Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ora!ambar From: panix!mara@cmcl2.NYU.EDU (Mara Chibnik) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: sexist space... Message-ID: <1991Mar11.234211.18056@panix.uucp> Date: 13 Mar 91 11:28:49 GMT References: <9103091235.aa25111@orion.oac.uci.edu> Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz) Organization: (getting there) Lines: 89 Approved: ambar@ora.com >From before: >>>The problem probably lies somewhere in the socialization of young girls (not >>>so much the boys I would imagine since there is no real evidence of the >>>(males actively telling the females to shutup). What are we telling our And my response: >>In other words--and this is really, really important to think >>about--the way boys are socialized is just fine, it's the girls who >>are broken and need to be fixed. In article <9103091235.aa25111@orion.oac.uci.edu> schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) follows up: >I suppose that is an implication that I didn't really consider too carefully, >however, given the context how would you interpret it? > >Given the premises: > >1) We want children to speak up in class. >2) Boys willingly speak up in class. >3) Girls only speak up in class when boys are not present. >4) Boys do nothing to prevent girls from speaking up in class. >I don't see how else to intepret this situation other than by saying that >there's something wrong with the way girls behave. What is bothering >you in all likelihood is that you read this as a general statement about >all male and female behaviors. Although I didn't state it explicitly, the >assumption was that the context of this statement is confined to this >particular case. Well, no, not exactly. As you point out yourself, the fourth point is not a certainty. I have also seen studies (we've discussed them here and elsewhere) that suggest that teachers, too, need to change their behavior, because they tend, in co-ed situations, to pay more attention to boys. Now this may eventually result in the girls' learning not to speak up, so this is one of the kinds of things "we" need to do to give more desirable signals to our daughters. However, I want to open the issue in quite another direction. You are taking it as a given that the participation of boys in class is a good thing, and that the non-participation of girls in class is a bad thing. (I don't mean you personally; the notion is inherent to this discussion in the various guises in which I've seen it here and elsewhere.) It may be that the kind of participation girls have to offer is not the same as what boys offer. This was the suggestion of one of the researchers who discussed findings on this topic last year. I don't have the reference handy; I caught a writeup in the New York Times. The study was done at one of the big Eastern formerly women's colleges, I don't remember which. The researchers said they were surprised to find that even there, where the long tradition of women's scholarship was a given, professors recognized and called on male students more often than they did on female students, and that a number of other measures (sorry to be so vague about this; I didn't keep the clipping) suggested that teachers' behavior was very variable according to the student's sex. But a secondary suggestion was made that this was due, at least in part, to a difference between the nature of the answers the women and the men had to offer, and in the kinds of questions that each found appealing. In particular, the men tended to be quick with brief and relatively simple responses, while the women seemed to spend longer formulating more complex, less "to the point" answers. If (and it is a very big if) there is some truth to this, it behooves us to consider the nature of classroom reinforcement. Unless we do this, we are skewing our definition of participation and of learning to favor a particular model. (I think this is happening anyhow, and I'm not sure that it's gender based. If there is a gender component to it, it's worth exploring.) Away back when, in the days before I discovered them, I caught a television show on computers as teaching tools. One educator had a caveat that impressed me: "Computers are very good at helping kids to learn certain kinds of things, and very useful in getting them to learn how to approach certain kinds of problems. But there are problems at which computer techniques do badly. If we lean to hard on the computers, we'll also be teaching the kids that the only problems that really count are the ones that computers can solve" [paraphrase, of course, but I can't put a name to it anyhow]. It's the same kind of thing, I think. -- cmcl2!panix!mara mara@dorsai.com marob!panix!mara Mara Chibnik Life is too important to be taken seriously.