"Are We Going to Read Anything That's Not Written by White Men About White Men?" A Mother and Daughter Challenging Patriarchal Hegemony in Secondary School

• In Event: Women Education Scholars and Their Children's Schooling

Abstract

This presentation will examine some of the ways that patriarchal hegemony is reproduced and reinforced through the schooling system. Examples of school curricula, policies and student-parent-administrator interactions are used to illustrate the ways that female bodies and voices may be marginalized and silenced in schools. The authors’ personal narrative inquiries (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) are presented to illustrate the roles a mother and daughter enacted in response to hegemonic processes and policies, and how school structures may be challenged. Using a feminist poststructural discourse analysis (Baxter, 2003; Weedon, 1987) we examine the multiple ways that mothers and daughters are positioned through school interactions and how those positions serve larger discourses related to formal school knowledge, normative female behavior and family-school relationships. This analysis also allows forces us to consider the ways is which discursive practices “are structured, what power relations they produce and reproduce, where there are resistances and where we might look for weak points more open to challenge and transformation” (Weedon, 1987, p. 136). For example, we deconstruct a school-wide bathroom policy dictating that students confine their bodily functions of defecation and urination to the 5 minutes between classes. Students who could not or would not do so were marked as delinquent (tardy). Lack of parity in the number of toilets per female vs. male students led to more female students being penalized than male students. The school discourse positioned the female students as delinquent and sought to create docile bodies (Foucault, 1977) but the female students and authors helped to raise alternative perspectives that disrupted the formal school policy.

Resistance to being constructed as a docile body requires practice; learning to be involved in issues that affect us must be learned. The presentation concludes by discussing how parent involvement may serve as an apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1995) in civic engagement. Rogoff wrote about how sociocultural learning takes place on three levels: community/institutional, interpersonal and personal. School involvement should be viewed as an opportunity to both challenge hegemonic practices and to help young people learn about civic engagement. Because more mothers than fathers are involved in school (Nord & West, 2001), it is especially important for mothers to work alongside daughters in speaking out for school change. Parent involvement provides a space for students to observe involvement, receive guidance on how to be involved in the school community and eventually practice “participatory appropriation” and challenge school issues on their own. The process of participatory appropriation allows an individual to “change and in the process become prepared to engage in subsequent similar activities” (Rogoff, 1995, p. 150). Such work defies construction as docile bodies, and sets the stage for schools to promote social justice through social pedagogical practices (Stephens, 2013).

 

Authors

• Kathy Nakagawa, Arizona State University

• Willa Eigo, Boston University