’ it allows us to hide our vulnerabilities and provide an excuse for underachieving.

Boys (and girls) have more respect for teachers who know their stuff. Being an expert in your subject (or subjects) is a must. This modelling of reflection makes it impossible to read Boys Don’t Try without considering your own mistakes in and out of the classroom, but without apportioning blame either. So, in the spirit of the book, here are a few examples of times I too think I have fallen into these gender traps and how I am now ‘rethinking’ them.One of the most powerful features of the book is the inclusion by the authors of various reflections on the effects of gender stereotyping on their own school experiences, as students and teachers. Pinkett’s descriptions of his difficulties fitting in at university and Roberts’ stories of his own response to subtle secondary school peer-pressure are moving and recognisable, lending passionate credence to the sections of the book which report key findings from research too. The authors were similarly honest in their interview for this great episode of the TES English podcast as well. It’s refreshing that both are truly walking the walk here, standing as great role models of the kind of masculinity they want to advocate. Teachers’ high expectations of themselves and their students, in subject knowledge and behaviour for learning, trump gender considerations (such as single-sex classes, or male students being taught by male teachers) every time. Secondly, Roberts invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to argue that teaching boys content they find relevant does them a disservice by not giving them access to “certain knowledge, behaviours, and skills” that are “highly valued in society”. Teaching only highly relevant content also reinforces low expectations of what boys can and need to learn. A gender gap in educational attainment means boys get lower exam results than girls, are more likely to drop out, and are less likely to go to university than their female counterparts. Similarly, the author makes a cogent argument for not making all boys’ learning “relevant”. First, he refers to cognitive social scientist Daniel T Willingham’s example of how content doesn’t always drive interest. For instance, we’ve all attended an event or lecture we thought would be boring but ended up being fascinating.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment