Abstract
One of the strongest social forces driving educational change — in classrooms, curriculum, teaching and leadership — is the changing role and position of women in society. But the effects of changing configurations of gender relations in education are not straightforward. In this chapter, Jill Blackmore discusses how stronger orientations to gender equity in children’s learning and educators’ careers frequently run against the grain of deep-seated cultural assumptions about gender, long-standing institutional practices that don’t easily accommodate changed gender relations, and parallel patterns of reform that seem to contradict or undermine many of the new directions otherwise being pursued in the name of gender equity.
In particular, Blackmore scrutinizes how gender-based reforms fare in the context of an increased market orientation to educational change, where many gender-sensitive practices in classrooms, curriculum and even the hiring of school principals are often construed as bad for the school’s image in the marketplace of parental choice. Gender based reforms are also analyzed in the context of a new managerialism in education, where emphases on financial constraint and centralized accountability in rational systems of measurement and management, paradoxically mean that the growing numbers of women entering the school principal-ship turn into emotional ‘middle-managers’ of educational change — motivating their staff to work reasonably and committedly in an increasingly unreasonable world.
Blackmore concludes by saying that gender-based reform in educational change is about much more than recruiting women into educational leadership, or embracing their caring styles of emotional managment, but also engineering much more fundamental shifts in the wider policy context of educational reform so that schools can be more responsive to gender based issues.
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Blackmore, J. (1998). The Politics of Gender and Educational Change: Managing Gender or Changing Gender Relations?. In: Hargreaves, A., Lieberman, A., Fullan, M., Hopkins, D. (eds) International Handbook of Educational Change. Kluwer International Handbooks of Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4944-0_23
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