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Abstract
This paper reflects on the development of the field of gender and education, as it emerged from the late 1970s onwards. It considers the reasons for the creation of the field and the impact on it of various waves of feminism, as well as the dominance of the Anglophone voice. It continues with an examination of how gender and education has developed as a field in Scotland. The paper continues with the findings of a small survey of the journal Gender and Education, the main journal of the field, at three points in almost 20 years of existence: 1990, 1998 and 2007. The survey findings suggest that the gender education field has been influenced by changes within both feminism and higher education though researchers from Scotland are few, and there is a concentration on Anglophone research and issues. The paper concludes with suggestions for future action in order to make the field more inclusive and practice/policy oriented.
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Background
This paper1 reflects on the development of the field of gender and education, as it emerged from the late 1970s onwards. I was involved right from the beginning when, as a teacher and later a postgraduate student and academic, I was assiduous in my criticism of schooling and education generally as sexist and a major target for reform. Since then I have mostly worked in teacher and higher education and have, among other things, endeavoured to raise the profile of gender as an area of educational research, policy and practice. I have had a particular interest in whether and how feminist scholarship in education has changed over the years, and the influence on it of culture and context (Weiner, 1994; Arnot, David & Weiner, 1999; Weiner & Berge, 2001). I have spent most of my professional life in the UK, indeed in London, though I worked for eight years or so, from 1998 to 2005, in Sweden where interest is high in gender and latterly, in antiracism and multiculturalism. I moved back to the UK in 2005, this time to Scotland and am presently attached to the University of Edinburgh. The arguments of this paper are drawn from my experience as above of working in gender and education as a teacher and then later as a researcher, in varying national and international settings.
My perception is that there seems currently to be a particular need for reflexive critique concerning feminist scholarship or gender studies as it is now often called. This is despite the fact that reflexivity has been a constant in the sense of the range of internal debates that have influenced and sometimes divided the field (Tong, 1989; Hirsch & Fox Keller, 1990; Weiner, 1994). However, currently divisions seem less ideological than in the past and more bound up with structures arising from globalisation and within the Academy itself. Western feminists have moved from second to third wave feminism(s) to address the fact that despite second-wave feminist emphasis on action and the removal of formal barriers to gender discrimination, in many (Western) countries the expected equality goals have not been realised.2 Rather, younger feminists have turned to theories and analysis rather than to the political action favoured by earlier feminist generations. Meanwhile, global agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO have activated programmes of gender reform in developing countries that largely equate with the demands of second wave feminism (Aikman & Underhalter, 2005). Eradication of gender discrimination in education has been adopted as a 'global' policy, mainly because lack of education particularly for women is seen as providing an obstacle to global stability and economic growth. This has aided the further development of strategies aimed at challenging gender and other forms of inequality, this time in developing countries (Aikman & Unterhalter, 2005), such as the three-fold policy continuum outlined below.
Equal treatment focuses on non-discriminatory practices but can ensure neither a shared starting point (or flat playing field) nor an equal outcome;
Positive action involves initiatives that address disadvantages experienced by girls and women which will enable them, the hope is, to catch up with boys and men; and
Mainstreaming, a more consciously systematic approach, aims to embed itself in institutional governance and culture (Leach, 2003).
This focus on gender policy at an international level has been identified as a 'new' global discourse of equity and inclusion within development agencies and national governments. Associated with an ambitious social development agenda (Leach, 2003, p.7), it has generated a range of gender initiatives from getting more girls into schooling in rural Bangladesh (Hossain in Aikman & Unterhalter, 2005, p.45) to reducing school-related gender-based violence in Malawi (USAID, 2008) to recruiting and training local female teachers in Pakistan (Farah & Shera, 2007). However, such initiatives have themselves been undermined by other policy strategies from the same agencies: for example, Structural Adjustment Programmes which offer investment and loans to poor countries in exchange for increased privatisation and a reduced public sector.
The literatures on the various orientations of feminist scholarship and their policy contexts as outlined above are, however, often separate for developed and developing countries, meaning that third-wave Western feminists read less of the literature on gender and development than the other way round. A similar point is made by Fennel and Arnot (2008) who suggest that Western and non-Western feminists indeed have different trajectories. The former mainly concentrate on issues arising from their own wealthy and developed liberal democratic societies, while non-Western feminists necessarily devote most of their efforts to ensuring that the 'girl child' actually gets an education.
The field of gender and education largely reflects the third-wave interests of Western feminism, displaying a general lack of interest in other regions of the world unless specifically engaged in development work. To me, this suggests that the aspirations of its creators -- about making academic disciplines more inclusive and socially just -- have been subordinated to the twin demands of western feminist theory and elitist academic practice.
So in this paper, I first consider the reasons for the emergence of gender and education as a field and the impact on it of various waves of feminism, and of Anglophone ideas. Strictly speaking, an Anglophone is a person who speaks the English language, though the term is primarily associated with Englishness and English culture, and is largely the legacy of the British colonial empire (Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, 1997).3 Thus in this paper, included in the Anglophone category are researchers from the UK, and English-speaking post-Colonial countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and USA. The paper continues with an exploration of the development of gender and education in Scotland followed by a presentation of the findings of a brief survey of the journal Gender and Education, the main journal of the field, at three points in its almost two decades of existence: 1990, 1998 and 2007. The aim is to ascertain the varying impact of second/third wave feminism, visibility of Scottish research, Anglophone predominance and other shifts within Academia. The paper concludes with a call for greater reflexivity about what we are doing as feminist academics, plus suggestions for future action with the aim of making the field more inclusive and socially just.
Gender and education as a field
What has come to be known as second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s across the western world, and was concerned primarily with generating gender change aimed at improving the conditions of girls and women. It was a major influence on the emergence of gender and education as a field in Britain which mainly focused, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on sex-differences research aimed at highlighting girls' under-achievement in examinations, their under-enrolment in 'male' school subjects, and their under-recruitment to 'male' careers and professions (Clarricoates, 1978; Deem, 1980; Kelly, 1981; Walden & Walkerdine, 1982; Weiner, 1985). However, as examination patterns started to favour girls from the late 1980s onwards due to their increased access to subject study (Arnot, David & Weiner, 1999), the success/failure, boy/girl dualisms went into reverse. Following also a heightened policy emphasis on achievement, the disciplinary terrain shifted to seeking explanations for boys' and young men's relative academic failure. Meanwhile, in the Nordic countries4 and in other non-Anglophone countries in Western Europe (particularly Holland) early efforts targeted both sexes in seeking improvement in the conditions of girls in schools and in addressing the impact of the hidden curriculum (i.e. socialisation processes) on young people's understandings of gender. Policy in these countries shifted somewhat later towards support for research on the low relative achievement of boys and their so-called 'laddish' and antisocial behaviour (Öhrn, 1999).
From the 1990s onwards, Western feminist political action went into decline, partly due to the diminishing influence of the women's movement and second-wave feminism, and partly due to the post-structural turn of third-wave feminism; what Sue Clegg refers to as the 'retreat into theoreticism' (Clegg, 2006, p.310). Gender researchers who might previously have identified as both activists and researchers, now no longer did so. In the case of Britain, interest in gender theory combined with the demands of performance culture from new public management within universities meant that gender researchers were less likely to think of themselves as change agents and more as scholars in one or more legitimate disciplinary fields, e.g. sociology of education, with a specialism in gender. This theoreticist turn was less apparent in non-Anglophone (European) countries, perhaps because performativity5 (management by targets and measured performance) and managerialism had less of a stranglehold there than in the UK or North America.
However, there were also new forms of feminist activism as a new generation of feminists sought engagement in a variety of 'pro-feminist' or 'post-feminist' activities. For example, the university-based Warwick Anti-Sexism Society (WASS) in England was set up in 2004 to campaign against sexism, and to develop a new language of action for 'post' feminist times. As Lambert and Parker (2006, p.474) note, there was a concern to create a distance from 'loony raving feminists' which was combined with the wish to establish a meaningful collective identity around anti-sexism and more 'relevant' forms of feminism. Here, challenging stereotypes and attracting men to the anti-sexist cause became twin pillars of what Whelehan (2000) terms 'new' or 'post' feminism.
Networking also continued as a form of feminist activism, for example, in the form of professional 'networks' of women aimed at enabling them individually and collectively to challenge stereotypes, and effect personal and organisational change (Mavin & Bryans, 2002). Usually women-only, such networks exchanged information, provided feedback on work situations, involved sharing experiences, and offered help with career development. Such networking was seen as an 'emancipatory process', enabling increased consciousness about the inequalities women in education face (Mavin & Bryans, 2002, p.248). However, critics might point to its prime focus in individual enhancement rather than altruism or collective political action.
So, currently, it might be said that the field of gender and education includes, on the one hand, increasingly 'theoreticist'-oriented feminist scholars, and on the other, feminist activists and networkers interested mainly in forging individualistic and locally-situated forms of feminist action.
Practices of exclusion
A key problem for the field is the way in which the Anglophone/non-Anglophone dualism has been played out. This had a special meaning when I worked with Swedish colleagues because my English-language background was seen as particularly valuable in helping them get published. I became aware that young researchers in Sweden who needed to publish in reputable journals, faced the twin obstacles of writing in a second language and drawing on a cultural context that is seen as outside the gender and education discursive 'norm'. The outcome was and remains that they (as well as senior colleagues) face substantial difficulties in getting their work 'listened to' at conferences, and even more so, in getting it into print. Moreover, responsibility for lack of appeal and/or rejection of manuscripts is placed with the 'unsuccessful' researcher rather than the overall system of reviewing or the lack of language support offered. The consequence at the individual level is that many Swedish researchers give up presenting or trying to publish in English, thus restricting themselves to the (very) few available national-language discussion forums and journals.
Such examples of the treatment of non-Anglophone research and ideas, moreover, have a knock-on impact at the level of the discipline. Non-Anglophone concerns and discourses are rarely visible unless substantial attempts are made to fit them in dominant Anglophone discourses. Non-Anglophone research tends thus to be viewed as exotic and unusual. This is exemplified in a recent overview of a collection of articles selected from the Gender and Education Journal where the editors, Skelton and Francis (2005) note the relative over-representation of contributions from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The reason they give is that researchers from developing countries tend to provide 'case studies exploring specific issues in particular countries' (p.2).Perspectives from such sources are thus judged as illuminating the specificity of the region while Anglophone perspectives are seen as more generalisable to other countries and contexts. A similar point is made by Larsson (2006) who argues, for the field of ethnography, that 'the relation between the Swedish/Scandinavian network and the Anglo-American is on the whole unilateral' (p.191). Swedes invite British and North American researchers to Sweden, and refer to and use their research -- whereas the opposite seldom happens. Larsson also discusses the difficulty for non-Anglophone writers of attaining international visibility largely because (in this case for Scandinavia) their journals are not included in citation indexes.
As mentioned by Larsson above, there is a problem of 'unilateral' or the one-way flow of 'travelling' discourses (Mahony & Hextall, 2001; Lundahl, 2005) from Anglophone to non-Anglophone settings (see also Arnesen, Lahelma & Öhrn, 2007). British research on masculinities and boys, for example, has had considerable impact on policy-makers in Sweden whereas the importance of Swedish state policy for gender research has attracted little equivalent attention in Britain. This inattention is surprising given that gender as a research field has been more pioneering in Nordic policy contexts than in Britain, with no British equivalent to the Swedish National Graduate School in Gender Studies established in the early 2000s.6 As a consequence of such state gender policies, Sweden has witnessed an upsurge of (doctoral) research on gender and schooling on topics such as: gender and racialised discourses in school science and mathematics (Nyström, 2007), gender and rule-following in classroom cultures (Wester, 2008), femininities and masculinities in classrooms (Forsberg, 2002; Holm, 2008) and in relation to developing countries, gender and education issues in post-revolution Laos (Bäcktorp, 2007). This outpouring of doctoral and other research on gender also means that there will be a critical mass of gender researchers working on educational issues in Sweden for the foreseeable future.
The lack of interest in (and therefore invisibility of) the outcomes of Swedish state investment in gender research in education offers an illustration of how travelling discourses work, and demonstrates also how the dominant voice is able to squeeze out 'other voices'.
Gender and education in Scotland
Scotland provides a further example of how the field of gender and education is locally influenced yet globally moderated. Overall, while enjoying the advantages of 'Anglophonism', Scottish gender researchers have lacked the influence, theoretically and empirically, of their equivalents in England or across the Atlantic. Studies, policy and research overviews, and commissioned reports from the 1990s onwards all point to a lack of funding and support for work on gender in Scotland, with evidence of similar ground being covered time and time again. Thus a research overview of equality issues in Scotland by Brown, Breitenbach and Meyers (1994) asserts that most Scottish gender research is small-scale, lacks comprehensive coverage, and has generally failed to address how gender interacts with other social factors such as ethnicity and social class. An Equal Opportunities Commission sponsored report written half a decade later (Powney, McPake, Edwards & Hamilton, 2000) is more positive in its assertion of 'considerable research and action to enhance gender equality' (v), though it is difficult to judge the extent to which the claim draws on research carried out in Scottish settings. Powney et al. note that by the new millennium, Scottish public policy documents were referring to equal opportunities issues at school level, and gender policies were in place to raise the achievement of pupils, particularly boys. They meanwhile maintained that equality issues remain peripheral to mainstream concerns for government, public and private bodies.
A 2001 project on gender and pupil performance sponsored by the (then) Scottish Executive involved a review of research literature and policy, questionnaire to local authorities on current gender practices and six secondary school case-studies. It reported long-standing patterns (in Scotland as elsewhere) in relation to gender; for example, that girls tend to do better in examinations than boys, boys tend to dominate classroom settings, and more boys than girls are assigned behavioural support (Tinklin, Croxford, Ducklin & Frame, 2001). Nonetheless, the young people interviewed were described as holding 'modern views on the roles of men and women in work and the family' (p.9). Practical strategies to promote gender equality taken by schools noted by the researchers, include challenging stereotypes, providing positive role models, literacy initiatives aimed at boys, single-sex groups in English and mathematics, and introducing mixed-sex seating. A review four years on, of strategies used by Scottish schools to address gender inequalities provides more of the same, though suggests that schools are largely focusing on boys' underachievement and poor behaviour to the detriment of work with girls. It is rare, the authors say, 'to find schools with written policies on gender equality' (Condie, McPhee, Forde, Kane & Head, 2005, p.vii). A book of the project published in 2008 concludes that Scottish education is 'locked' into an understanding of gender as a relational concept principally concerned with the relative achievement of girls and boys (Condie, Forde & Head, 2008), the assumed homogeneity of what it means to be a girl or boy, and the dominant discursive nature of gender as an isolated feature. McPhee in the same volume draws attention to Scottish reformers' historical emphasis on literacy (McPhee, 2008) but such glimpses of specifically Scottish cultural influences are rare.
In a 2007 seminar on the state of gender and education in Scotland, Riddell presented a bleak picture of Scottish research and practice on gender, noting (again) its traditional low profile in Scottish educational research, policy and practice, increasing emphasis on males in terms of boys' academic underachievement and male 'flight' from teaching etc., and utilisation of managerial technologies to 'force' gender equality agendas such as getting more women into senior positions. Riddell noted that such initiatives often fail to engage hearts and minds, and also expressed pessimism about the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), established in 2007 to replace the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and the other formal equality bodies, because it is likely to dissipate strategies specifically aimed at gender change.
So, why the relatively low profile and pessimism in relation to gender in educational research in Scotland, despite the evident efforts of a number of feminist researchers? Paterson and Fewell (1990) argue that gender as an educational issue largely went unrecognised in Scotland until the 1990s despite increased feminist activity south of the border from the 1970s onwards. This was mainly to do, they suggest, with 'the proud Scottish tradition of education which embodies the belief that talent is the key to educational (and implicitly social) mobility, provided an apparently sufficient account of the structure and content of educational provision' (p.1). Meritocracy and attacking the social class structure, rather than challenging sexism or racism, thus have become the central targets of Scottish educational reform. Paterson and Fewell further argue the mythological nature of Scottish education, its 'applauding tone and the ways in which it has impeded understanding' (p.3), have combined to prevent in-depth gender policy analysis or research. Thus, the specificity of Scotland's relationship to gender in/equality has avoided examination. Rather, Scottish educational research on gender has been driven by British (government) social democratic and latterly neo-liberal policy trajectories. Educational research on gender has thus become equated with south-of-the-border concerns, while that on social class is more associated with Scottish interests. In other words, class trumps gender as a national educational issue! Interestingly, Scottish researchers often face the accusation reserved for non-Anglophones, of illuminating specificity rather than generality, and of offering case-study rather than generalisable material. However, I want to offer an alternative possibility: that Scottish educational research on gender would be more insightful and appealing theoretically and empirically, if it addressed head-on specific mythologies of Scottish education such as that of the lad o'pairts7 and the claimed meritocracy of the system.
Survey of Gender and Education journal
This section of the paper reports on a survey of the content of articles published in the Gender and Education journal for three specific years: 1990, 1998, and 2007 – to give a sense of how the field has developed across the years. The journal was selected because it is usually the first journal of choice for gender researchers, and the particular years, to show if and how content has changed from the journal's inception. 1990 was the first full year of publication (the journal was established in 1989), and 2007 is the most recent full year of publication, with 1998 an approximate midway point. The current thrust of the journal is articulated on its website as to further 'feminist knowledge, theory, consciousness, action and debate':
Gender and Education is an international forum for discussion of multidisciplinary educational research and ideas that focus on gender as a category of analysis. Contributors should bear in mind that they are addressing an international audience. The journal grew out of a feminist politics and is committed to developing the critical discussion of gender and education in its broadest sense. It is particularly interested in the place of gender in relation to other key social differences and seeks to further feminist knowledge, theory, consciousness, action and debate…. We expect articles to engage in feminist debate and to go beyond the simple description of what boys/men and girls/women do.8
The titles and abstracts of 'original articles' were examined to identify the range of topics, and predominant orientation (theoretical, empirical, archival, practice/policy) and whether originating from Scottish, other Anglophone or Non-Anglophone settings. The findings are summarized in Table 1.
We can see that the number of articles increased over the period as more journal issues were published -- 24 in 1990 (three issues per year), to 27 (four issues per year) to 35 (six issues per year). This suggests the growing popularity and maturity of the field as does its inclusion in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). In terms of orientation, the 1990 volume has more articles on policy/practice and also more viewpoint articles which express opinions or contribute to policy debate. Viewpoint articles are missing altogether from the later volumes with articles from 1998 and 2007 more likely to be theoretical or empirical, and with greater emphasis on research studies in 2007. Scottish gender research is largely absent with no articles from visibly Scottish authors in 1990 and 1998 and only one in the 2007 volume, on obstacles to women attaining management posts in Further Education institutions in Scotland (Ducklin & Ozga, 2007). Little difference is discernible over the years, however, in the visibility of Anglophone writers with few articles appearing from non-Anglophone sources. For example, only two articles address issues of an international nature, on HIV/AIDS and European legislation respectively.
Concluding points
This paper has sought to provide a brief overview of the field that has come to be known as 'gender and education'. Dissonance between different feminist waves and the dominance of Anglophone interests and issues have been posited as possible exclusionary influences. In the case of Scotland, the association of social class analysis with national interests, and gender analysis with 'English' interests, has contributed, it is argued, to a conceptually and empirically weaker gender and education field overall. The small study of the main journal of the gender and education field suggests that second-wave feminism was more prominent in 1990 and absorption with theory and research, a characteristic of third-wave feminism, is more evident in 1998 and 2007. Scottish work on gender is scarcely visible. The study also suggests a preoccupation with Western feminist concerns and a relative lack of interest in other parts of the world, developing or otherwise.
So what can we make of the study and the other arguments raised in the paper? First, it has to be acknowledged that the development of any new disciplinary field is complex, and therefore the struggles over status, power and knowledge faced by the emerging field of gender and education are not to be underestimated (Erixon-Arreman, 2005). Gender researchers in education (particularly in England) have been largely successful in scaling the walls of Academia. The field now 'owns' a high-ranked (British) journal, runs a well-attended biennial international conference plus regular regional conferences and seminars. It has also established an academic society of the same name.9 It thus offers a potentially fruitful career and publications pathway, at least for those whose language and cultural milieu is English-speaking.10 In so doing however, it seems that the field, originally created to expose and eradicate bias and discrimination, has been obliged to jettison many of its inclusive aspirations (e.g., encouragement of debates and standpoints with/among practitioners, inclusion of non-Western viewpoints) and has missed the opportunity to forge a discipline that is able to embrace practitioners as well as academics, practice as well as theory, the developing as well as developed world.11 This is not to say that I am 'against' theory or the ideas of third-wave feminism; neither do I advocate the return to the limiting debates about sex or gender difference of the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, I want feminist researchers to regain a sense of political and ethical as well as academic purpose. In so doing, the hope is that gender and education as a field might be re-shaped to be more inclusive.
What, for example, might the field of gender and education look like if the flow of research ideas was reversed and non-Anglophone research was re-positioned as central rather than peripheral to the field? Perhaps, current 'second-wave' concerns in developing countries of getting more girls into basic education might elevate political action higher up the present gender and education agenda. Or, greater attention to Nordic gender discourses might provide a focus on the potential of the state in promoting gender change. Or, research and analytic frameworks might be found which are more effective in challenging the current 'obsession' with boys and men. Or in the case of Scotland, research which addresses (multi-) cultural specificity and which fuses gender, ethnicity and social class might have greater purchase on Scottish policy-makers, as well as attracting more interest from feminist academics elsewhere. More practical suggestions offered in the 2007 seminar (Riddell, 2007) on how to encourage more interest in gender and education in Scotland included:
- better collaboration between researchers and teachers involved in the 'cutting edge' of gender dynamics in everyday school life;
- collaboration with potentially 'sympathetic' policy-actors such as Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA);
- identification of 'controversial' or 'provoking' ways of challenging current gender perceptions, e.g. that all boys are failing;
- better picture of national and minority cultural diversity, and its impact on gender.
- establishing a network of gender and education researchers in Scotland (Weiner, 2007).
A further consideration in making the field of educational research more equal and inclusive, is the potential role of educational journals such as Gender and Education (and indeed Education in the North). Editorial strategies that could contribute to broadening assumptions about what is worth publishing include:
- better language and editorial support from journals for researchers/contributors to conferences and journals for whom English is not a first language;
- editorial policies aimed at extending theorising to embrace those offering alternative perspectives on, and experiences of, the field;
- non-Anglophone scholars invited (e.g. as referees) to comment on work other than from their own country or region;
- Anglophone researchers required to incorporate non-Anglophone literature where possible, particularly if written in English.12
Adopting at least some of these strategies in England, Scotland and elsewhere, I want to suggest, would aid the development of new understandings of gender and education in terms of the changes and developments that are deemed significant, and might also challenge the automatic assumption that the English/Anglophone voice counts most, and that English/Anglophone topics and issues are of most general importance. Feminists working on educational projects in developing countries seem to have a better grasp of what such an 'inclusive' field of feminist scholarship might look like (Leach, 2003, Aikman & Unterhalter, 2005; Fennell and Arnot, 2008). It is about time that the rest of the field caught up with them!
Notes
1 The paper draws substantially on a paper entitled 'The Sound of Silence: on absence (and presence) in the field of gender and education', co-written with Elisabet Öhrn, University of Gothenburg, and presented at the Gender and Education Conference, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 28-30 March 2007
2 First wave nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism concentrated on opening up access of woman as a category to political, economic and social aspect of public and private life from which they had been hitherto excluded. Second wave feminism starting in the 1960s fought for a broader agenda which concentrated on social issues specifically affecting women: for example, reproduction, sexuality, domestic labour, violence in the home, and paid working conditions. Third wave feminism which emerged in the early 1990s argues for multiplicity of perspectives and for a more robust concept of agency which incorporates women's ability to act autonomously and politically, despite often crippling social sanctions (McNay, 2000)
3 It is argued for example that in terms of women's reproductive rights, the Anglophone African region 'shares a critical common legal and political history. All the nations — with the exception of Ethiopia — achieved independence from the British after World War II' (Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, 1997: 10).
4 The Nordic countries comprise Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and sometimes, Iceland.
5 Judith Butler (1990) argues that in the act of performing the conventions of reality and by embodying those fictions in our actions, we make those artificial conventions appear natural and necessary.
6 Full-time doctoral students were first admitted in January 2002. By 2005, there were 39 doctoral students representing 21 different disciplines. Established by the Swedish parliament, the aim of the graduate school was determinedly cross-disciplinary and wide-ranging.
The National Graduate School of Gender Studies works through interdisciplinary collaboration with participants from various scientific environments with diverse traditions. This diversity affects the structure of the graduate research training, scientific problem solving procedures, methodology, theory, reflexivity, and ethics (Graduate School website http://www.umu.se/genusforskning/index_eng.html)
7 The specially gifted boy was called 'a lad o' pairts', traditionally offered a good education at the free parish school. There is no Scottish equivalent for gifted girls.
8 http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/09540253.html (accessed 9-Apr-08)
9 For more details of the Gender and Education Association, see http://www.genderandeducation.com/
10 A recent example is the proportion of books on gender among the new books announced by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) in its March 2008 newsletter. Eight out of the 33 books mentioned (or just under a quarter) were primarily on gender including one feminist treatment of sex education (Research Intelligence, 102: 26-7).
11 Action researchers, for example, have been much better at allowing a combination of different levels of writing and researching about education. For example, see the Educational Action Research Journal, website at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09650792.asp
12 This could be easily done as Nordic doctoral theses are usually in paperback form with an English abstract and summary. They are also increasingly publicly accessible via university websites.
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