Living the gender gap within everyday schooling: Empirical insights from Chile
Living the gender gap within everyday schooling: Empirical insights from Chile
Speaker: Dr Andrea Lizama-Loyola, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
When: Thurs 9 October, 12-1PM
Where: Fulton 212 / Zoom Webinar
The problem of educational inequality is a widely recognised issue across developing and developed countries. Literature have offered theoretical and empirical insights to understand the scope of the problem of educational inequality and its effects on individuals and society. However, the problem of inequalities under both a multidimensional and intersectional perspective has been comparatively less explored.
This paper is based on qualitative data that I have collected for a study that explores how inequalities are lived and contested in school settings. Theoretically, this paper draws on the cultural reproduction theory (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), particularly the links between different forms of capital and schooling (Lareau, 1987; Reay, 2004; Davey, 2009; Forbes & Lingard, 2015). With a feminist and poststructural framework, this paper also employs the concept of everyday schooling to understand how teachers and students navigate routine barriers in the formal and informal school (Gordon, et al., 2000; Gordon, 1996). Methodologically, the study has adopted an ethnography approach to explore students´ everyday experiences within the school. Participant observations were conducted over 7 months in four schools (from Santiago and Coyhaique). Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 students from those schools.
Results locate social structures as having a central place in shaping the schooling system in Chile. Particularly, the gender gap is not only a problem of access to education, nor is it only a problem of dissimilar outcomes between girls and boys. Findings of the study show gender inequalities – in intersection with other social divisions- are (re)produced and well-maintained in everyday school. Such experiences are observed in multiple ways, for example, how teaching is done, the interactions between teachers with boys and girls and peer interactions (between students) too. Moreover, I argue that although the gender gap can emerge within the classroom, it also can be resisted by those who are part of the school system.
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