PLACE VALUES Self-positioning in the interface between classroom communities of practice and discourses of gender and ability in mathematics Yvette Solomon Lancaster University

Successful girls… Tend to say they are anxious and don’t belong (Bartholomew, Boaler…) Here we have a story of –Institutional discourses of gender and ability But also –Challenge and resistance What family and cultural resources do Becca and Gerry draw on in order to position themselves as successful?

Identities, self-positioning and repeated positioning in mathematics Gender discourses and institutional practices interact to constrain the range of identities that are available to mathematics learners - girls appear to lack a niche: “doing mathematics is doing masculinity” (Mendick, 2005) “More often than not … identities are not a matter of deliberate rational choice. A person may be led to endorse certain narratives about herself without realizing that these are “just stories” and that there are alternatives..... identities are products of discursive diffusion—of our proclivity to recycle strips of things said by others even if we are unaware of these texts’ origins …. designated identities are products of collective storytelling—of both deliberate molding by others and uncontrollable diffusion of narratives that run in families and communities” (Sfard & Prusak, 2005, pp.18-21)

Agency through reflection “The author of a narrative generates novelty by taking a position from which meaning is made − a position that enters a dialogue and takes a particular stance in addressing and answering others and the world…….. Thus speaking and authoring a self can be a creative and novel endeavor.… In weaving a narrative, the speaker places herself, her listeners, and those who populate the narrative in certain positions and relations that are figured by larger cultural meanings or worlds. Narrative acts may reinforce or challenge these figured worlds.” (Skinner, Valsiner, & Holland (2001 para 10)

Teachers’ success stories: “It’s all about confidence” Mary: I hate saying this. … Boys blame the question … blame the teacher. I think girls tend to blame themselves. Whereas often they are a lot better than the boys. Mark: Lads more often than not are quite willing to have a bash whereas girls are just slightly more insecure in terms of ‘am I doing this right?’ – not often that they aren’t – but they have to know that before they move on, whereas lads are a lot more slapdash – ‘whether it’s got any working or not I’m going to write that down’. Girls need a lot more coaxing, giving them confidence in a quiet manner, whereas the lads need more of a matey feel - ‘come on you can do it’ - whereas with girls it’s a question of trying to draw them out and stop them being so withdrawn.

Indulgence of boys’ refusal to work steadily Alison: Girls like coursework - the boys don’t like writing [laughs] the girls quite get into that, it will be like a project…. It will be a shame when the coursework goes… the boys are hard work, they’ll do it but it’s getting the writing done, explaining what you’re doing… Mark: Girls are quite happy to sit and get on with something and show that desire to learn….. Low achieving girls are in a way more aware that they are low achieving and likely to do something about it whereas the lads yes they’re aware that they’re not where they should be but … in terms of showing working and being a bit more methodical it’s definitely for the girls whereas for the lads it’s seen as ‘OK it’s a test but I’m not going to work’ ….. but they still get the marks [laugh].

And girls just try too hard…. Mark: Girls I often find would spend maybe too long making sure it’s all written down perfectly, making sure it’s all neat and it’s all nice and maybe not get so much done. So in terms of stretching them you have to push them along pace-wise, throw in questions at them …. whereas with the lads maybe it’s a bit easier sometimes because they will finish things quicker therefore we can give them extension resources to get on with whereas with the girls sometimes they don’t want to stop what they’re doing to get on with extension stuff because it will look unfinished … whereas the lads would rather rush through and say ‘yes we want to get on to that other cool stuff’ and it may be harder to stretch the girls…

Being good at maths – no place for girls? “Girls, at the nexus of contradictory relationships between gender and intellectuality, struggle to achieve the femininity which is the target of teachers' pejorative evaluation. They often try to be nice, kind, helpful and attractive: precisely the characteristics that teachers publicly hold up as good — asking all children to work quietly or neatly, for example, while privately accusing the girls of doing precisely these things. Thus they are put in social and psychic double-binds. Few girls achieve both intellectual prowess and femininity” (Valerie Walkerdine, 1998, p.162)

‘Maths is hard’ – proving a point Becca: If there was someone with an A level in maths and someone with an A level in something like… I don’t want to offend anyone, but say like drama? or P.E?, I don’t mean that it any kind of way but… I think.. if someone has maths – ‘ah!’ [it] is a good thing to have. … especially girls having done A levels in Maths and things like that and harder subjects. …at GCSE it was a lot more because…I enjoyed maths and wanted to get good GCSEs. I did it at A level and I wanted to work hard just…just to be good at it just to say I’ve got an A level in maths. Just to show people… and then further maths is like well that’s even further into the maths world, hopefully that will be like something people will be really impressed with.

A family narrative Becca: When I was little my Dad… he was brilliant at maths, well he still is.. and he always WISHED he’d taken it further, because he didn’t go to university. So he’s like ‘you know you’re good… you can keep doing it’, so he encouraged me a LOT with my maths, a lot… um because… I mean er in GCSEs I got higher grades in English than I did in maths, I got I got a few I dunno an A* in English and I wanted it in maths… but I thought there’s no way I want to take English because I want to do maths. … he didn’t stay on at school... He looks back now and he did an Open University course in maths and got a brilliant grade … so he’s like just ‘Oh do it otherwise you’re just going to look back and be like “oh I wish I did it now”’. …and I guess for me he wants me to go into something that…that I’m going to enjoy for my whole life so I guess… will have opportunities to do things… with a good grade.

Doing well in maths is too easy Gerry: I didn’t want to take something just because I would know I would get a good mark because I do like to challenge myself …. I am not one to take something just because I’m good at it. Even if art history I know is quite a big challenge because it’s a public school subject… you know it’s a difficult exam. … I always associate confidence with more things like… when you have to improvise a bit.... maths just to me seems like a more of a straight forward thing… To me it’s more important whether I’m achieving for my own, for my own abilities. … I've always found maths a lot less stressful than any of the other subjects …because it didn’t require a lot of thought …almost relaxing you know … it’s just, you don’t have to um you don’t have to sort of create.

Objectifying the discourse of mathematical status Gerry: You get pushed more into academic… if you’re good at something like maths I think… people like the idea of you doing something that’s more academically rigorous. IF you’re good at maths you’re encouraged that way [laughs]… You’re taken a bit more seriously. How is she able to do this? I come from a family of engineers … my uncle is a professor in the University of [X]. We are quite - you know - I am the just one of the black sheep like my parents…[laugh]. We like art instead. I am a bit of a rebel.

Another family narrative Gerry: Both of my parents are very artistic … when they were younger they were…obviously art was not the thing to do and they were pushed away from it and they never even did it until they took it up about fifteen years ago and made their own business … And now my Dad paints a lot… and I’ve always grown up... with a lot of classical music from my dad and a lot…the art cupboard was our playground… not a computer. Um so I've just grown up being really creative I suppose. So yeah, I was grown up with a lot of music and my parents have been encouraging me always. … It’s nice to be encouraged when you’re a clever person at other academic things, to still get encouraged in the direction of art…

Disrupting discursive positioning The same semiotic mediators, adopted by people to guide their behaviour, that may serve to reproduce structures of privilege and the identities, dominant and subordinate, defined within them, may also work as a potential for liberation from the social environment. …. When individuals learn about figured worlds and come, in some sense, to identify themselves in those worlds, their participation may include reactions to the treatment they have received as occupants of the positions figured by the worlds. (Holland et al 1998, p.143)

… But how long can they keep it up? The space of authoring, or self-fashioning, remains a social and cultural space, no matter how intimately held it may become. And it remains, more often than not, a contested space, a space of struggle. (Holland et al, 1998, p.282)