Carrie Paechter

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · School of Social Sciences

This commentary sits within a context of growing cultural concern over brain damage that occurs in many of the Western world's most popular, profitable and prized sports. After laying out evidence demonstrating this point, we discuss the increasing inclusion of women within sports which involve regular and routinised brain injuries. We problematise...

The aims of this review were to provide evidence which could inform improved responses to young people and young adults in need of support through transition. Implications for practice are drawn out from this review, with an overarching focus on improving outcomes for children, young people and young adults. This review provides: ● Clear and succ...

While research is increasing into binary trans identities in educational settings, young people identifying as non-binary have been little studied. We explore the school experiences of eight non–binary teenagers aged 13–18. Our findings suggest that both the implicit and explicit curriculum are strongly binary, making it hard for non-binary young p...

In this paper, I consider the contradictions in majority Western treatment of trans and intersex children, in relation to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). I argue that how each group is treated is underpinned by contrasting assumptions about what constitutes the child’s best interest, which is a primary consideratio...

In this article, we consider a previously unidentified form of community of practice: the community of practice of transition. Our exemplar data come from two separate studies, one of a group for trans young people and one of an online divorce support community. Such communities differ from other communities of practice because the transition proce...

Ideas about gender are changing. The UK and other countries are moving towards altering laws about gender recognition. Intersex people can be recognised as such in some countries. In the global North, nonbinary identities are becoming more common, and this is reflected in changes to recording systems. Referrals to child gender identity clinics are...

Small Steps Big Changes (SSBC) is a 10 year programme hosted by Nottingham CityCare Partnership and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund's 'A Better Start' programme. It seeks to improve the outcomes for 0-3 year-old children in the areas of diet and nutrition, social and emotional skills, and language and communication skills. This report...

In this paper I examine the postion of feminine boys in the literature on gender and childhood. I argue that there has been little systematic research carried out on feminine boys, and that this is the case for several reasons. I start by discussing how researchers tend to focus on dominant narratives, with the result that alternative positions are...

Discussion of the philosophy of education in relation to gender in the West originated in debates about the role and content of girls’ education. These debates were both elucidated and complicated by the introduction of the term ‘gender’ and its takeup within education research. While the emergence of gender as a conceptual framing for this work ha...

In this paper I consider and challenge the ways in which hegemonic femininity has mainly been conceptualised in the gender literature. This approach has several limitations, including being strongly binary, positioning girls and women as Other and frequently essentialised. After suggesting some criteria for a more useful conceptualisation, I consid...

In this paper I consider the adult focus of current mainstream gender theory. I relate this to how the concept of the heterosexual matrix originates in a social contract which excludes children from civil society. I argue that this exclusion is problematic both for theoretical reasons and from the perspective of children themselves. I start by disc...

Developments in the field of gender theory as applied to education since the 1970s are briefly reviewed in order to highlight key challenges and debates around gender categorisation and identification in gender and education. We argue that conundrums of categorisation have haunted, and continue to haunt, the field of gender theory, and empirical ap...

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant ‘cool’ group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of ‘being nice’ and ‘being normal’ these ‘non-cool’ girls were able to avoid some of the struggles for domin...

Discourses of fairness are bound up with Western ideals of companionate marriage. They are also central to the ways people talk about their approaches to divorce, especially in relation to the division of property and finances. How fairness is understood within marriage, however, is gendered, with husbands more likely to take equity-based approache...

In this paper I will consider how girls become alienated from their bodies and how this is exacerbated by some of the current practices of formal physical education. I shall argue that a more fertile approach to the education of girls' bodies may be through the expressive arts, particularly dance and drama. From a very early age, girls are encourag...

In this paper I examine how young women construct their identities with others in online communities. I argue that the proliferation of social networking and its popularity among young people means that performed identities are increasingly collaboratively constructed, with the individual having less control over their public image than was previou...

This article is concerned with methodological issues arising from a retrospective partially insider study of a divorce support website. I argue that, while we need to conduct detailed retrospective studies into the development of online communities, such studies bring methodological challenges, due to their retrospective nature, the potential size...

This article is about the informal learning that took place in an online divorce support and advice forum. In it, the author discusses the formation of a community of practice among the members during the first nine months of the site's operation. The author shows how the key markers of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire deve...

In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems. The first concerns the issues and difficulties involved in studying how children think about their bodies, in the schooling setting. The second involves an attempt to bring together a series of phenomena around which gendered media and social panics are being constructed in the UK and elsewhere.I...

In this paper I seek to address a series of tensions in the ways we think, write and speak about gender in classrooms and playgrounds, and in the language we use to describe children and their behaviour. I shall examine some of the concepts we use for describing gender relations among children and consider the extent to which they are still useful....

This paper is about how nine to eleven year old children, particularly girls, co-construct tomboy and girly-girl identities as oppositional positions. The paper sits within a theoretical framework in which I understand individual and collective masculinities and femininities as ways of ‘doing man/woman’ or ‘doing boy/girl’ that are constructed with...

When I was contacted by the editors of Gender and Education to see whether I wanted to respond to this article, I was not particularly keen to do so. I generally believe that critique is a good thing, and that direct responses have a tendency to come over as precious, petulant, and petty. However, having read the article several times, and having r...

This paper starts from the idea that children learn and construct gendered identities within local communities of masculinity and femininity practice, including peer communities. The data presented come from an ESRC‐funded study of tomboy identities, which investigated the enabling and constraining factors for girls in taking up and maintaining tom...

This article focuses on the involvement of boys and girls in playground football. It is based on research conducted with 10- to 11-year-old pupils at two state primary schools in London. Boys and girls were found to draw on gender constructs that impacted variously on their involvement in playground football. The performance of masculinity through...

This article reports on the findings of an exploratory study of tomboy identities. Based on case study data of children aged nine to eleven in two contrasting London schools, we attempt to tease out how children of this age, their teachers and parents, understand the term ‘tomboy’, how they relate it to the identities of themselves and others, the...

This article considers the relationship between ‘school’ and ‘non-school knowledge’ and the classroom power imbalances they represent. The author critiques ways in which this distinction has been treated by earlier authors, arguing that ‘non-school’ or ‘owned’ knowledge has been defined simply as a negative of ‘school knowledge’, and that this does...

Lost Geographies of Power JOHN ALLEN, 2003 Oxford: Blackwell 232 pp., ISBN 0 631 207287 (paperback), £16.99

This paper is basically about terminology. In it I discuss the terms 'masculinity' and 'femininity' and how they relate to being male and being female. My theme arises from an increasing difficulty that I am finding in understanding how individual identities relate to dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity. Christine Skelton and Becky...

How children learn to construct and enact masculinities and femininities is clearly an issue for education and one that has been explored in a wide variety of ways. In recent years, however, our conceptions of gender have once again become problematic, particularly given a gradual slippage regarding the sex/gender distinction and the increasing use...

This article takes up my previous work [Paechter, Carrie (2003). Learning masculinities and femininities: Power/knowledge and legitimate peripheral participation. Women's Studies International Forum, 26, 541–552.; Paechter, Carrie (2003). Masculinities and femininities as communities of practice. Women's Studies International Forum, 26, 69–77.; Pae...

Space is largely ignored in both the theory and the practice of education. At the same time, however, there is an abundance of spatial metaphors that are used to describe schooling, the curriculum and educational processes. Some of these (top of the class, department) have their origins in spatial arrangements that once dominated schools and school...

Cartesian dualism has left a heavy legacy in terms of how we think about ourselves, so that we treat humans as minds within bodies rather than mind/body unities. This has far‐reaching effects on our conceptualisation of the sex/gender distinction and on the relationship between bodies and identities. Related to this is a dualism that is embedded in...

This paper takes up my previous work [Women's Stud. Int. Forum 26 (2003b) 69] considering how masculinities and femininities can be regarded as local communities of practice. In particular, I focus on how the legitimate participation of children in adult communities of masculinity and femininity takes place within gendered power/knowledge relations...

This paper considers the relationship betweenpower, gender and curriculum change. Writingfrom a Foucaultian standpoint, the authorconsiders how teachers react to and resist bothimposed and voluntary educationalinnovations. She looks at how subject status,personal identity and career history affect howa teacher is likely to react to a particularprop...

Physical education (PE) lessons are an important arena for the construction and consolidation of dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities within schools. The gym, sports hall, playing field and associated areas such as changing rooms and showers function as sites both for the gendered display of hegemonic forms of heterosexual mascul...

This exploratory paper argues that treating masculinities and femininities as localised communities of practice is a useful approach to the question of how and why particular forms of gender are performed at particular times and places. In the paper I consider Lave and Wenger's [Lave, Jean, & Wenger, Etienne (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate pe...

This article is an attempt to analyse my experiences during the 1970s as the adolescent daughter of a lesbian, setting these against some of the theoretical writing in this area. It starts from the premise that personal experience, if treated theoretically, can provide illumination beyond the scope of an individual's life. In the article I draw par...

This article reviews the author's experiences as an educational researcher working in a period of constant structural, curriculum and policy change. The author argues that, although the changing national context significantly altered the focus and conduct of the research, it is still possible to remain true to at least some of one's original aims,...

This paper draws on a two year study of the power and gender relations between teachers negotiating the new design and technology curriculum for England and Wales between 1992 and 1994. In it I reflect on the experience of attempting to analyse gender and power relations between individuals and groups positioned in a variety of ways with respect to...

This paper considers the situation of secondary teachers working in two marginal school subjects, design and technology and physical education. Focusing on the interaction between gender, identity, status and the body, we explore the similarities between these subjects, and suggest that marginality is itself gendered. Through a consideration of the...

This paper explores the interface between gender and power through the examination of the process of introducing the new subject of design and technology into the English and Welsh National Curriculum. In considering teachers’ reactions to and interpretations of the new subject, three aspects of power are considered: the relationship between power...

Over the past several years those working in higher education have shown a growing interest in professional development, particularly with regard to those areas of work, such as teaching, nursing and medicine, which have undergone rapid, outsider‐led change. There remain a number of questions, however, about what professional development means and...

The National Curriculum for design and technology requires that the new subject be delivered in a cross‐curricular way, involving teachers from a number of previously‐existing subject areas. The negotiation by teachers of this new curriculum and its associated new subculture has taken place in a context in which struggles for power and control in t...

This paper considers the effects on teachers, students and the curriculum of the experience, in the spring of 1993, of the first extended assessement tasks in Design in Technology in England and Wales. It examines the frustrations experienced and the dilemmas faced by teachers in working on these tasks with students, and their attempts to resolve t...

This paper reports some of the findings of the first year of a study of the development of the design and technology curriculum in England and Wales. The establishment of a new, high status, practical subject area offers a unique opportunity to study curriculum history as it happens. Furthermore, as the new subject is being taught by teachers from...

This is a conference paper. One feature of the development of the design and technology curriculum within schools has been an ongoing debate, between the various groupings within it, concerning the nature, purpose and delivery of the subject. This paper considers the use of selective readings and interpretations of national curriculum documents as...

Enormous changes are taking place regarding how people learn. The introduction of new technologies and in particular the resulting possibilities for our virtual presence in virtual spaces, highlights some comparatively neglected aspects of learning. This book seeks to redress the balance by presenting a collection of papers, which view learners as...