Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine a selection of creative writings by students at one Australian secondary school over a period of 50-plus years, charting the frequency with which key markers of gender appear in student storytelling over this period and sampling the types of gendered representation demonstrated in these stories.
Design/methodology/approach
– Taken from a larger study, and grounded in feminist and poststructuralist reading practices, the research draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and quantifies verbal processes relating to gender using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (2004).
Findings
– The research finds the visibility of females in the selected corpus has increased considerably, yet the nature of female and male participation in these texts remains comparatively unchanged when measured by the process types of Halliday and Matthiessen’s SFL (2004).
Originality/value
– If past decades of (pro)feminist choices are only challenging gendered patterns of representation at the level of quantity but not type, this has significant implications for teachers of English. The paper’s conclusion considers what more might be done in present and future teaching to assist students to problematise their own, as well as others’, representations of gender.
This empirical and feminist study seeks to contribute to social change and justice. It examines student creative writing in one state school magazine in This last finding is of particular significance because although greater female representation is readily observable at the relatively simple levels of lexis and text, the concerning counterpoint of increasingly unagentic female representation is less immediately apparent. As this study shows, however, a proportional reduction in agency can be gauged and evidenced when more complex but still accessible techniques of semantic and contextual analysis are utilised. The study argues that this, in turn, has implications for teachers who wish to contribute to gender justice as they work with students and colleagues to resource, model, explain, and critique language use. In addition to its feminist and educational implications, the study's methods and findings suggest areas for future research into textual representations in many other social justice contexts.
These problems were created by a woman who lives on her family farm and observes her brother Gordon, the grandfather of Gavin, Brandon, and Cayman, work the farm as was done in the past. She sees the farm as a fun place, with many opportunities for mathematics in the daily work and at farmers' markets where farmers sell their produce.
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