MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Kimberly A. Haverkos
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
______Director Dr. Richard Quantz
______Reader Dr. Sally Lloyd
______Reader Dr. Kathleen Knight-Abowitz
______Graduate School Representative Dr. Nazan Bautista
ABSTRACT
DOES GOING GREEN WEAR A SKIRT? HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND RITUAL CRITIQUE
by Kimberly A. Haverkos
How do performances of girlhoods interact with performances of sustainability? The research presented in this dissertation suggests that going green does wear a skirt—that the girls in this research performed sustainability because it was a “natural” and expected performance of girlhoods within the particular school spaces studied. However, girls’ performances of sustainability did not provide these girls with access to science as previous research has indicated. In the current educational environment, there is a push for more students, particularly girls, to enter the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields. Knowing the complicated relationship between girlhoods and science, this dissertation looked at how girls’ interactions with sustainability might provide a link to that STEM field. Focusing on girls at two private schools in the Midwest, one all-girls school and one co-ed school, the research gathered in this study looked at girls’ performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability. Through the lenses of ritual critique, standpoint feminism, and eco-justice, the girls’ performances illuminated the ways in which girls and sustainability continue to be marginalized by science, limiting the possibility of girls accessing science, or STEM more broadly, through issues of sustainability. By examining the interactions between performances of girlhoods and sustainability, the research suggests girls are performing sustainability and going green because it is a “natural” part of feminine nurturing and caring. The legitimacy of science as it is conceived at present is upheld at the expense of both girls and sustainability because this conception of science is divorced from rituals of sustainability. While sustainability may not be a way into science for these girls, it is a way to challenge expected gendered performances of the “good girl student” within these schools. The author suggests a re-articulation of STEM to mean Sustainable Transformative Educative Movements in which girls can legitimate their experiences and knowledges through sustainability as service.
DOES GOING GREEN WEAR A SKIRT? HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND RITUAL CRITIQUE
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Educational Leadership
by
Kimberly A. Haverkos
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2012
Dissertation Director: Dr. Richard Quantz
©
Kimberly A. Haverkos
2012
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………… 1
Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………………. 14
Chapter 3 METHODS……………………………………………………………………... 38
Chapter 4 CONTEXT……………………………………………………………………… 62
Chapter 5 RESULTS………………………………………………………………………. 77
Chapter 6 RESULTS………………………………………………………………………. 101
Chapter 7 CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………... 136
APPENDIX………...... 152
WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………… 168
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CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION
Propagating A Little Shop of Horrors with a STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math make up the STEM field, a field which is being centered in education discourses in order to funnel more (Western1) girls and boys to pursue careers in these fields. STEM initiatives are often linked to programs that seek to increase the number of girls or minorities who are participating in science and who are taking up science careers. Girls and science have had a complicated relationship, though, with girls often being marginalized by and through their participation in science. While this idea of marginalization will be developed more thoroughly throughout this dissertation, it is important to recognize that attempts to have more girls involved with science, to graft them onto the STEM system, have increased over the past several decades. From 1998 to 2007, the number of academic camps focusing on STEM and girls rose 140% to 58 camps within accredited camps (Cavanagh, 2007). Of the 2500 choices in accredited camps and any number of camps run by individuals, schools, or other institutions that are not accredited, 58 choices seems limited and limiting. In terms of education, STEM initiatives tied to increasing the number of girls in STEM related careers are now part of the driving force behind receiving governmental funding through the Race to the Top program (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp- women-girls-stem-november2011.pdf). Girls and STEM have recently received attention from the Council on Women and Girls, which put together panels of trailblazing STEM women who spoke about the importance of getting more girls involved in the fields represented by STEM (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cwg). Providing role models to girls around the country, this initiative is one of many that are attempting to grow girls into careers in science. But what if girls, particularly those within the United States, do not want to be involved in the field of STEM as it is today? On a separate front, humans’ interactions with the environment have become a politically hot topic, with discussions around climate change, environmentalism, dependence on oil, and
1 A discussion of STEM development and pushes for more people to take up these careers within the “Developed” world vs. the “Developing” world, where many are taking up STEM careers, is worthy of its own discussion, but is beyond the scope of this project.
1 issues of sustainability taking on more urgency and more resistance. Ecological and economic consequences of human decisions and usage of resources are often at odds with each other. Take for example the discussions around the Keystone XL Pipeline, the 1,897 km pipeline that will pipe oil from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska (http://www.transcanada.com/keystone.html) and then to the Gulf Coast should the plan be approved by the U.S. government. Bitter divisions politically, economically, and environmentally have arisen from the debates around the approval of this project. In addition to political, scientific, and economic discussions, there are also issues of equity—who benefits from this project and who is marginalized? Whose way of life is legitimated and whose is de-legitimated? The projected pipeline is to travel through Native American lands, possibly disturbing what some Native Americans consider sacred space. The conversations around this one issue, the Keystone XL Pipeline, point to the inter-relatedness of environmental, economic, and equity issues. Issues of the environment, economics, and equity are tightly bound together, with no easy, one-size-fits-all solution. Finding ways to develop a critical literacy around these issues, through environmental education and more integrative curricula, is an important enterprise that needs to be taken from the margins to the center of educational discussions. Again, this topic will be discussed in greater detail, but the inter- relatedness of difficult topics, such as those found when issues of the environment, equity, and the economy come together, might be a place to develop relationships between girls and science. Let me play with a metaphor for a minute. Plants are amazing living systems—roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, bark, cell walls, etc. It is even possible, given the right environment, to propagate an entire plant from just one small piece of a plant. We have all seen the avocado seed, stuck with toothpicks, growing roots into a plastic cup; the potato “eye” growing off a spud; a pineapple plant sprouting from the cast off tops of the fruit. Science has made it possible to splice and dice and graft pieces from different plants together to continue propagation. Cloning and genetic modification is now “common” among those who grow plants to increase yield, prevent disease, and fight off insects. Problematized by some, others argue that genetic modification is tied to human history since humans have genetically modified most plant foods since time immemorial by cross breeding certain types with others to draw out and create stronger plants and higher yields. Today’s genetic modification of plants is a bit trickier. The insertion of bacterial DNA laced with pesticides into the genetic makeup of a plant so that it produces its own “natural” pesticide is a bit more advanced than noticing that certain plants give
2 higher yields than others and their seeds are worth saving and possibly crossing with the plant that seems to not get diseases…Or is it? And why this talk of genetic modification and plants to explore building relationships between girls and science? If we take a plant stem, by itself, and do not provide any propagative tools (a place to graft it, root developing chemicals) or healthy plant environments (healthy soil, proper amounts of water, sunshine), we doom the plant that might have developed from that stem to death. Perhaps because plant deaths are not as dramatic as a human or animal death, we worry very little about the consequences of the survival of this propagation. With the power that science and technology have today in the production of knowledge and ideas, the STEM/stem that is being propagated, both its death and/or its continued growth, are very important discussions closely tied to the future of humans, animals, plants, the planet (and beyond), the economy, issues of equity, the environment, etc. Attempts have been made to “graft” STEM initiatives onto the current educational institution, which itself is full of “diseases” and “ills” that, if the graft takes, will only spread those problems to the STEM initiatives. This grafting also ignores the problems and issues that the STEM initiative itself holds. Individuals, institutions, schools, and businesses are so busy focusing on what the STEM plant will (or might) look like in the future, the possibilities (problematic as they are) of this one STEM/stem, that they are ignoring the problems of propagation and plant health that must be addressed before we end up with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, an evil plant that eats its caretakers in an attempt to take over the world….through plant propagation of small leaf cuttings. The current STEM initiatives seeking to increase girls within the fields of STEM are similar to small leaf cuttings—attempts to grow girls into STEM careers, taking activities and programs based on STEM and grafting girls onto the initiatives or grafting the initiatives onto girls. What if girls do not want to be grafted onto? What if it is necessary to examine the stem/STEM itself to see if it is worth propagating? How might it be necessary to change the ground into which these stems/STEMs are being planted? What are the consequences of grafting these two entities as they are understood today, without looking at the underlying meanings and issues of power that are wrapped up in relationships between girls and science? And how might the complexities of issues of the environment, equity, and economics be linked to propagating a healthier STEM for girls? Finding a Viable Plant/Situating A Need
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It is vitally important for girls’ voices, ideas, and knowledges to be a part of STEM conversations, careers, and future directions. But it is also vitally important that girls’ ideas, voices, and knowledges be legitimated. How might more fertile ground and a better propagation method be used to develop a healthy, lasting relationship between girls and science that seeks to legitimate girls’ participation within the fields of STEM? With the current push in education for STEM related literacies and funneling girls (and students more generally) into STEM careers and keeping them there (Hill, Corbett, & St. Rose, 2010), how might a look at the complexities involved in issues of sustainability help to lay out a more fertile (albeit, probably not less polluted) field for growth? Looking toward the environmental root first, we might find some clues. There has been a sharp uptake in the number of girls pursuing biological (“life”) science careers in college. However, the number of women who stay in STEM positions as long term careers slips drastically with more than half leaving their careers after ten years (Hill, et al., 2010, p.19). Biology, often considered the “softest” of the hard sciences, is also the most explicitly interrelated, although the current move in research to micro/genetic levels may change this representation. Environmental science, when not considered its own discipline, is often lumped under the biological umbrella. With environmental science’s representation in the relational realm, there may be possibilities of developing connections between girls and science through this subject to create the critically literate society needed to make hard decisions in the future around environmental-equity-economic issues. However, even as the AAUW’s most recent report shows an increase in the number of women who are involved in science as compared to the past forty years, the title to their report, Why So Few?, indicates continuing tensions between girls and science (Hill, et al., 2010). Perhaps the answer is not in more technical responses through changes in the classroom, more academic STEM camps, more inquiry-based science experiences, more field trips, better role models and hands on interactions with science. While these responses may provide some immediate measure of possibility, in the long term, they are simply cloning a stem/STEM that is unhealthy, leading to sickly and weak offshoots. Instead, the focus may need to shift towards an examination of the nonrational aspects of both science and science education to see why there is not simply a “dearth” of girls in science, but rather why girls may be rightly rejecting the community that science has created and normalizes in society as “commonsense” and “natural” (Quantz, 2011).
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Within the sustainability/environmental literacy movement, we find a plant that refuses to be eradicated by efforts to starve it through reductions in funding and passages of educational policy that marginalizes such topics, to pull it out by the roots through efforts to discredit issues and those affected by them, or to trim it back through the incorporation of safe and “commonsense” topics. Instead, these efforts seem to cause the sustainability/environmental literacy movement to return in multiple and diverse ways. While not always stronger, as revealed by current studies, the sustainability/ environmental literacy movement does have deep roots that allow it to continue to branch out and grow in new ways. Current studies do reveal that we are far from achieving environmental literacy in United States classrooms. For instance, Green at Fifteen? published by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (2009) reported that in environmental science knowledge, of the fifty-seven countries that participated in the OECD PISA, the United States ranked thirty-fourth, and was below the OECD average score for environmental science proficiency (OECD, p. 38). Additionally, several studies report that knowledge of environmental science is not enough to achieve environmental literacy; students’ attitudes, values, and behaviors are as much a part of environmental education as the scientific facts educators present about these issues (Alp, et.al., 2006; Heimlich, 1992; Trisler, 1993). This research suggests that having a stem alone is not is enough to grow a healthy plant. The entire growing field and its climate are important—the soil, sun, water, and plant need to be in place to grow a robust, productive plant. The science, attitudes, and behaviors all must be brought into conversation to develop an environmentally literate society. The Environmental Literacy in America report (Coyle, 2005) demonstrates the high intentions that Americans have when it comes to environmental action, but reinforces the lack of literacy that plagues even the most well intentioned arm chair activists. Intentionality does not necessarily lead to literacy, change or activism. These studies also reinforce other gendered patterns of scientific performance: boys outscore girls on standardized tests about environmental facts, but girls hold stronger positive attitudes and values about the environment. In the United States, the largest consumer of environmental resources, environmental literacy is based mostly on a consumerist version that ironically and paradoxically seeks a “greening” of America through the purchasing of more goods and a hidden use of more
5 resources. How girls2 relate to the environmental issues that abound becomes an important area for research if we take to heart the claims and critiques of science by feminists who feel that the oppressions that are created through science are more strongly felt by and played out on girls and women (see for example Haraway, 1991, 1997; Harding, 1991, 1993, 2008; Shiva, 2001). Environmental science and the issues that arise from that science fall under the umbrella of science, making environmental science complicit in some of the oppressions created through science and therefore necessary to examine. Girls now make up a huge portion of the consumer base within Western cultures (Aapola, et al., 2005; Lamb & Brown, 2006)—how they make meaning around environmental issues is an important place to seek understanding, especially as environmental literacy gains ground within educational (and other) discourses (of and for change). Additionally, there are a number of unresolved tensions within the discourses around girls and science education. The current STEM/stem propagation techniques to bring together girls and science are not producing healthy results. There are still gendered disparities within science and science education that play out in a number of cultural and material ways with girls still lagging behind on standardized science tests, gaining fewer science degrees overall, holding fewer science positions for less time, etc. This study, therefore, seeks to look at the relationship between two discourses, that of girlhoods and the narratives surrounding sustainability, in hopes that a more fertile and generative relationship can develop from healthier shoots and stems. Choosing Seeds/Planting Questions: Defining the Purpose of the Study Stems have the potential to grow into a “new” plant--producing fruit, flowers, and leaves that are the same as the plant from which that stem was taken. This genetic sameness, however, can be dangerous. One blight and the entire species can be wiped out causing extinction. STEM, being propagated over and over from the same parent plant, is creating a dangerous monoculture. Finding ways to increase the diversity within STEM, all the while understanding that STEM is not unproblematic, requires that STEM be bred with something new; that it have new genetic material infused into its make-up in order to create novel seeds of potential. This may not be enough to save the STEM plant, however. It may be necessary to start over, to plant new seeds of thought, to encourage new and wild growth. It may be necessary to cultivate an
2 Girlhood studies makes use of the term “girl” in current research and so “girl” or “girls” will be used instead of “young woman/women” to represent the population I studied for this project and throughout discussions in this project.
6 entirely new way to engage girls with science. It is my hope that this research will do that—seek out new ways to legitimate girls’ knowledges and voices in order to develop new relationships with STEM instead of propagating the same, failing relationships. It will bring girls’ voices into discussions of eco-justice and sustainability; it will center girls’ lives in research that seeks to understand how the girls make meaning (instead of how meaning is applied to girls’ lives); it will seek to legitimate girls’ ways of being, developing “…a feminism that moves at the speed of girlhood—at the speed of girls’ lived, daily experiences in the hallways at school, dances, the playground, the mall, community centers, skate parks, and online…” in order to be useful and relevant not only to academia, but to girls as well (Curry, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p.xxi). In order to do this, a critical examination of how girls are currently making sense of their lives, how they are currently interacting with science and sustainability must be addressed. It is my hope that through sustainability, girls can engage with science in a new way, with new questions and new answers. In order to look at the possibilities that sustainability might hold for the relationships between girls and science, I have studied the ritual performances of girls, those formalized and symbolic actions which helped these specific girls to make meaning of their lives. The research question which this study sought to answer is listed below, along with several questions that aided in answering that research question. Research Question Where do performances of girlhood interact with performances of sustainability? Sub-Questions What is normalized in schools generally, and science class more specifically, through performances of girlhoods? What is normalized through performances of science as enacted in schools, especially as it refers to girlhoods? What is normalized around issues of sustainability and the environment through performances of sustainability? Preparing a Field for Planting/Developing a Nutrient Rich Foundation: Conceptual Underpinnings Conceptually, I will be framing this research study from within an interwoven framework that brings together standpoint feminism, eco-justice, and ritual critique. Each has its own unique strength that lends to the purpose of this study and each also supports answers to critiques
7 that are leveled at these theories individually. Much of this will be fleshed out in Chapter 3, but as an introduction to the ways that I have worked to frame the research, questions, and analysis, this section seeks to lay a basic understanding of my methodology. Standpoint feminism is an epistemology that centers women’s experiences as the beginning of knowledge creation. The multiple and partial knowledges that are available come into being through the multiple lenses that are necessary for girls/women (and other oppressed people) as they maneuver through, in and against the hegemonic world that seeks to de- legitimate their lived experiences, knowledges and voices. Exploring the relationships between the knower, the known and the process of knowing allows standpoint feminists to open up and bring into the discourse issues of power, control and access in the creation of knowledge through the voices and experiences of those who have been marginalized. Key to this way of knowing is the idea and acceptance of partiality—partial views and partial knowledges. Joey Sprague (2005) states, “Because each of us experiences life and our selves in multiple facets that are ‘stitched together imperfectly’, we can partially identify with another, empathy is possible, and through it, two knowers can make a partial connection” (p.43). This partiality and the situated knowledges (Haraway, 1991) that arise from multiple views is in part a way through the post- modern critique of standpoint feminism’s dealings with difference. If, as standpoint feminists claim, they center women’s unique experiences as a place to begin construction of knowledge and work against hegemonic oppressions, then there must be room for difference and the multiple identities that every person brings into a situation. As Patricia Hill Collins (2000) reminds readers, no one, homogenous standpoint exists. Essentialist understandings suppress difference in search of elusive unity (p.28). Ignoring or universalizing these differences only works against the possibilities that standpoint feminism allows for. Additionally, issues around privileged epistemologies (i.e., the more oppressed, the more “real” the experience/knowledge) must also be addressed by standpoint feminism. If we live in an interconnected world of relationships (as I will argue in the eco-justice section), then no one person’s standpoint is innocent—instead we are all linked together in and through the creation of knowledges and oppressions. Constantly seeking a critical balancing between seeing all from nowhere and seeing uncritically from below can help standpoint feminists reveal the situated knowledges of women/girls and other marginalized people and through the imperfectly stitched connections, partial visions, and unique standpoints, there is hope for new knowledge.
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An epistemology based in eco-justice centers the earth and all the living and non-living things upon the earth in its quest to understand and create knowledge. As a way to replace the epistemologies of mastery that have resulted not only in human oppressions, but also the destruction of the environment and living beings outside of the human family, ecological epistemologies begin with ecological situations and the interconnections of knowers and knowings (Code, 2006). Instead of relying on an epistemological “monoculture” created and sustained by a dominant hegemony of Western thought, ecological epistemologies depend upon diversity and difference, interdependence and negotiations—and not only within the human population (Shiva, 2001). According to Shiva (2001), “Knowledge systems which view humans as members of an earth family locate creativity in understanding the relationships between different organisms. This generates different ways of knowing and different claims to knowledge” (p. 461). Perhaps another way of looking at this knowing is as an onto- epistemological experience. According to Bonnett (2004), this ecological knowing is about learning to be in the world. Enlightenment thinking separated mind and body, knowing from embodied being. To know the world was an act of the mind--rational and superior to bodily being in and of the world. Knowing the world (and those inhabiting the world) through the use of “rational” and “objective” science became a way to justify domination over others based on differences that became “…natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral” (Haraway, 1991, p.8). This conversation is more than thought within a “rational” mind. It is about inhabiting the world differently. Ecological thinking becomes “a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice” (Code, 2006, p. 5). Ritual, as defined by Quantz (2011), is “that aspect of action that is a formalized, symbolic performance” (p.8). Moving beyond analysis, into critique (and hopefully beyond to future praxis), this project will seek to “recognize the interplay between the cultural and material relations that are realized in ritual” (Quantz, 2011, p. 17). Again, according to Quantz (2011), “The task of the ‘critic’…is to find a way to present the multiple voices in dialogue while also revealing the potential distortions between these performative meanings and the material lives of the oppressed and disempowered” (p.71). Much more interested in everyday interactions that are normalized as “natural” and “commonsense,” ritual critique seeks the performances that people take up everyday as windows into how they make sense of their world.
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So how do the above explanations influence my weaving together the epistemologies of standpoint feminism, ecological thinking, and ritual critique? If we accept that standpoint feminism centers women’s experiences and ecological thinking centers the earth family as Shiva (2001) calls the interacting beings on the earth, then the weaving necessary to integrate these two ways of knowing allows for women’s experiences to be seen as a starting point for the creation of knowledge but only if we see those experiences within the context of a multitude of other connections that arise in an earth family. By bringing ritual critique into this weaving, we can see the places where performances work with and against the material lives of marginalized groups, places where potentially productive things can grow. Additionally, such an understanding of interwoven epistemologies is necessarily embodied—the physical matters, whether it be the physical and bodily conditions of impoverished women or the physical and bodily conditions of the environment that sustains multiple (human and non-human) populations. And these conditions are made more apparent when the focus of attention moves beyond a self to the connections and relationships made, the connections that influence and are influenced by that self (whether that self is human or not, female or not). For me, the implications of the use of such an interwoven epistemology must be brought back to my interests in connecting girls and science through environmental issues. How girls make meaning in their lives around environmental issues through sustainability, science, and girlhoods is a question that centers the experiences of girls but in a way that seeks to explore their connections and relationships within a wider web of experiences, knowledges, people, and environments. It seeks out the fertile places, looking for new and more diverse ways of growing, rather than attempting to clone or re-generate what is already available. It adds to the ground, providing rich and nourished soil in order to grow a variety of possibilities rather than degrading that soil by removing important and necessary nutrients. Chapter 2 will look at the research that has already been done around some of the larger issues at stake in this study. Specifically, it will begin with a look at the study of girlhoods, move into research centering girls and education, and, finally, examine what has been learned about girls and science education. It will also examine the current state of environmental education as it is shifting into the slippery world of sustainability and how girls have been studied through the lens of sustainability. Chapter 3 will flesh out the methodology and methods used to collect and analyze the data. Building upon the conceptual underpinnings laid out above,
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Chapter 3 will weave together three diverse yet flexible theories to describe how a comparative case study founded on these theories can provide a wealth of surprising and not-so-surprising data. Seeking to understand how girls make meaning of their lives through their performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability, Chapter 3 provides a rationale behind centering girls’ lives, looking for the interconnected relationships the girls are a part of, and focusing on the performative rituals that shed light upon how these girls were making meaning around those performances. Chapter 4 explores the context within which this research took place, while Chapters 5 and 6 look at the results of the study through the three sub-questions listed above, as well as the actual dissertation question. Each sub-question garnered its own themes, which were then used to examine the interactions between performances of girlhoods and sustainability. Chapter 7 looks at the implications of this study as well as ways to look through and beyond the results of this study. This means examining both the theoretical possibilities and the pragmatic possibilities offered by this study. Defining Sustainability The root words of sustainability are to “sustain,” originating from the Old French sustenir, which means to keep in existence, to provide sustenance and nourishment, and to strengthen the spirit and courage. (Sutton, 2009, p.19) Given all the work that has been done addressing environmental education, this research project has limited itself to issues of sustainability rather than environmental education. The reason for this lies in part with the definition of sustainability laid out below, but more importantly with the methodology that I used (see chapter 3). Sustainability is a slippery term and has many definitions that different people use to meet their ideological needs. According to Our Common Future (1987), a document that came out of the United Nation’s Brundtland Report, sustainability involves: …development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. (Our Common Future, 1987)
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From this document, the United Nations has put together a fairly comprehensive, anthropomorphic response to issues of the environment by embracing the idea of sustainability. In 2005, the United Nations created the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) whose purpose is “…to mobilize the educational resources of the world to help create a more sustainable future” (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the- international-agenda/education-for-sustainable-development/about-us/). Education for sustainable development is defined as being …about learning to: respect, value and preserve the achievements of the past; appreciate the wonders and the peoples of the Earth; live in a world where all people have sufficient food for a healthy and productive life; assess, care for and restore the state of our Planet; create and enjoy a better, safer, more just world; be caring citizens who exercise their rights and responsibilities locally, nationally, and globally. (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/index.shtml) The above definition is quite broad and yet centers humans as the reason to educate for sustainability. Additionally, the definition above does not explore the ways in which the topics it includes in its definition relate to each other and relate to outside conditions and issues that are intricately wound into “the state of our Planet.” While not unproblematic, the definition may serve as a starting point. I would like to begin with a different definition to further explore what sustainability is and is not within this paper. If we look at sustainability as the “three E’s”-- environment, equity, and economics--we have three concepts that can ground the conversation of how girls interact with issues of sustainability. Using three concepts allows a decentering of any one of the “three E’s” and the issues each “E” brings into relation with the other “E’s.” This also necessarily brings the relationships that each “E” has with the other “E’s” to the forefront. Bringing the environment into this definition decenters the anthropocentric definitions of sustainability by recognizing that humans are only one piece of a much larger web of relationships and connections to and on the Earth. Equity is necessary in any definition of sustainability in order to seek out places of inequity and injustice, whether in the environmental, economic, or social arena. Including economics into this definition recognizes the capitalistic confines that are currently in place locally, nationally, and globally as humans interact with a larger Earth family (Shiva, 2001). However, including economics in this definition also necessarily brings the relationships between economics and issues of equity and between
12 economics and the environment into the light for critical analysis and understanding. By making explicit the connections that the economy has with the environment and issues of equity, we can illuminate the ways in which power works through the economy. By framing sustainability within these “three E’s,” it also broadens who and what can be included in the environment and issues of equity, as well as who and what influences the system of economics that currently drives our global society. According to Michelle Tenam-Zemach (2009-2010), sustainability requires an ecological paradigm that “views relationships holistically…focus[es] on the whole system, rather than fragmented, discrete parts. This requires a nonlinear perspective, one that views the earth and all that it contains as one living system” (p.123). In Chapter 3, I will flesh out an interwoven foundation that looks at the possibilities a complex game of Cat’s Cradle may provide to our vision of knowledge creation. While this imagery will be described in more detail in that chapter, it is important to acknowledge it here, in our discussion of sustainability, so that we may envision the “three E’s” as places where the strings of the Cat’s Cradle game cross to create nodes or knots. While these knots are important--the significance of the environment, equity, and economics cannot be denied--my interest is in the relationships between the nodes, the spaces between that connect the “three E’s.” If we continue to focus on the knots, the “three E’s” as individual nodes, sustainability remains a “buzzword…[a] predominantly anthropocentric concept; it is about achieving a sustainable quality of life for human beings” (Schinkel, 2009, p.211). For my work here, sustainability is about understanding the spaces, relationships, and connections between the “three E’s.” I have little interest in nailing down a specific definition for each of the “three E’s” because thinking of sustainability as the “three E’s” is not conceived as a technical mechanism for achieving sustainability itself, but as a way of seeing and acknowledging the relationships that may lead to sustainability. To pull from Tenam-Zemach (2009-2010) again, “From an ecological perspective, assumptions concerning human nature view humans as one species among many that exist interdependently, and while social and cultural factors influence our affairs, this web of nature impacts all species as well as the environment at large” (p. 123).
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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Two discourses frame this study. One discourse addresses girls in science. The second centers on the environmental education/sustainability movement. Each of these discourses is constituted by complex and diverse voices in conversation. As I continue through this study, it will be important to recognize their diversity because diversity is a key tenet of ecojustice work, one of the theories woven into the framework of this study. While this study utilizes two distinct discourses, they are not independent of each other—girls are caught up in issues of sustainability. This chapter will begin by framing the discussion of girls in science in the larger discourse of girlhood studies, but first, it will begin with a very brief review of the field of girlhood studies, move into girls and education, and then focus on girls and science education. I will then examine the field of environmental education and the move towards sustainability education, finishing the chapter by exploring how girls are represented in research on sustainability. Girlhoods Girlhood studies is an “adolescent” field of study, still in its youth as a field, that has produced a great deal of information about how girls’ identities are shaped and developed (Aapola, et al., 2005; Currie, et al., 2009; Lipkin, 2009). While girlhood(s) studies is tied closely into the development of adolescence as developed by G. Stanley Hall (Driscoll, 2002), girls and the development of girlhood is, today, its own entity to be reckoned with. Girls are not passive bystanders in their lives, but actual agents of change (Proweller, 1998; Kearney, 2006; Currie, et al. 2009). Because girls have so often been studied as passive (Orenstein, 2000; Currie, et al., 2009; Lipkin, 2009), the way girls make meaning in the world as active participants and the way the world is made available to them make for some interesting study. The specific study of girlhoods3 began with the feminist movement in the 1960’s. Prior to this, while girls were studied, the focus was on how to “do” proper girlhood (Driscoll, 2002). As Catherine Driscoll (2002) stated, “While girls, therefore, are products and performances of the long history of Western discourses on gender, sex, age, and identity,” (p. 7) the idea of the
3 The use of the term girlhoods (instead of girlhood) seeks to pro-actively address some of the critiques of standpoint feminism around issues of difference as it recognizes the diverse number of ways that girlhood is and can be performed throughout the world. Seeking to resist a monoculture of girlhood also brings to the fore the tenets of eco- justice around issues of diversity. Finally, girlhoods (vs. girlhood) allows for multi-voiced possibilities within this exploration of ritual critique.
14 adolescent girl is a late modern idea. Not until the early 1980’s, when Carol Gilligan (1982) began to challenge the psychological studies that claimed women (and hence girls) had lower levels of moral reasoning, did adolescent girlhood itself become a place of serious study. In the early 1990’s the AAUW’s (1991) study, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, led to a brief flood of research around adolescent girls and girlhood. Often universalizing the experiences of girls and creating its own set of norms, these studies helped to put girls’ studies at a margin of academic experience, but not unproblematically. Often girlhood was studied from the perspective of adulthood which viewed adolescent girls as in crisis. This view from above, while perhaps better than no view at all, still leaves girls silenced. Gilligan (1982/1993) discussed the ways that girls have lost their voices because they have come to understand that their words do not matter, “….that others would condemn or hurt them if they spoke, that others would not listen or understand, that speaking would only lead to further confusion, that it was better to appear “selfless,” to give up their voices and keep the peace” (p.x). Mary Pipher (1994) picked up this thread of silencing the girls in Reviving Ophelia, when she discussed the process of socialization to “quiet the girls” which today is regarded as the norm. Peggy Orenstein (2000) supported Pipher’s claim with her ethnography of middle school girls where a culture of silence and self-control for girls was created, accepted and normalized. “By sixth grade, it is clear that both girls and boys have learned to equate maleness with opportunity and femininity with constraint” (Orenstein, 2000, p. xviii). These “lessons of silence” teach girls to censor their ideas and thoughts and enforces self-doubt within the girl population, quite in contrast to the boy population (Orenstein, 2000). After sharing examples of girls being punished for speaking out and boys being rewarded, Orenstein (2000) continued: Girls’ hesitance to speak out relative to boys is not mere stylistic difference; speaking out in class—and being acknowledged for it—is a constant reinforcement of a student’s right to be heard, to take academic risks. Students who talk in class have more opportunity to enhance self-esteem through exposure to praise they have the luxury of learning from mistakes and they develop perspective to see failure as an educational tool. Boys…feel internal permission to speak out…to assert the “I am.” (p.12) As Elline Lipkin (2009) pointed out, this constraint in schools may help girls in the short-term within the walls of the school, but what are the long term consequences of this silencing norm: “Girls’ diligence in school may pay off in better grades, but does it come at the cost of
15 reinforcing a stereotypical femininity that works against them once they are out of the school system” (p.33)? Only rarely are girls seen as agentic in their identity formation. Although much has changed, girls “…continue to face significant, gender-related hurdles as they make the transition to womanhood” (Orenstein, 2000, xii). This “girlhoods as crisis stage” misses the agency that girls themselves hold in the creation of their identities and the meaning making they do in their lives around diverse issues. As Dawn Currie, Deirdre Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz (2009) stated, “Girls’ identities are shaped as they try out different ways of being girls in various social settings. They are active in this process; they are ‘doing’ girlhood” (p. xv). Schooling and Girls The classroom is one of the most important places for student development and identity realization. Not only do children and young people spend most of their life within the walls of a classroom, but the relations and social identities that students form are begun and built upon within schools. As Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick and Anita Harris (2005) stated in Young Femininity, “…education in late modern society is the singular most important social institution shaping children’s and young people’s everyday lives and identities as well as their understandings of their future life chances” (pg. 59). These identities include those that are normative, those that are transitional and those that they will carry with themselves in some manner or another for the rest of their lives. The education of the student at school goes way beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. They learn the nonrational rituals that legitimate acceptance into different groups within society. The normative behaviors and stereotypes that are reinforced and awarded in schools are those that students grow up believing (for the most part) are “real,” “normal,” and “commonsense.” The 1991 AAUW report, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, looked at the role of schools in girls’ experiences with a particular focus on math and science. The report determined that classroom environment and experience could be linked directly to a drop in girls’ self-esteem and that these classroom experiences unintentionally, but systematically, discourage girls from entering those fields that have been dominated by men, namely math and science. The findings of the AAUW report are consistent with those of other studies such as Pipher(1994), Gilligan (1982/1993), and a number of ethnographic studies that have found that
16 girls are not rewarded, but punished, for achievement and initiative. Instead, they are rewarded for being quiet and following the gender rules that silence them. However, study after study has found that, while these are the cultural expectations and often the experiences of girls, there are a number of ways in which girls push back and resist or subvert as they seek to take up these expected performances in ways that make sense to them. Marie Miranda (2003) explored Chicana gangs and the differences between societal expectations and lived realities. Through the creation of a documentary, these girls provided their own public service announcement to voice their own meaning-making and identity creation. And yet, they constantly negotiated the boundaries between their lived experiences and expected performances of girlhood. Wanda Pillow (2004) explored how the teen mother negotiates assumptions and expectations within education. She also explored how the multiple identities that these students hold complicate and shift the assumptions, expectations, and ways forward made (or not made) available to them during and after childbirth. Teen pregnancy disrupts the assumed narrative and life trajectory for many adolescent girls and “…adults are faced with the failure of ‘prevention’ and their own fears and concerns about teen sexuality” (Pillow, 2004, p.89). Again, in Pillow’s work, we see the cultural expectation that girls remain silent. “The girls …understood this as ‘Do not ask for, and certainly do not demand, your rights.’ And ‘Do not be too ‘loud’ about your pregnancy—do not make an issue of it for the school’” (Pillow, 2004, p.113). Marnina Gonick (2003), while challenging feminist ethnographic practices, wrote about the complicated categories and performances available to girls. Through a student created media production, Gonick’s subjects explored how their identities were negotiated in good girl/bad girl and popular girl/smart girl terms while Gonick explored how their ambivalent, hybridized identities provide liminal spaces of possibility. In Helen Harper’s (2000) ethnography of girls and feminist avant- garde writing, she explored the ways that student writing can unintentionally disrupt identities in formation. Interesting to note, many of the girls whose writings challenged passivity and ideals of femininity refused to move beyond the words on a page—they “…refused the possibilities opened up by feminism” (Harper, 2000, p.147). Harper’s conclusion is worth noting at length given the focus of this study. …I am not confident about rational efforts to change desire, but it would seem that until we find some better means all we can do is interrogate the desires, dreams, or pleasures in which we are invested. It seems unlikely that one can simply unlearn …[them] by
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replacing them with alternative (and better?) desires and pleasures….But while it may not be possible to unlearn … merely through substitution, it may be possible to defuse them in some sense by increasing the kinds of desires and pleasures (and subject positions) open to women by exploring the contradictions in our current investments and their discursive and material production in our lives. (Harper, 2000, p. 161) Harper’s conclusion is uncanny and yet appropriate for this particular study, for as will be noted in the next section, substitution is a key tool used by those attempting to lure girls into science. And these substitutions have yet to yield exciting results for girls or science. Girls and Catholic Schools While this research project was conducted in private, Catholic schools, it does not focus specifically on girls’ performances of Catholic identity, but on a broader set of performances. But while the performance of being Catholic is not central to the study, a brief history of the Catholic school systems may provide an important context for interpreting these broader actions. The development of Catholic schools in America has run in tandem with the public schools, often with each informing development and changes in the other. With the institutionalized Catholic missionary system having influence in the early Americas, Catholicism and education have a long history on this continent (Walch, 1996). Catholic schools reached their pinnacle in the 1960’s, with around 13,000 schools and over five million students (Meyer, 2007). Their success during this era was in part due to the growth of the number of Catholics in America, a more favorable view of Catholics in popular culture (think Bing Crosby in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s), and finally the election of a Catholic to President. The growth of Catholic schools in the early twentieth century was also due in part to the feminization of the teaching profession that allowed this system of schools to grow based on gendered oppressions within the Catholic Church and society. Up until the 1960’s, Catholic schools were largely staffed by religious orders, often sisters (Walch, 1996). These nuns (and to a lesser degree, brothers of teaching orders – who most often taught at universities and not at local parochial schools) permitted Catholic schools to stay afloat by working for minimal wages. While parents gave money to build the schools, not having to “pay” the teachers provided a huge monetary relief to parochial schools. After Vatican II, tens of thousands of sisters and brothers in teaching orders were disbanded forcing Catholic schools to
18 hire mainly lay teachers (Walch, 1996). This cost drove up the cost of schooling in these institutions, and limited who could attend Catholic schools. Since the 1960’s, the Catholic school system has gone through tumultuous ups and downs, landing them in an ambivalent position in the early twenty-first century. By 2006, the number of Catholic schools had fallen from the 1960s’ high of 13,000 to only about 7,500 with more closings each year (Meyer, 2007). The number of students attending went from 5.2 million in the 1960s to 2.3 million in 2006 (Meyer, 2007). At a point in their history when most reports are showing that Catholic schools are “outperforming” their public school cohorts, voucher systems are allowing a larger number of non-Catholic and lower-income Catholic students into their programs and opening up possibilities for this religion-based educational institution. In Peter McLaren’s (1986) book Schooling as a Ritual Performance, he looked at the Catholic school space and the identities that students negotiated both inside and out of the schools. While McLaren looked at how Catholics were made, my interest in his work lies in McLaren’s description of the student state. “It is here that the students give themselves over to the powerful controls and enforcement procedures available to teachers—controls which allow teachers to dominate students without recourse to brute force” (McLaren, 1986, p. 88). Because this study is focused on girls, science, and sustainability within Catholic school spaces, the student state, and negotiations within and outside of that state are of importance. However, it is Nancy Lesko (1988) and Amira Proweller’s (1998) work that focused on girls and identity formation within these private schooling spaces. Lesko (1988) examined the contested spaces within Catholic schools between the larger cultural expectation for individualism and the Catholic expectation for morality and community, basing her study in class and labor relations. “Contemporary Catholic schools thus exhibit tensions between an emphasis on education in skills and self-interested achievement and a religious-based education emphasizing character and morals” (Lesko, 1988, p.19). Citing continued marginalization and silencing especially in educational research, Lesko focused her study specifically on girls. The different groups of girls which she discussed—the populars, the burn-outs, and the mellows—each negotiated Catholic and societal norms. However, Lesko focused at the end on the “queens,” the girls who were able to negotiate all of the student identities successfully through communication that was considered by Lesko to be authentic. However, she goes on to note that this “genius” communication was
19 invisible (silenced, non-voiced) and unacknowledged within the school as it was considered emotional “women’s work” (Lesko, 1988, p. 128). Amira Proweller (1998) takes up the centering of class and labor again in Constructing Female Identities, where she examined the project of “becoming somebody.” Again citing the continued focus of educational research on boys’ schooling experiences, Proweller took up the middle-class girl culture at a non-sectarian private single-sex high school. She pointed out that this group of girls is often missing from the research field because of the privilege of their absence. As these students are often white, heterosexual, middle-class girls, their identities were spaces of absence—their whiteness, their femininity, and their class were not made explicit and, therefore, rarely “recognized” in research. Science and Girls One of the most pressing issues in science education as suggested earlier in Chapter 1 is the lack of interest in science subjects by girls. This in turn leads to fewer women in science careers, which leads to fewer women being creators of knowledge in a very powerful field. This is in part the message that the Council on Women and Girls has been sharing through their programming and attempts to bring more girls into the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). In collaboration with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, they shared this thought, “Supporting women STEM students and researchers is not only an essential part of America’s strategy to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world; it is also important to women themselves” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women). Science, however, as some before me have stated, has become our religion (Haraway, 1991; 1997). How girls and science relate to each other and how, if at all, girls can become legitimate creators of knowledge within the realm of science is of great import. Science has helped to create and perpetuate stereotypes of girls and science that are reinforced by society at large. Tani Barlow et al. (2005) described the rise of the “Modern Girl” and how she developed within hegemonic ideals of femininity. Through the use of product advertising, marketers were able to develop an ideal that “all modern girls” tried to live up to. Advertising and media campaigns worked to bring science and female stereotypes together to reinforce those values most sought after by mainstream society (which were created by those same media campaigns). Through the use of terms like “doctor recommended” and
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“scientifically designed,” marketers of make-up, hair products, deodorants and other self “betterment” products played on the weaknesses that society displayed for all things scientific (Barlow, et al., 2005). This successfully tied science to girlhood in a way that has yet to be even cracked let alone pulled apart. Many girls still go weak in the knees for the latest “scientifically developed” hair product or “clinically proven” acne treatment that will help them live up to an ideal feminine stereotype that can never be fulfilled. However, the most interesting link between science and girls is the fact that the traits deemed necessary to perform science are in diametric opposition to those traits that are deemed appropriate for a girl. Several of the traditional, patriarchal female qualities that are idealized in women and girls are emotionality and passivity. These ideals clash sharply with the scientific ideals of objectivity, reason, and the active search for truth. And yet women have been, are, and will continue to be, successful both in science and as females. It is the interplay of the stereotypes representing these two ideas that creates the conflict for girls and science. Where these stereotypes are played out, developed, and challenged then, becomes an issue of great importance for the success of girls in science. The media is one place where stereotypes are played out and inform the viewers of the appropriate behaviors for society. It is a place where identities are shaped, created, and replaced. According to a study by Jocelyn Steinke et al. (2007), when students were requested to draw a picture of a scientist, the students claimed that their depictions were almost completely based on representations from television. The stereotypes that were typically included were: a nerdy/geeky male in a laboratory setting wearing a lab coat and using chemistry equipment. This cartoon image is emblazoned on the minds of children around the country. It’s no wonder girls have a hard time imagining themselves in such an environment. In Geek Chic, Lorna Jowett (2007) stated, “Both real and fictional female scientists continue to struggle against ingrained ideas about what women are and what science is” (p. 45). Her study of female scientists on television show just how ingrained those images are and how women portrayed as scientists often have to give up part of their identity as female to be considered a successful scientist. This idea is backed up by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Brown (2006) in their book Packaging Girlhood. The authors of this book take an in-depth look at how marketers work to control consumers, namely girls. In a section looking at science on television, they note that there are no girl geniuses in cartoons. If girls show an aptitude for science in a show, they are given an uber-
21 feminine quality that takes away from their scientific know how and the audience is reminded that the feminine and science just don’t quite mix (Lamb & Brown, 2006). The study of the relationship between girls and science education has also been thoroughly documented (See Barton, 1997; Braidotti, 2007; Hill et al., 2010; Kahle, et al., 1983, 1993, 2004; Lather, 2004). The push in education for STEM related literacies and funneling girls (and students more generally) into STEM careers and keeping them there (Hill, et al., 2010) often begins by examining the classroom. While much of the research on girls and science has moved from fixing girls to fixing science education, the underlying message is still that girls must somehow adapt to fit into the mold of science, to “see” themselves as scientists within the science system. I would argue that what is missing is an analysis of science education that asks how science needs to see differently; the shift should come not in how girls see themselves, but in how science sees girls as part of science as they are. Additionally, how girls use rituals in school associated with both girlhood and science to make sense of their reality (especially as it relates to sustainability) is an area that is understudied. Instead, what is studied very often is attitudes towards science. What researchers find time and again is that boys have “better” attitudes towards science than girls, with better being measured very often in quantitative terms. Additionally, the science attitudes being questioned are those found in science within school settings. From changes in attitudes, it is assumed that changes in behaviors will follow. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case, as the numbers of students entering science careers continues to remain low and measures of attitudes show changes related to teacher factors more than curricular changes (Osborn, et al., 2003). Jonathan Osborne, Shirley Simon, and Sue Collins (2003), in a review of the literature around science attitudes, claimed that this might be due to the fact that there is a difference between school science and societal science with school science driving student decisions about science careers. Additionally, according to Osborne, Simon, & Collins (2003) the measuring of attitudes is not an exact science, and questions about what exactly is being measured linger over many of these studies. “As a consequence,” they wrote, “our understanding of the nature of the problem has possibly improved, although possibly not our understanding of its remediation” (Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003, p.1050). The number of studies that are critical of science education as it relates to gender is voluminous (see for example Barton, 1997; Braidotti, 2007; Kahle, et al., 1983, 1993, 2004;
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Lather, 2004). Sandra Harding (1991) laughs at the idea of “science education for girls” because, in her view, the current system of science education is so flawed that it is not beneficial to any student. According to Harding, without an understanding of the social power structure, the historical location of science and a knowledge of current science trends, society as a whole will never be able to shake the current abuses of science by the dominant group. In the 40th anniversary issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Jane Butler Kahle (2004) noted that, of the ten most often cited articles, five were on issues of gender. She also noted that those five articles were among only a handful of articles published in forty years on the topic of gender in science education within “well-respected” science education research journals (Kahle, 2004). The marginalization of gender as a relevant variable in science education journals mirrors the marginalization of girls in science broadly. Much of the research on gender and science education that has been conducted has been quantitative. It has been accountability driven and produces little more than technical responses to try to make girls “feel” better about science (Kahle, 2004). Kahle (2004) makes an important point about this research: “…if achievement differences are viewed through a response lens, girls underachievement is a response to teaching environments” (p. 961) but instead most research focuses on characteristics, establishing the problem as the girls and seeking to change them instead of science. This is not the case of all research, however. Heidi Carlone (2004) and Sarah Carrier (2007, 2009) both looked to change the science being delivered to girls (and boys) in their research. Carrier’s work will be discussed in connection with girls and environmental education in a later section. As Carlone (2004, p. 393) stated, ..we must think about ways to engage girls in different kinds of educational activities that promote broader meanings of science and scientist (Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998). This implies that we must make substantive changes to both science pedagogy and curriculum so that girls might begin to see themselves as people who can and do learn science (Brickhouse, 2001; Carlone, 1999). Carlone’s (2004) ethnographic study of an action physics class did not live up to her expectations of how girls might interact with a science course that related to their everyday lives. The rituals of the physics classroom still rejected the girls’ entry into science through the class, while placing the boys into positions of authority and future possibilities (the teacher claimed the boys had talent and ability while girls only had interest—even when girls outperformed boys in
23 grades) (Carlone, 2004). Additionally, the girls’ seemed to reject this “active” science, especially when it challenged their role as a “good student” by lowering their grades and not following other classroom styles (both in teaching and homework) where girls maintained those labels. Carlone’s (2004) resolution was to incorporate more “puzzlemaster” formats in classes where the teacher shows students how to solve a puzzle, the students complete this quest and are given another puzzle that can be solved using the same format as the first (Quantz, 2011). She stated, “…an emphasis on concepts and relationships versus facts should be a prominent characteristic of a reform-based classroom…” in order for “…students [to] have opportunities to learn the subject matter in more robust ways and apply it to new situations” (Carlone, 2004, p. 406). Billy Wong’s (2012) research focused on a case study involving two 13-year-old girls and their identification with science. Based on a larger doctoral project that centers student ethnicity and science, Wong used Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to examine the performances these girls demonstrated in school in relation to their interests (or non-interests) in science. The two girls worked to establish identities that were either smart/intelligent (and therefore, scientific) or hetero-feminine. Performing intelligence was a part of the “good-girl” habitus that both girls took up, though the author is unsure if this was due to their ethnicity, their family, the school, or other outside factors. However, when it came to specific science identities, one girl chose to not pursue science in high school and instead wanted to focus on being “famous” through hetero-normative behaviors (Wong, 2012). The other student, insecure in her science identity/abilities, chose to pursue science against or in resistance to the “popular girls” identity at her school, which she labeled as childish and overly feminine (Wong, 2012). Wong never discussed their actual performances with science, however, instead focusing on the words that the girls, their friends, and their teachers stated throughout the study. Two more studies represent the (many) techno-rational attempts by researchers to draw girls’ interests into science. Ayelet Baram-Teabari and Anat Yarden (2008) studied student free- choice science learning while Sylvie Kerger, Romain Martin, and Martin Brunner (2011) sought to find which topics girls would be most interested in studying. Using statistical analyses of the quantitative data, their results supported their original hypotheses. Theoretically, according to Kerger, Martin, and Brunner (2011), by simply increasing the number of topics studied in science “…which are stereotypically considered to be feminine” (p.15), girls’ interest in science
24 would increase, hopefully leading to an increase in females in science. Unfortunately, their research also demonstrated that boys’ interest in science decreased when it was suggested that they would learn science through these feminine topics (Kerger, Martin, & Brunner, 2011). Their solution—gender specific science classes, although they did raise the point that some girls may enjoy topics that boys enjoy and vice versa, “Imagine a girl whose interest does not match that of other girls and a boy who is more interested in female topics than male topics” (p.17). The reader has to “imagine” this possibility since it is so out of the realm of normal! Baram- Teabari and Yarden’s (2008) work followed a similar track, determining that girls and boys like different topics in science, with interest gaps widening as they get older. Their solution was to engage children sooner, “[i]f gendered patterns with respect to biology and physics appear for socialization and not inborn reasons…”(p.86). This focus again looks to change the children instead of examining what might need to change within science. The question then returns to why don’t girls participate in science education? What is it that they are rejecting about the community created by the ritual aspects of science education as it is performed in schools? In order to answer this question, one needs to understand the history of how science (and, therefore, society) has constructed “woman” through the lens of “scientific rationality” and its effects on the “natural order” of women, men, nature and other within the world that we participate in today. Without an understanding of how these aspects of ritualized science instruction reify the very same ideas of domination, control and oppression, there will be no change in how girls interact with and join into the science community. Their very presence as active and equal participants in and with science is unnatural, nonsensical. The legitimacies established by the “commonsense” values of science that normalize and naturalize hierarchies of power and whose knowledge counts, reject girls. This is seen very clearly in the choice of words used by researcher of girls and science in their discussions. Osborne, Simon, and Collins (2003) make the following claim: “..analysis by gender shows that the male to female ratio remains stubbornly high at 3.4:1 in physics, while it is at least approximately equal in chemistry. Biology by contrast, is still dominated by girls with 1.6 girls to every boy…” (p.1051, italics added). In physics where the ratio between males and females is significantly higher (at 3.4 males to 1 female), we see the use of the word stubborn to describe the difference in participation. But in biology, where girls have the number edge at 1.6 females to every 1 male, we see that the field of biology is dominated by girls. This terminology reinforces the hidden power structures that
25 normalize boys’ participation in science and disallow girls’ participation in these fields. Why would girls want to participate/belong to a group that worked to continue the domination over themselves (and nature) and their subordination to men? They may learn these rituals of science, but in their rejection of science classes, courses and careers, girls are rejecting their own subordination in a system that’s major effect is to naturalize control over them. So the future of girls and science must be addressed in ways that have not yet challenged the identities, values and beliefs that are created and legitimized by science. This requires a much stronger response than shifting pedagogies to inquiry-based science, creating after school girls-only science clubs, and providing more female role models. While these actions may draw some girls into a science identity as it is legitimized today, they do not challenge the structures of domination that are naturalized by accepting that identity. They do not legitimize the identity of “girl(s)” as a positive, equal member of human society. Until the aspects of ritual bound up in the science classroom are brought into the light and challenged, “commonsense” power structures questioned and changed, will we not see girls enter into science as it is created and sustained by Western society. Eco-justice, Environmental Literacy, and Sustainability Environmental education is a complex collection of classes and opportunities seeking to improve the levels of environmental literacy within the United States. Found both within and outside of schools, environmental education is a diverse and wide-ranging reform movement has had a sustained, if small, presence in education for many decades. In 1990, Congress passed the National Environmental Education Act to establish a federal response to calls for a more organized environmental education movement (http://www.epa.gov/enviroed/pdf/neea.pdf ). Moved to the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the movement has been focused on teacher training and website development, grant opportunities, and assessment. Using the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) as its source of information, the EPA, while providing guidance, does not seek to establish national standards around environmental issues, but rather it seeks a way to promote environmental literacy in both the population and schools. But what does it mean to be environmentally literate? How does one go about defining environmental education? The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) has taken a lead role in “defining” what environmental education should look like. However, the organization is very careful to declare that their goal is
26 not to tell people what to think, but rather how to think about the environment. As their mission statement claims: The North American Association for Environmental Education promotes excellence in environmental education and serves environmental educators for the purpose of achieving environmental literacy in order for present and future generations to benefit from a safe and healthy environment and a better quality of life. (www.naaee.org) While the NAAEE does not define what environmental literacy or environmental education is, it is working to bring into conversation all the disparate groups working towards environmental education goals. This means, however, that along with state initiatives, corporations such as the Walt Disney Company and the Toyota Motor Company join in the conversation to establish environmental education plans and lessons for teachers. The NAAEE sponsored discussions include theoretical discussions about nature, oppression, and epistemology. The NAAEE’s dictum of not teaching what to think about the environment, but rather how to think about environmental education is appropriate. While this does not provide a definition, per se, it does provide a framework for those interested in encouraging environmental education platforms. The EPA has taken this framework and established a more focused definition for both environmental education and environmental literacy that frames the discussion in decision- making terms. Environmental literacy is set as the desired outcome of environmental education programs, while environmental education focuses on the following as a way to create a population ready to make “informed and responsible decisions”: awareness and sensitivity, knowledge and understanding, attitudes, skills, and participation (http://www.epa.gov/education/basic.html). Much like the NAAEE’s claim of how to think about the environment, the EPA makes it clear that environmental education “does not advocate a particular viewpoint,” but instead focuses on critical thinking, problem solving and decision making (http://www.epa.gov/education/basic.html). In addition to the EPA and the NAAEE, the following groups are just a small sampling of the many organizations that are working towards a more environmentally literate citizenry, but doing so in a number of diverse and distinct ways. The No Child Left Inside Coalition (NCLI) is working to have environmental education placed back into the curricula that NCLB wiped out in its standardized frenzy for core subjects such as reading and math. The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) began in 1990 in line with the EPA’s environmental education
27 goals and the 1990 National Environmental Education Act as an organization that could reach more deeply into business pockets to fund environmental literacy programs. The Campaign for Environmental Literacy (CEL) has joined forces with several government organizations to fund environmental education programs with government monies. A number of individual states are also working to include environmental education into their curricula. However, with the large number of different groups promoting different agendas as well as curricula, states often have a great many choices in development of their environmental education plans. Current curricular issues in environmental education are framed in two distinct ways. The first looks at what knowledge should be addressed by environmental education, while the second raises questions about what discipline best suits the inclusion of environmental education into already full curricula. Looking at the first issues, part of the problem returns to the very definition of what an environmental education is and further, what is meant by environment (or nature)? Does ecology fall under this definition? Do human oppressions fall under this topic? Are “the facts” enough—ecology, food chains and webs, earth cycles? Or does there have to be a larger push to work on attitudes and behaviors toward the environment? Does this include natural history? Geography? Nature? Environmental activism? Issues of consumerism and the green economy? Individual state standards in science and social studies play into how environmental education is incorporated into the classroom. This can become a complex discussion when in addition to state standards and state-level guidance in curricular matters, environmental education groups are developing to promote environmental literacy within their states. Some of these groups work in tandem with their state’s department of education, but others do not. The National Science Education Standards, developed in 1996, weave environmental science, issues, and knowledge into the more disparate science subjects of earth science and biology at the middle and high school levels. The National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (2010) also implicitly and explicitly incorporates environmental issues into its newly revised standards through its ten themes for social studies (http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/strands). The eco-justice movement arose in part as a response to the environmental movement and also the social justice movement (Tippins, et al., 2010). Many proponents of eco-justice were concerned by the limited scope of environmentalism that focused solely on nature, neglecting humanity and also the limited field of social justice that focused its gaze on humanity
28 to the neglect of the earth (Mueller & Tippins, 2010). Instead, eco-justice advocates proposed a “new4” way of looking at the problems of both society and earth by claiming that the twin oppressions of humans and nature are intertwined and inseparable. Looking towards place-based education and indigenous knowledges/pedagogies, eco-justice education is on the fringes of the environmental education movement (Tippins, et al., 2010). It provides a critical outlook towards the centrist environmental education movement (which itself in the past has been marginalized), while promoting a pedagogy that frames itself as working to end both types of oppression-- human and nature--while at the same time seeking to reduce the “crisis” mode that has been taken up by many environmentalists (in and out of education) (Mueller, 2009). Additionally, eco-justice advocates, unlike the stances taken by the EPA and the NAAEE, are explicitly political and provocative. They purposefully seek to engage in discourses that challenge the dominant hegemony (See for example Mueller, 2009; Bowers, 2001; Bonnett, 2004; Orr, 2004; Tripp and Muzzin, 2005; Shiva, 2001). They purposefully seek change. As Deborah Tippins and Mike Mueller (2010) claim, It is simply not enough to articulate an educational vision where ecojustice is at the heart of reform. Our call for educational practices reflecting the premises of ecojustice must take into account the way in which individuals and communities view the purpose of schools and the reasons why a change is needed. (p.183-184) David Orr (2004), too, takes aim at education as it is now constructed, the purpose behind it, and the possibilities it holds. “[E]ducation can equip people merely to be more effective vandals on the earth” (Orr, 2004, p.5). An “education” based in dominant ways of knowing, hegemony, hierarchies of power, and oppressions can lead to many illiteracies, environmental illiteracy being only one of many possibilities. As Margaret Eichler (2005) pointed out, “attributing my [environmental] illiteracy only to my own personal limitations…fails to acknowledge the social and cultural construction” (p.187) of that illiteracy. As she goes on to ask, in whose interest is it to keep us illiterate in environmental and sustainability issues? Working within an eco-justice framework for education not only takes up relevant issues of theory, but also finds it necessary to put into practice an activist agenda around green social justice (Tippins, et al., 2010; Tripp & Muzzin, 2005). Tackling issues of oppression, unjust
4 There are many indigenous scholars who would argue that this way of being and knowing the world is not new but rather non-Western.
29 policies in education, standardization and content driven curricula, environmental problems, and monocultures of the mind are difficult but not impossible agendas for those who have accepted eco-justice as a way of being (See for example McKenzie, et al., 2009; Smith & Williams, 1999; Stone & Barlow, 2005; Tripp & Muzzin, 2005). These explicit agendas contrast the hidden agendas promoted by organizations such as the EPA and the NAAEE who are leading the discourse for environmental education. In the foreword to a book on re-storying the connections between culture, environment and education, Vandana Shiva (2009) says, We have to begin again, with a new education for a new imagination. We have to imagine our way forward at a time when the present trajectory is closing the future for humans. And with that new imagination we have to act to generate a future--with care and compassion, with hope and courage. (p. ix) Bringing explicit agendas to the discourse begins to make room for ethical and moral discussions, critical thinking and decision making based in those discussions, new knowledges from marginalized voices and places as well as hope. Missing from this eco-justice framework, however, are student voices in general, and girls’ voices more specifically. If an eco-justice framework is to be emancipatory, then finding and sharing girls’ voices and experiences is not only important, but necessary. Sustainability Education Most governments, whether through UN initiatives or otherwise, have engaged with the idea of education for sustainability. This was accomplished through a shift in terminology from environmental education to education for the environment to finally education for sustainability. However, if we look more closely at the assumptions and “norms” around government involvement through education, we find that there is already a resistance by those in power to act on these issues. According to Michael Littledyke and Evangelos Manolas (2010), although schools have “support” for education for sustainability, pressures from the assessment focus, lack of subject integration, and any other number of factors lead to a “…contradiction in guidance and practice for education for sustainability in many countries” (p.286). Additionally, our actions are not necessarily linked to knowledge and neither are our attitudes. Again, according to Littledyke and Manolas (2010), “…people do not always act rationally even when the consequences are possibly damaging” (p.287). There are also a number of critics who claim that it is not the school systems’ responsibility to educate students on the moral issues at stake in education for
30 sustainability. As Schinkel (2009) sought to answer in his article, can governments make this type of education compulsory without coming into conflict with state neutrality? I would argue that state neutrality is an assumption of education that needs to be more closely explored. By actively attempting to remain neutral, a position is being taken whether acknowledged or not. Additionally I would argue that positions on sustainability itself have already been formed at the state, national, and global levels through the policies and initiatives (or lack thereof) that have been passed or not passed. Again, the assumptions and norms that are created by these policies are worthy of their own exploration. Also worthy of exploration are the commonsense assumptions within the field of environmental education and education for sustainability. Seeking to illuminate the power of what is considered normal and legitimate within this marginalized field is as important as challenging the dominant commonsense assumptions about sustainability outside of the field of environmental education and education for sustainability. Alison Lugg (2007) suggested that in our search for sustainable diversity, “… terminology and approaches to sustainability education are necessarily diverse since sustainability education is a contextually situated and evolving field of study” (p.98). Arjen Wals (2010) too discussed the importance of not normalizing sustainability education, suggesting that “…elevating these tendencies to norms or universal principles is internally inconsistent with the principles themselves” (p.143). So, then what does sustainability education look like and what is necessary for its’ success? Teacher Preparation. What does sustainability education mean for teacher education? And how might teachers affect the sustainability education occurring in schools? According to Iroha Kalu, L.E. Uwatt, and A.E. Asim (2005), in a study of Nigerian teachers, not much. Kalu, et al. (2005) found that teachers’ attitudes toward environmental issues and the teaching of sustainability were significantly positive. Additionally, Kalu, et al. (2005) found that “…they will teach the correct thing, motivate and persuade the learners to be conscious of the environment in whatever they do” (p.256) and that teacher attitudes did not depend “…on the type of school where they teach (primary or secondary), their gender, teaching experience, and educational qualification” (p.256). Moving to a more local representation and criticizing current teacher preparation programs, Greenwood (2010) used the narrative of his own experiences to demonstrate that, “…the field of teacher education has been nonresponsive to a wide array of globalized sustainability problems impacting local environments everywhere…because teacher
31 education, in practice… is a network of bureaucracies that operates under a largely unexamined cultural logic” (p.139). Greenwood discussed a nation and schools whose focus moved away from the suggested values and concerns of sustainability and instead focused on “…how to get everyone reading "at grade level" (a ritualized goal that has failed many times in recent decades), or college or workplace "ready" (a target manufactured by business leaders as they exert power over the curriculum)” (p.140). This however does not mean that sustainability education is not taking place. It does suggest that sustainability education is working from within the confines of the current education system, which as suggested previously attempts to work from a value- neutral stance. Values and Skills Learning. Because sustainability education requires a connected, relational view of issues “…critical thinking is also fundamental to environmental educators’ efforts to create an environmentally literate citizenry” (Ernst & Monroe, 2004, p.431). Many research projects, however, still attempt to remove specific values from discussions of sustainability, seeking a way to maintain a stance of imagined neutrality: In the face of complex environmental issues, environmental education does not advocate a particular solution or action, but instead facilitates a student’s ability to draw on and synthesize knowledge and skills from a variety of subject areas to conduct inquiries, solve problems, and make decisions that lead to informed and responsible actions (UNESCO, 1978). (Ernst & Monroe, 2004, p.431, italics added) However, students who participate in environmental and sustainability focused programs for more than a year improve their critical thinking skills generally (Ernst & Monroe, 2004). These results suggest two things. First, that participation in sustainability education provides a critical lens necessary for making difficult value-based decisions that are necessarily bound up in issues of sustainability. Secondly, that sustainability education itself must be sustained and long- lasting; that it cannot be short, technically oriented programs focused on technical responses and solutions. Not all educators are concerned with these seeming contradictions, though. As Elaine Lewis, Caroline Mansfield, and Catherine Baudains (2008) pointed out, there is an “…overlapping relationship between values education and environmental education for Sustainability” (p.138) and this is a necessary link to educating for sustainability. In the world of Montessori, this is not seen as a problem, but rather a strength where whole systems learning is key to the educative experience of the child (Sutton, 2009).
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Preliminary evidence supports the proposition that conducting environmental education projects, with an education for sustainability perspective was an effective, meaningful approach to the teaching of values and for enhancing awareness of whole systems thinking. This relationship between values education and environmental education for sustainability was observed in hands-on, real-life contexts, as well as in student mind maps and interviews. (Sutton, 2009, p.151) Experiential Education. Another finding supported by the literature around sustainability education is the idea of experiential learning as key to students’ understanding of issues of sustainability and the environment. The ability to have direct contact with the environment enhances students’ learning and attitudes toward that environment (Janssen & Crauwel, 2011; Jenkins & Pell, 2006). Additionally, research points to a disconnect between learning in schools and affinity for the environment (Jenkins & Pell, 2006). Because of this, some researchers have turned their attention away from the schooling environment to outdoor education and informal education. [O]ut of school EE [environmental education] programs remain an appealing alternative to in-class science education because they provide children with a unique opportunity to experience substantial outdoor immersion and often have a more profound impact on affective development. (Larson, 2010, p. 96) Lewis, Mansfield, and Baudains (2010) conducted several experiential programs with elementary school children, finding that the context of the learning mattered and that the children’s ability to engage in the environmental space, to experience the sustainable or environmental idea being explored, was key to these children’s empowerment and learning. Student participation in local environments led to students creating questions to explore, demonstrations of care and action for the environment, and more learning (Lewis, et al., 2010). Prince (2010) found similar results when taking young children to a rocky shore—integral to the learning was the outdoor experience. While research points to promising results with experiential learning, up to this point, most of the research and program or curricular development has been around the environment only rather than an understanding of how sustainability is connected to other issues, particularly those within equity and the economy. This, according to Lugg (2007) requires shifting the scope of outdoor, experiential sustainability education towards critical thinking:
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Outdoor education, unlike many other forms of ‘indoor education’ is in a unique position to offer experiences that may engender awareness and understanding of human connectedness to other forms of ‘nature’. …the outdoor environment offers a more holistic mode of learning through direct, sensory, affective and cognitive engagement with ecological systems and processes, such that the consequences of individual and collective actions may have immediate and real outcomes for the learner. The immediacy of the feedback for learners offers powerful pedagogical possibilities for outdoor education to contribute to the sustainability agenda. (Lugg, 2007, p.106) Lugg, too, however, falls into the trap of assuming education as a neutral space raising concerns that a socially critical pedagogy may be seen as a form of activism and an education for something rather simply education about something (Lugg, 2007, p.107). Finally, many of the current trends in sustainability education suggest a technical response to issues of sustainability. For instance, Kimberly Yousey-Elsener, Diana Richter Keith, and Staci Lynne Ripkey (2010) research project focused on how important it was to assess student learning within sustainability education in order to determine improvements. This links to Greenwood’s (2010) critique of education’s current focus on bureaucratic ways of thinking and schooling. What surprised the researchers who implement these technically oriented programs is students’ shifts away from technical solutions towards more integrative and holistic ways of thinking. Anne Jerneck, et al. (2010), in searching out ways to integrate sustainability into the fields of science found “…that global sustainability challenges cannot be understood or solved solely in the natural, medical or engineering sciences; equal efforts must be devoted to examining the challenges from other ontologies and epistemologies” (p.70). Bland Tomkinson (2011), too, was surprised by the results of his study, “Hence, key responsibilities for young professionals were communication and the raising of awareness, with technical skills taking second place” (p.2, italics added). Uri Zoller (2011) suggested that this “…mandates an alternative educational practice…” in order to shift into a “…purposed education for sustainability…within a global web of complex systems, interrelationships and implications” (p.36). Sustainability and Gender Often discussions of gender and sustainability are linked not to research in schools, but development programs in developing nations, where the role of women performing the aid has
34 sought to make explicit the role of women in acting out sustainable living (Tinker, 1990; Moser, 1998; Nelson & Wright, 2001). Most of the current research on gender and sustainability within schools has focused on quantitative attempts to measure environmental attitudes and behaviors. Because of this, much of the focus on gender and sustainability in education has been done through the lens of environmental education, creating a rather large gap in the research. That being said, the results of this research are still necessary to examine in order to understand where girls are currently placed in relation to sustainability. Some of the early surveys and questionnaires that measured attitudes towards the environment delivered questionable results according to other researchers (Leeming, et al., 1995; Schindler, 1999; Zimmerman, 1996) because many of the surveys were not validated, studied for their reliability, or dealt with very specific ecological topics or areas (Schindler, 1999). However, more current research continues to show similar results to that earlier work--girls’ attitudes differ from boys, with girls often reporting significantly stronger feelings and actions about the environment than boys, while boys often have a better understanding of environmental knowledge (Zimmerman, 1996; Alp, et.al., 2006; Jenkins & Pell, 2006; Uitto, et al., 2010; Harraway, et al., 2012;). Only one study (Larson, et al., 2010) suggested that gender did not make a difference in environmental and sustainability attitudes. This study was completed through a National Parks program and focused on informal, hands-on experiential learning. Larson, et al.’s (2010) results did show an increase in attitudes and knowledge for the student participants, but also pointed to a different reason that students may have shown improvements—it was fun! Eco-centric and bio-centric affinity is one of the most common factors measured in quantitative and mixed methods research. Defined as the ability to assign “…intrinsic value to all aspects of the environment, animate and inanimate…it underpins such beliefs as animals should have the same right to life as people, nearly all human activity is damaging to the environment and the natural world is sacred and should be left in peace” (Jenkins & Pell, 2006, p. 773). With girls and women scoring significantly higher on questions measuring this trait (Jenkins & Pell, 2006; Uitto, et al., 2010; Harraway, et al., 2012), researchers suggested that, “…traits like empathy and a focus on communication and social connections…[often] categorized as women’s ways...also seem to be at the root of sustainable personal and organizational behavior” (Learned, 2011, p.24). Additionally, Jenkins and Pell’s (2006) results suggested that girls are more likely to look “…to the role of the individual in addressing
35 environmental problems” as well as being more “…willing to make personal sacrifices to this end” (p. 773). Uitto, et al.’s (2010) supported this as well, demonstrating that girls had stronger feelings of responsibility than their male cohorts. Another significant result, looking at adults in the United States, came from Aaron McCright (2010), who found that “Women hold more scientifically accurate beliefs about climate change than do men” (p.78), contradicting much of the research that suggests it is boys and men who have more knowledge around issues of the environment. One of the few studies that looked at gender and environmental education through a qualitative lens, Carrier (2007, 2009) began her study as a way to make environmental education more interesting to boys. This type of study represents a trend in gender and science education research to focus studies on boys as the marginalized group in reform efforts for science education (Hayes, 2003). Bringing the environmental education class outside allowed for a more “authentic” science experience for boys--increasing their affinity for environmental issues. The girls, however, showed no change (even though they started out with much higher levels of affinity for the environment than the boys). Neither group increased in “knowledge” about environmental science, but the results did show that boys were more “comfortable” with this active style of, again, “authentic” science (Carrier, 2009). This suggested that even when gender was centered in research on the environment and schooling, girls’ experiences were marginalized. One of the very few research projects that did not begin by marginalizing girls’ experiences was Katrin Batz, Sebastian Wittler, and Matthias Wilde’s (2009) examination of an outdoor extracurricular experiential learning project, where girls not only demonstrated higher intrinsic motivation their male counterparts, they also showed significantly higher gains in knowledge as well. Batz, et al (2009) suggested this was due to the interconnectedness and relationships that the program developed: “…the physical context is connected with the personal and sociocultural context by offering learning situations that urge the individual pupils or a member of the group to engage with their peers and the educational content of the [outdoor learning experience]”(p.54). However, the authors recentered boys at the very end, effectively marginalizing the results of their study along with girls ways of knowing, with the following implications for education:
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Apparently, the classes in the zoological garden appealed more to the girls than to the boys. Consequently, a concept of a mono-educational study group (Kessels, 2004) with male instructors (Beuster, 2006, p. 93), boys’ topics (Gehlhaar et al., 1999), stronger management (Beuster, 2006, p. 93) and elements of competition (Boldt, & Schütte, 2006) could support boys instead. (Batz, et al., 2009, p. 59) Current literature around gender and sustainability within schools demonstrates how science and schooling maintains what is “normal” science and who is allowed to access that science, even within environmental and sustainability driven experiences and research. The research presented within this dissertation challenges those taken-for-granted assumptions that are being reified by the current research through a centering, and maintenance of that center, of girls’ performative interactions with sustainability.
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CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY The purpose of this chapter is to weave together a working methodology for my interests in adolescent girls and sustainability using standpoint feminism, eco-justice and ritual critique, theories that have been influential in the ways I am beginning to understand and better know the world. I will then use this methodology to inform the methods used to pursue this research. Within the confines of this chapter, I will explore some of the aspects of each theory and show how they inform my epistemologies as well as address some of the critiques of those ways of knowing. I will then attempt to bring these theories together in a framework that will be useful for bettering my understanding of girls, science and sustainability as I begin to analyze the research gathered for my dissertation. I will then discuss the methods used to gather and analyze the data collected through this research project. Finally, I will explore Robin Bernstein’s (2011) theory of scriptive things, a theory I will apply in Chapter 7 as a tool for deepening the analyses of girls’ performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability. Standpoint Feminism Standpoint feminism as an epistemology centers women’s experiences as the starting point of knowledge creation. Often critiqued by postmodernist theorists for its attempts to center and unify through universal “truths” about women, the use of standpoint feminism is not unproblematic. However, despite its potential problems, standpoint feminism has found support in the work of Black feminists. Standpoint epistemologies examine “…the ideas and actions of …excluded groups in a way that views them as subjects [and] reveals a world in which behavior is a statement of philosophy and in which a vibrant, both/and, scholar/activist tradition remains intact” (Collins, 2000, p.17). According to proponents of standpoint feminism, women (and always within this dissertation, other oppressed groups) hold more than one perspective because they are oppressed. Their world view is multiple because, in order to function in a hegemonic world, they must be able to see the world through a dominant lens, but they also have the ability to see the world differently because of their oppression(s). This ability to “see differently” leads to a constant border crossing status, where women (and again, other oppressed peoples) hold multiple standpoints and see through and beyond the dominant narratives that (attempt to) order their lives (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007; Sprague, 2005). As Patricia Hill Collins (2000) reminds us, “An oppressed group’s experiences may put its members in a position to see things
38 differently, but their lack of control over the ideological apparatuses of society makes expressing a self-defined standpoint more difficult”(p.39). By beginning from women’s perspectives, these multiple and partial knowledges seek to acknowledge those voices that have traditionally been lost, ignored, and silenced in and through powerful societal narratives and norms. By seeking to explore the relationships and connections between the knower, the known, and the process of knowing, standpoint feminist epistemology can be used to expose issues of power and challenge the status quo that keeps certain ways of knowing oppressed as well as legitimate knowledge creation from spaces that are not beholden to (although certainly connected to) dominant epistemologies. Key to this way of knowing is the idea and acceptance of partiality—partial views and partial knowledges. Sprague (2005) states, “Because each of us experiences life and our selves in multiple facets that are ‘stitched together imperfectly’, we can partially identify with another, empathy is possible, and through it, two knowers can make a partial connection” (p.43). And through these connections, partial visions, and unique standpoints, there is hope for new knowledge. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives…Partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard. (Collins, 2000, p.270) Haraway embraces the idea of partiality in her situated knowledges which seeks to reject privileged knowledge, but still attain “better accounts of the world” (1991, p. 196) through partial, embodied and situated perspectives (Ramazanoglu, 2002). Patricia Hill Collins seeks to use the acknowledged partiality of one’s own knowledge to forge a “politics of solidarity in the awareness that one does not have a complete knowledge of social reality” (Tanesini on Collins, 1999, p.153). Seeking communal dialogue and critical discourse, Collins looks to build communities that are able to understand and respect a diversity of different standpoints. As Abigail Brooks points out, this perspective “sets the stage for intragroup connections and enables the growth of alliances that are needed to wield power and forge social change” (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2007, p.75-76). This “fusion of horizons” may allow for the building of alliances and a political common ground that is not established at the expense of the diversity of women’s
39 experiences, but rather embraces and creates an ongoing community of different standpoints (Brooks, 2007). Standpoint feminism is not unproblematic, however. A number of critiques are leveled at this way of knowing, and while all of them need to be addressed by standpoint feminists, only three will be discussed here in an attempt to look at several of the critiques that I am (more) concerned with in regards to the questions that I am seeking to address. The first is the issue of difference. Standpoint feminism often universalizes women’s experiences seeking ways to promote a unified front in an effort to fight oppression, gain political power and change the way knowledge is created. However, identity and difference matter. A universalized feminist standpoint ignores divisions between marginalized and oppressed groups and discounts the differing needs of these groups. These identities that each of us claim are complex and tightly interwoven along with issues of power, privilege, and knowledge. Additionally this type of thinking disallows for the multiple and intersecting identities that we all have—I am not only a woman, but white, heterosexual, American, a mother, etc. The interplay of these identities is an important part of my own standpoint. I cannot deny one or all but one of my identities in order to more effectively define my position. Nor can I choose one piece of myself as the foundation of my identity and “add” the rest. Standpoint feminism should understand the consequences of the additive approach to difference—including women and people of color into predominantly white male spaces was not an effective approach to resolving issues of difference and more importantly addressing issues of power. A final note on difference and standpoint feminism, when standpoint feminists do address issues of difference, they often end up creating hierarchies of privileged oppression. This in turn leads to a second critique of standpoint feminism--the problem of privileged epistemologies. According to some standpoint feminists, the more marginalized and oppressed one is, the more “real” their experiences and understanding of “reality,” the more objective their accounts of life. Sandra Harding uses the idea of strong objectivity to define this epistemic privileging. According to Harding (1991), research that begins from women’s lives is more accurate and less distorted than research that begins from the lives of men in the dominant group—the place where up until very recently all research began (and very often continues to begin today). Collins (2000) supports this stating,
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[E]ach group using the epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, become the most “objective” truths. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives…Partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard… (Collins, 2000, p. 270) Do oppressed people “see” power relations differently? Is one type of oppression more oppressive than another? Do those who are furthest on the margins produce less altered and less partial knowledge? The problem with this formulation of difference is that it can work as a divisive tool rather than using difference as a way to build connections, relationships and knowledges. Additionally it works to romanticize oppression and difference, with some seeking to “see from below,” a position that may not be possible. Haraway warns that standpoints of oppressed people are not innocent, and while marginalized standpoints might allow for critical reflection of current knowledge production and issues of power, “how to see from below is a problem” that constantly seeks to not fall into either the “god-trick” of seeing all from nowhere (scientific objectivity) or the trap of relativism where all knowledge is legitimated and judging between competing knowledge claims becomes an unreasoned process (Haraway, 1991; Ramazanoglu, 2002). And finally, a few critiques from my own understanding of standpoint feminism. There is a narrative of time, processes, transformation and knowledges that remains locked into an idea of linearity. Processing time and transformation in this way as progress legitimates forward motion as the only direction available to standpoint feminists. Rebecca Schneider (2011) explores these notions of linear time, and the consequences of not seeing beyond this linearity. Linking capitalism to forward-marching time and development, Schneider (2011) explores the associations between this and the Protestant work ethic, which denies time as anything other than forward moving and linear. Schneider (2011) suggests it is necessary “To trouble linear temporality—to suggest that time may be touched, crossed, visited or revisited, that time is transitive and flexible, that time may recur in time, that time is not one—never only one….” (p.30). When marginalized groups disagree about that forward motion, “progress” stops. This linear way of thinking requires a common ground among and between marginalized groups in
41 order to even visualize change that reinforces the critiques of those outside of standpoint feminism that claim grand narratives and universal truths are a part of standpoint feminisms’ project. If standpoint feminism remains locked into a “dot-to-dot” process of moving linearly from one oppression to the next, it remains locked into Schneider’s (2011) “… “development” model serving modern capital” (p.174). As Schneider suggests, “…to approach time [differently]…, a scholar must suspend ingrained socio-cultural approaches to time as singularly linear and try to think outside of well-worn habits of thought” (p.41). While linearity and lines of continuum do provide a less messy and uncomplicated view of many ideas, this leads to my next critique—that standpoint feminism is seeking to make sense of power relationships, difference, oppression, knowledge and knowledge production in a way that is neat, clean and packaged with a pretty bow. Standpoint feminists seem to draw back from complicated and messy connections and relationships, fusing horizons in an often unproblematized manner. For example, Brooks (in Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007) makes this statement, “Women, as members of an oppressed group, have no cause or motivation to misconstrue reality” (p.67). This statement neglects issues of power, hegemony, difference, and according to postmodern critiques, continues to cause oppression rather than resolve it (Ramazanoglu, 2002). Even as standpoint feminists address these concerns and critiques, they talk about how they have “avoided” this or that problem or criticism (Tanesini, 1999). Perhaps grappling with the issues instead of avoiding them, or at least being more aware of the language that is being used, might give standpoint feminism and the knowledge produced from that perspective more legitimacy. Eco-Justice An epistemology based in eco-justice centers the earth and all the living and non-living things upon the earth in its quest to understand and create knowledge. Much like the term sustainability, there is no one definition that fulfills all expectations of the term. According to Lorraine Code (2006) this ecological thinking is unstable and contested, but dynamic and alive. As a way to replace the epistemologies of mastery that have resulted not only in human oppressions, but also the destruction of the environment and living beings outside of the human family Ecological epistemologies begin with ecological situations and the interconnections of knowers and knowings (Code, 2006). Instead of relying on an epistemological “monoculture” created and sustained by a dominant hegemony of Western thought, ecological epistemologies depend upon diversity and difference, negotiations and interdependence—and not only within
42 the human population (Shiva, 2001). According to Code (2006), “Ecological thinking, then, is about putting into circulation a radically innovative conceptual apparatus, enabling it to infiltrate the social order where it can expand to undermine the intransigent hierarchical arrangements that hold it in place” (p.20). Much like the roots of a plant that can crack through hardened cement, ecological ways of knowing may be able to subvert the Enlightenment’s rational mind in order to develop a more responsible way of inhabiting and knowing the world. According to Vandana Shiva (2001), “Knowledge systems which view humans as members of an earth family locate creativity in understanding the relationships between different organisms. This generates different ways of knowing and different claims to knowledge” (p. 461)5. For instance, Shiva discusses seeing plants as living subjects rather than objects, which allows us to work “…toward a biology that allows organisms to inform. If organisms have intelligence, they can inform us…” (p.461). Perhaps another way of looking at this knowing is as an onto-epistemological experience. According to Michael Bonnett (2004), this ecological knowing is about learning to be in the world. Enlightenment thinking separated mind and body, knowing from embodied being. To know the world was an act of the mind--rational and superior to bodily being in and of the world. According to Shiva (2001), “The ecological separation from earth body went hand in hand with the epistemological separation from the human body” (p.448). Being tied to nature, whether woman or “noble savage” or non-human, became, according to Western ways of knowing, inferior. The use of “rational” and “objective” science to justify domination over others based on differences became “…natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral” (Haraway, 1991, p.8). As the only “rational” beings, Western European males became the only legitimate source of knowledge production. But, for some, there never was this false separation of body and mind, knowing and being. Again, according to Shiva (2001), many indigenous cultures of knowledge do not accept this split. Ecological knowing seeks to bring mind and body, human and earth back together in Western cultures. Bonnett (2004) suggests seeking “…an educationally forgotten way of understanding nature” (p.95) where acquiring knowledge is based on a conversation with the world. This conversation is more than thought within a “rational” mind. It
5 It is important to note that the term “earth family” as used within this dissertation should not be seen as a space of innocence or romanticized relationships. As Haraway (1991) reminds readers, there are no innocent standpoints, and this should extend to the relationships that are examined within Shiva’s earth families.
43 is about inhabiting the world differently. Ecological thinking becomes “a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice” (Code, 2006, p. 5). Ecological knowing is not without its problems, however. Simply defining the terms equated with ecological knowing is problematic. What is meant by ecological? Nature? Environment? Natural? Communication? Using the rational definitions based in Enlightenment thinking creates an ecological epistemology that has a foundation in the very thing it is trying to replace. The science of ecology is rooted in ideas of equilibrium and balance as well as survival of the fittest and evolution, all of which are based in oppressive epistemologies that serve to promote Western knowledges and power at any expense. Shiva (2001) provides examples of this as she describes how monocultures of the mind lead to monocultures of the world, replacing the natural diversity of spaces with unidirectional “progress” based in Western ideologies. Shiva (2001) shares stories of biotechnology, biopiracy, and a new, intellectual imperialism. Biotechnologies dispossess “..the farmer of seed as a means of production” (p.458) forcing a reliance and hierarchical relationship between corporations and the farmer. Biopiracy is the theft of indigenous knowledges, particularly women’s knowledges because “…their role in development and conservation of biodiversity has been represented as nonwork and nonknowledge” (p.456). Intellectual imperialism allows corporations to own life and to own knowledge as well as property (Shiva, 2001). The monocultures arise as these corporations reduce the biodiversity they have stolen in order to increase profits, seeking uniformity in product (Shiva, 2001). This destruction of biodiversity (which includes human and non-human life as well as ways of knowing) is directly linked, according to Shiva (2001), to the marginalization and oppression of women and others who fall outside the dominant paradigm. Again, Shiva (2001) provides examples, where Third World economies rely on biodiversity, not just for economic survival, but for their food, shelter, and life. Breaking data down into annual labor requirements, Shiva (2001) demonstrates how biodiversity within specific contexts is almost nine times more productive than a monoculture (p.454). A second critique deals with the problem of Western theorists attempting to use ecological epistemologies to return to some romanticized notion of a more “natural” relationship with the earth (Code, 2006; Bonnett, 2004). Looking to an imagined and naïve past, some theorists attempt to reclaim a relationship that never was. Other theorists, eco-feminists in
44 particular, essentialize both nature and the human (usually woman) element involved in the relationship. Bina Agarwal (1994) points to five major critiques of ecofeminism, many which will sound familiar as they mirror those laid at the feet of standpoint feminism. First, ecofeminism sees “woman” as a unified category, erasing class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and other identity “markers.” This would extend, as well, to ecofeminism’s emphasis on Western women’s ways of knowing and the neglect around other ways of knowing that has been discussed by many feminists who are not white, straight, and Western. Second, ecofeminism neglects “real” materialism, focusing instead on ideological domination. Third, it pays little attention to the “…social, economic, and political structures within which these constructs are produced and transformed…” ignoring how “…certain dominant groups are able to bring about ideological shifts in their own favor and how such shifts get entrenched” (Argawal, 1994, p.90). Fourth, ecofeminism ignores the lived material relations women have with nature and finally, the biological “essentialism” that arises from cultural ecofeminism’s link of woman to nature ignores the social and historical constructions of these identities. This type of ecofeminism reifies the oppressive Western binaries that link woman with nature, but set them against man and rational thought (Code, 2006). Argawal’s response to the critiques is a feminist environmentalism that seeks to see the material and the ideological as linked and interactive within the feminist and environmental movements. This approach provides a segue into ritual critique. Ritual Critique Ritual, again, as defined by Richard Quantz (2011), is “that aspect of action that is a formalized, symbolic performance” (p.8). How might this way of thinking help to “...find and illuminate the way in which material power is institutionalized into the nonrational practices of our schools and lead us to replace them with new practices designed to celebrate democracy and justice” (Quantz, 2011, p. 19)? Ritual works to enforce the sacred symbolic in our lives. Ritual is a public performance of meaning-making. Through ritual we perform for those around us our commitments, our values, our beliefs. Through participating in rituals with others, we confirm our acceptance of a common understanding of the world, of reality. And because our body treats as sacred the symbols of our actions, when we stand up and proclaim with our body that which is of value to us, we define our morality, too. And finally, by learning and performing these rituals we proclaim our membership in an
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identity group. By embracing the performances of one group we publicly create our self as, at one and the same time, belonging to one group while distancing ourselves from other groups. (Quantz, 2011, p. 160) We use ritual to define where we belong within society and where others belong; rituals reinforce what constitutes normal and commonplace within society. They are the “pivot of the social world” (McLaren, 1986, p.37) that links our lived experiences to the political, historical and material world. But it is more than this, too. As Peter McLaren points out, “Ritual knowledge is not something to be ‘understood’; it is always, whether understood or not, something we feel and to which we respond organically” (p.204). Nonrational rituals work invisibly to embody the dominant hegemony which works on and “through the bodies and subjectivities” (McLaren, 1986, p.204-5) of social groups. The contestations between marginalized and oppressed groups with dominant ideologies can and do play out in “formalized, symbolic performances.” And herein lies the importance of studying the nonrational rituals which are embedded within society at large, but more importantly, within those groups that are marginalized by the dominant (non-homogenous) culture. Seeking out the ways in which meaning is made through these symbolic, formalized performances allows for a recognition of the ways in which the “normal real world” (read dominant ideologies) plays out in material ways in and on the lives of the marginalized (as well as in the ways these rituals sustain the dominant group). McLaren (1986) raises important questions: “Whose interests (…) do the rituals ultimately serve? …Who benefits most from the ritual structures remaining as they are? Who is marginalized as a result? ....In what ways do… rituals uncritically transmit the dominant ideology?” (p.82-3). Determining what these rituals are, then, while an important task, is not, according to the tenets of ritual critique, the important task. Instead, the focus must shift to how these rituals are used to make sense of the world (Quantz, 2011, p.23). This is especially the case in regards to marginalized and oppressed groups where the performative meanings being presented may be in contradiction to the material and lived experiences of those within the group. This does not mean to suggest that the marginalized have no power. As Quantz (2011) points out, “Far from there being “a status quo,” the status quo must continually be created and recreated by the forces of the powerful within a society. And, equally important, that reality is constantly being challenged by the less powerful” (p.36). Therefore, by shining a light onto the construction of
46 the commonsense and natural that develops through the performances of nonrational ritual, we can learn to “…create alternative images and actions; that is, in carnival terms, to reflect the second truths of the nonlegitimated voices” (Quantz, 2011, p.65). What I will be looking for in this study is how girls use the ritual aspects present around science, girlhood, and sustainability to construct and create their world. Moving beyond analysis, into critique (and hopefully beyond to future praxis), this study will seek to “recognize the interplay between the cultural and material relations that are realized in ritual” (Quantz, 2011, p. 17). Ritual and ritual critique can be particularly helpful when examining why girls don’t participate in science and science education and perhaps why they prefer identifying with the rituals of sustainability as some have claimed. What is it that they are rejecting about the community created by the nonrational aspects of science education as it is performed in schools? What might they be accepting around issues of sustainability? In order to answer these questions, one needs to understand the history of how science (and therefore society) has constructed “woman” through the lens of “scientific rationality” and its effects on the “natural order” of women, men, nature and other within the world that we participate in today. Without an understanding of how the nonrational aspects of ritualized science instruction reify the very same ideas of domination, control and oppression, there will be no change in how girls interact with and join into the science community. Their very presence as active and equal participants in and with science is unnatural, nonsensical. As Quantz (2011) points out, “Those who break the form or challenge the symbols do not merely question knowledge, they call for what nature will never permit. They have no commonsense. They undermine reality and morality and identity” (p.148). The legitimacies established by the “commonsense” values of science that normalize and naturalize hierarchies of power and whose knowledge counts, reject girls. Why would girls want to participate/belong to a group that worked to continue the domination over themselves (and nature) and their subordination to men? They may learn these rituals of science, but in their rejection of science classes, courses and careers, girls are rejecting their own subordination in a system that’s whole purpose is to naturalize control over them. How do they use the rituals of girlhood/femininity to create who they are and construct their reality in school/in the world? In science class? In connection to issues of sustainability? In the realm of environmental literacy, we have reduced sustainability and environmental issues to technical problems, “puzzles,” that need to be “solved,” rather than moral problems that
47 have implications of both an environmental and social nature. If work within eco-justice is seeking to shift the direction of discourse to one that (at least partly) includes moral responsibility, then the use of ritual critique is a necessary missing component as ritual “…works to determine which values are legitimate and which are not” (Quantz, 2011, p.150) thereby determining our morality. Finally, as Quantz (2011) points out, when our rituals legitimize the technical and the technical realm erases an ethic based on relationships, it replaces it with “…an ethic built around rightful manipulation and exploitation of the external world” (p.150). Counterproductive to the eco-justice movement, such “commonsense” ideas need to be illuminated and challenged. Weaving Epistemologies While use of science terminology and definitions is problematic, I would like to explore my understanding of relationships in order to better explain how I see the epistemologies of standpoint feminism and ecological thinking and ritual critique as becoming interwoven. Ecology, in a traditional sense, is used to look at the interconnections of animals to their environments. For me, however, ecology is the study of relationships, and it is more than “nature.” I contend that we focus too much on humans in discussions of knowledge, meaning making, difference, and power. As Shiva (2001) points out, “earth has many children and humans are only one of them” (p. 450). However, we often leave humans out of discussions of nature. We (humans) are as much an integral part of that web as the grass at one end of a food chain. Additionally, this web demonstrates the consequences of ignoring or removing pieces of the web–complete collapse because of the interconnectedness of all (human and non-human, living and non-living). In this epistemic exploration, though, it is not through the “examination” or “observation” of two beings (A and not-A – terms that I do not like because of the binary that it establishes, but don’t have a better way to express right here or now) at different places on the web that we can understand (or know) A and not-A. Rather, it is in the relationship between, the space between, that the understanding of knowing each other and the other parts of the web must come from. Additionally, to reduce subjects (that we know or want to know) to A and not-A ignores the relationships that must extend beyond A and not-A. These two are not created or sustained in isolation. There is an entire relational experience to other pieces of this web that each brings to this particular relationship. In exploring knowledge and what it is to know, then, there must be
48 an understanding of the relationships that are built and the connections of A and not-A to a larger web (bigger picture). A flat, one dimensional web, however, does not do justice to the depth of connectivities that I visualize in this web of relationships and knowledge. Nor does it explain the role of power or culture, language or history, environment or nature in the creation of these webs. Donna Haraway (1997), in attempting to explain “antiracist feminist multicultural studies of technoscience” (p.268), uses the imagery of the child’s game Cat’s Cradle to explain the constantly changing relationships between “science studies, antiracist feminist theory, and cultural studies” (p.268). Visually, I like the imagery that this implies. Not only is cat’s cradle a game that requires many hands (paws, limbs, roots, rocks?), but it has depth and dimensionality (unlike the visual of a flat web). Those holding the strings are constantly changing (influencing?) the patterns that develop, creating messier and more complex connections of strings, knots and spaces. Some simply hold the string, exerting no influence (or very little influence) on the changing of patterns, but are still implicated in the webs of connection and the eventual patterns that they create, while others manipulate the strings directly attempting to change the patterns and relationship created (power). Additionally, non-human beings and non- living entities are part of the web as well—just as intricately woven into the fabric of knowledge and knowing as humans, influencing patterns and connections as much (if not more?) than their human counterparts. If I use this imagery to understand relationships and the creation of knowledge, I cannot disconnect context, history and culture from each other. If I may develop the imagery of the cat’s cradle game a little further, this four (or more) dimensionality of the game puts everything within a context – whether historically, culturally, or ecologically, because the connections never end – forward, backwards, all around. History (herstory? Its-story?), environment and culture help to create and sustain current contexts of place within the cat’s cradle and effect the possible movement, influence, and sustainability of the place now held within that web. And again, only by exploring the relationships between these nodes/knots/spaces/strings can an understanding begin to develop of how difference and similarities, power and privilege, affects and creates and sustains the patterns. Through these explorations, then, knowledge is created, but ever changing. So how does this explanation influence my understanding of the interwoven epistemologies of standpoint feminism and ecological thinking? If we accept that standpoint
49 feminism centers women’s experiences and ecological thinking centers the earth family as Shiva (2001) calls the interacting beings on the earth, then the web I visualize allows for women’s experiences to be seen as a starting point for the creation of knowledge but only if we see those experiences within the context of a multitude of other connections that arise in an earth family. According to Code (2006), ecological thinking and feminist thought are good allies because they seek to address multiple oppressions using multiple theories and practices to deal with a multitude of issues—each at different knots, spaces, nodes, and shifting patterns. If we bring in ritual critique at this point, we can see that it too seeks out multivoiced and nonconsensual dialogue that constantly forms and re-forms society. As Quantz (2011) points out, “Thus, as the multiple voices within the individual and within the community struggle to control the direction of the acceptable dialogue, ideological expressions may be reinforced, reinterpreted, or rejected”(p.52). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) picks up this dialogic thread, “In contrast to the dialectical relationship linking oppression and activism, a dialogical relationship characterizes Black women’s collective experiences and group knowledge. On both the individual and the group level, a dialogical relationship suggests that changes in thinking may be accompanied by changed actions and that altered experiences may in turn stimulate a changed consciousness” (p. 30). While focusing here on Black feminist thought, Collins continues by saying that through opening the dialogue, disseminating the conversation, “…individuals from other groups who are engaged in similar social justice projects…can identify points of connection that further social justice projects” (p. 37). Additionally, such an understanding of interwoven epistemologies is necessarily embodied—the physical matters, whether it be the physical and bodily conditions of impoverished women or the physical and bodily conditions of the environment that sustains multiple (human and non-human) populations. And these conditions are made more apparent when the focus of attention moves beyond a self to the connections and relationships made, the knots and patterns that influence and are influenced by that self (whether that self is human or not, female or not). Much like Elizabeth Wilson’s (2004) call for feminists to better understand the epistemology of the body and the knowledge that we can derive from our bodily experiences, Bonnett (2004) states, “It is often overlooked, the knowledge that we possess through bodily contact with the world” (p.98). For Collins (2000), this idea picks up on what might perhaps be called a “commonsense” idea within Black feminist thought: “Many African-American women
50 grasp this connection between what one does and how one thinks…A recognition of this connection between experience and consciousness that shapes the everyday lives of individual African-American women often pervades the work of Black women activists and scholars” (p.23-4). This idea of embodiment also is present in ritual critique, where one comes to realize that “…ritual not only symbolizes but it embodies” (Quantz, 2011, p.26). Quantz continues “Through participation in ritual, we can not only become cognitively aware of identity, reality, and morality but identity, reality, and morality can actually become embodied in our person—a process McLaren (1999) refers to as “enfleshment.” Through this embodiment or enfleshment, our emotional, physical being can become connected to our cognitive, symbolic world” (p.26). When this bodily awareness is linked back to the mind, this way of knowing, this feminist/ecological standpoint searching out ritual, becomes a way of knowing “that allows itself to be vulnerable rather than seeking mastery” (Bonnett, 2004, p. 100). Cold fusion and the hope for cheap, sustainable energy with limited consequences was once the goal for the betterment of society. After research that was not replicable and reports that were blatantly falsified, the hope for this process died away, with today’s scientists looking at cold fusion as a quaint, utopic, and unrealistic ambition better left to the imaginary realm of science fiction. Will the atomic crashing together of standpoint feminism, eco-justice, and ritual critique and the goal of a “fusion of horizons” be relegated to the same fate? Or, is there a possibility for a methodology that can build from the ideas and critiques of these theories, foster critical discourses and communal dialogue and legitimate new knowledges that come from the margins, all while keeping in mind a larger earth family ? Donna Haraway (1991) looks beyond human-human connections and relationships in her exploration of technology, culture and science. Her cyborg narrative provides new boundaries to be explored, blurred and crossed. In this move to explore connections and relationships that are outside of human-human links, standpoint feminism and Haraway’s ideas of situated knowledges allow any number of possibilities. This may be especially true for issues that involve the environment. What are the connections, power relationships, and possibilities for knowledge creation if we explore the spaces between human and animal, human and habitat, human and their surroundings? Shiva (1993, 2005) places women, their knowledges and their environment at the center of her research, looking for and finding the spaces of power that are involved in those relationships. While not denying that human-human relationships also affect the
51 connections she is studying, Shiva explicitly looks for those connections that are so often ignored beyond the human-human links. Both Shiva and Haraway take advantage of different kinds of connections and relationships that move beyond humanist concerns to expand the horizons that are available to those working from unique critical and socially just oriented perspectives. This move beyond human-human connections and relationships also challenges the traditional notions of linearity and progress that bind the motion of those involved in much current research, activism, and theorizing. Unidirectionality does not allow for the expansiveness that Collins calls for in her work of community building through black feminist standpoint theory (Brooks, in Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007). If our vision is limited to one point on the horizon, there can be no fusion of horizons or partial perspectives—they are all the same perspective seeking the same endpoint. The three theories that I am attempting to bring together imply a multitude of perspectives and visions, but in their practices the linearity so prevalent in “research” pushes them to some teleological end that they have no ability to “control.” Is there a way for this imperfectly stitched onto-epistemology to move upward and outward, forward and backward, downward and inward, in a multi-dimensional manner that seeks out the critical discourses and communal dialogues that Collins calls for, that seeks a profusion of ideas and knowledges that legitimate everyday experiences of marginalized people and spaces? As Haraway (1991) states, “Abundance matters. In fact, abundance is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature (p.68).” She continues by tying nature and humans together in a struggle for a common good that seeks to resist the domination and command- control systems so prevalent in patriarchy and capitalism. It is a process that is messy, transgressive, and prolific, as well as unapologetic about the changes it seeks to realize. It is interwoven in ways that are yet unimagined. These imaginings are a starting place for explorations as the experiences of the marginalized- human and otherwise- are brought to the center of knowledge production. Weaving Together Girls, Science, and Sustainability: Does Going Green Wear a Skirt? For me, the implications of the use of such an interwoven epistemology must be brought back to my interests in connecting girls and science through environmental issues. How girls make meaning around issues of sustainability is a question that centers the experiences of girls but in a way that seeks to explore their connections and relationships with a wider earth family (as in their experiences with other living and non-living things). Additionally, this way of
52 understanding can provide space for not only the voices and knowledges of girls, but also a deeper, more reflective understanding of “the web of entities and phenomena with which one has a…familiarity and which form implicit and explicit points of reference for one’s ongoing concerns and purposes” (Bonnett, 2004, p. 101). A diversity of knowing through webs of connections and relationships can develop from this one perspective, that of adolescent girls. As Shiva (2001) states, “The logic of diversity is best derived from biodiversity and women’s links to it” (p.453). This requires an embrace of the diversity that is possible in multiple ways of knowing as well as developing and sustaining relationships with each other, the earth and the other beings present on this earth. This exploration into weaving together the epistemologies of standpoint feminism and ecological thinking has created a number of avenues forward, with paths to new knowledges and creative and innovative ways to explore the multitude of relationships and connections that keep us linked together. A knowing that remains vulnerable allows us to be globally connected as an earth family, but rooted in the local experiences and relationships specific to our individual communities. It is my hope that this methodology can not only help create knowledges that begin with girls’ experiences of meaning making around issues of sustainability, but also knowledges that challenge hegemonic ways of knowing, exclusionary practices of dominance, and what and whose knowledges are legitimate. Methods In order to examine how girls use ritual to construct their girlhoods and sustainability, I propose to use a comparative case study approach between an all-girls private school and a co-ed private school. Again, the questions that I am seeking to answer move around the following ideas: How do girls use ritual to construct their world as girls and within the narratives of sustainability? How is ritual used to normalize what we have come to believe is meant by both “girl” (girlhood? femininity?) and “sustainability” (environmental literacy?)? Where do performances of girlhood interact with (either through acceptance/overlap or disjunction/resistance) performances of sustainability? Prior to engaging with my research agenda with possible participants or data collection, IRB approval was sought and given, as well as permission from both the principals of the school buildings and the teachers whose classrooms I observed. Ethical concerns surrounding the vulnerability of school-age participants taken into consideration during the development of
53 interview questions, consent and assent forms, and observations, as well as during the establishment of the researcher-researched relationship. The choice of a case study as the method is purposeful. According to Bogdan and Biklen (2003), a case study is “a detailed examination of one setting, or a single subject” (p.54) that can be expanded to a multi-subject study while Creswell (2009) defines it as “a strategy of inquiry in which the researcher explores in depth a program, event, activity, process, or one or more individuals” (p. 13) that is bounded by time and or space. The qualities that define case study are also useful in this case. Thick descriptions are sought in the data collection phase through in-depth observations, formal and informal interviews, the collection of documents, physical artifacts and other textual data. This type of data triangulation (collection from multiple sources) may best be seen as “a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any inquiry” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008, p. 7). Because the case study “seeks to engage with and report the complexity of social activity in order to represent the meanings that individual actors bring to those settings and manufacture in them” (Stark & Torrance, 2005, p. 33) this method is an appropriate way to address my question(s). This method also allows a move beyond the specific case, not to generalize across populations, but to understand how issues of power, knowledge and legitimacy play out in the classroom between girls and environmental issues. The case study also lends itself to ritual critique (which Quantz more often compares to educational ethnographies), where multivoicedness is sought out and, while spoken word is important, it is in physical gestures that ritual can be observed and understood. As Quantz (2011) notes, “What people say about the performances is important, but how they actually perform their identities and their politics is even more important” (p.44). Site Selection Because girlhood can be defined as a performance, how this performance plays out in schools that are single sex and co-ed may provide clues into how girl’s interact with and use environmental discourses. Site selection was therefore purposeful in that an all girls’ school and a co-ed school were chosen as research sites. Because location matters, schools were chosen from the tri-state area within working distance of the researcher. The all girl’s school, St. Sofia6, is located in an urban area of a large mid-western city. It is a private Catholic school serving
6 All names have been changed to provide a level of confidentiality to the participants and schools.
54 grades 9-12. The “go green” message at this school is very important, but has multiple meanings for the school (the school colors also happen to be green). Three science teachers who deal with environmental science agreed to have me in their classrooms. Dr. Metz, a white female with a PhD, teaches the higher-level biology class and runs the recycling program at the school and is starting an environmental club this upcoming year. Mrs. Anderson, a white female, teaches the lower-level biology classes and is organizing a new composting project for students. Mr. Franklin, a white male, is creating an environmental science class for this fall. They all gave me access to their classes and after school activities and also suggested that students and parents would be happy to give permission to have their students participate. More details about the setting will be provided in the next chapter. The co-ed school, St. Agnes, is also located in the Midwest, but in a neighboring state. This rural private, Catholic school serves students in grades 9-12. Originally an all-girls’ school (with a residential option), the campus became co-ed in 2000. There are two science teachers at this school and both provided access to their classrooms for my research. Mrs. Andre, a white female, teaches the biological and earth science classes. Mr. Johnson, a white male and retired school administrator, teaches the chemistry and physics classes. Neither is involved with the recycling program at their school, but both do take extreme pride in their work with the students around scientific knowledge. Again, more detail will be provided in the next chapter. Identifying Research Participants In order to more thoroughly understand the intricacies of ritual performance of girlhood and interaction of girlhood with the rituals of sustainability, it was my hope to identify 3-6 girls at each site that I could develop a deeper relationship with in order to pursue how girlhood rituals are performed throughout the day and in spaces other than the science classroom as well as how these performances interact with issues of sustainability. Unfortunately, this was not quite how my plans played out. My insider status came from my interactions with the teachers, not the students. In developing relationships with these adults, I was able to identify students who might want to aide in my research. Additionally, the science teachers at St. Sofia were able to connect me to several other teachers in other subjects who were willing to have me observe their classes in order to provide comparisons of girls’ performances in other spaces to their ritual performances in science. In the end, I was able to observe students in English and Art as well as multiple science subjects. At St. Sofia, many of these students were the same due to the size of
55 the school and the tracking that is part of their scheduling structure. While I had access to girls in specific science classes, I was lucky enough to find some students who were self-interested in environmental issues, as well as a few who were not (as) interested in these issues to sit and talk with me. This purposeful selection allowed me to explore more fully the “rituals of everyday life” (Quantz, 2011, p.44) and how these rituals work to normalize (and possibly disrupt) certain identities around girlhood and sustainability. Additionally, it allowed me to observe the ways in which the words that they said contradicted the actions that they perform. Data Collection According to Creswell (2007), “Case study research is a qualitative approach in which the investigator explores a bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information (e.g., observations, interviews, audiovisual material, and documents and reports) and reports a case description and case-based themes” ( p.73). The data collection phase is typically extensive, and draws upon these numerous sources of data in order to build an in-depth description and understanding of the case (Creswell, 2007). Beginning with observations, I was able to gain a “first-hand experience” of the spaces in which I conducted my research (Creswell, 2009). Observations were particularly important for understanding how ritual is used to make meaning, as has already been noted, because it is the performance of ritual that is as important (if not more so) than the spoken word. Therefore prolonged engagement at the site using observations was key in my data collection process. These observational data include, but were not limited to, descriptive, reflective and demographic data (Creswell, 2009, 2007). Creswell (2007) suggests observations be completed both as an observer and as a participant. Because the teachers at both St. Sofia and St. Agnes provided me with access to their classrooms, their fieldtrips and their after school activities, I was able to fulfill both the observer and participant role as an adult and through a teacher performance. Again, my insider status was bestowed upon me from the teachers, not the students. Interviews are also an integral part of case study data collection, and I was interested in noting the difference between what was said and what was performed by these girls. However, it is important to note that the interviews served as supplementary data, reinforcing and adding depth to the ideas and themes that developed through the observations of the girls’ performances. The interviews served a purpose, but as Quantz (2011) points out, "While I did not ignore spoken
56 words, I focused primarily on physical gestures including clothing, body locations and movements, vocal inflections, and large-group massing and movements” (p.70). In the analyses that will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, therefore, much more space is given to the performances that the girls displayed, with the interviews serving to enrich my understanding of the girls’ ritual performances. To quote Quantz (2011) again, “What people say about the performances is important, but how they actually perform their identities and their politics is even more important” (p. 44, italics added). According to research in environmental literacy (see for example: Alp, et.al., 2006; Coyle, 2005; Heimlich, 1992; OECD, 2009; Trisler, 1993), girls demonstrate a higher affinity for the environment and hold stronger beliefs and values around environmental issues, but this does not translate into action. It is this disparity between what they say and what they do that I was interested in exploring with the interviews. What type of identities are created around sustainability when there is a disconnect between what is said and what is performed? What are the cultural and material consequences of an identity that is not performed, but only available to spoken discourse? While many informal conversations were held, I attempted to supplement these conversations with five requests for a more in-depth discussion about sustainability and girls. Out of those five requests, three semi-structured and “formal” interviews were conducted. It was my intent to do these interviews at a time when the girls were free—not during structured class time (possibly after school hours if transportation did not pose a problem). All three took place after school hours. While more detail will be provided later, all three girls were seniors that I had observed in more than one class. All three were over eighteen and considered “strong” science students by their teachers. One interview was held in a conference room at St. Sofia. Another was held at a local public library and the third interview was held at my home. The interviews were audio-recorded and reflective notes were written after the interviews, as again, performativity during these interviews may provide as much data as the spoken word. Audio-recordings were later transcribed. The following questions provided a framework to begin a conversation around issues of science, girlhoods, and sustainability. They were not strictly followed, especially if a participant began a conversation thread that excited and illuminated her. However, the following did allow for a focus within the interview.
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Interview Questions/Conversation Starters7
Tell me about yourself What is your favorite subject in school and why? What do you think about this science class? What are you learning about that you enjoy? What don’t you enjoy learning about in here? What have you learned in here that can be applied to other places in your life now or in the future? What types of activities do you participate in after school? What do you enjoy about these activities? How does this activity apply to other places in your life? How do you relate to science? How do you think other girls relate to science? What does it mean to be a girl today? What does it mean to be a girl at this school? In this (science) class? What does “going green” mean to you? What does sustainability mean to you? How do you think girls relate to “go green” messages? What does “go green” have to do with sustainability? Environmental issues? How does science influence your understanding of sustainability? How does science influence your understanding of being a girl?*** What environmental issues do you know about? What do you know about this issue/these issues? Where did you learn about this issue? Is it important to you and why or why not? Do any sustainability/environmental issues seem more important to you than others? Which one(s) and why? Why do you think girls care about/don’t care about sustainability? Why do you care about/not care about sustainability?
7 These questions have in part been derived from two sources: Bettis and Roe’s (2008) “Reading Girls: Living Literate and Powerful Lives” in Research in Middle Level Education Online, Vol. 32, Issue 1 and also Amira Proweller’s (1998) Constructing female identities: Meaning making in an upper middle class youth culture.
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Do you consider yourself an environmental activist? Why or why not? Tell me about yourself as an activist. What do you like about yourself when you participate in environmental/sustainability activities? How would you describe your participation in science class when issue of sustainability/the environment come up? If you could establish one sustainable activity for your school/your family/your community, what would it be and why?
Textual data were also collected to add to the validity of the data gathered. This included, but was not limited to, classroom materials such as handouts and textbooks, school materials such as school newspapers and flyers, online materials and messages affiliated with the school (this is to limit such things as Facebook and other social media, which , while influential to many students today and worthy of study, is beyond the current scope of this study), materials associated with after school activities and fieldtrips, and other materials that may be provided by students or teachers at these locations. All of the data collected were kept as both hard and electronic copies (i. e., field notes in a notebook were typed into a word document). The electronic data were saved on a flash drive as well as backed up on an external hard drive. Where possible, textual data were scanned and also stored in this manner. These data will be stored on a password protected computer and/or within a password protected folder until 2016 when the data will be destroyed. All hard copies will be kept in a locked file cabinet in my home office until 2016 when the data will be destroyed. Data Analysis Repeating what has already been said, it is my hope that this study will move beyond analysis, into critique, and hopefully beyond to future praxis. This case study will seek to “recognize the interplay between the cultural and material relations that are realized in ritual” (Quantz, 2011, p. 17). The data analysis sought to illuminate some of the hidden “commonsense” values and beliefs that are created and legitimized by science around issues of girlhood and sustainability and how girls use ritual to both accept and resist these meanings. Again, according to Quantz (2011), “The task of the ‘critic’…is to find a way to present the
59 multiple voices in dialogue while also revealing the potential distortions between these performative meanings and the material lives of the oppressed and disempowered” (p.71). This included searching out the rituals used by these girls, not to simply identify them, but to understand how the girls use these rituals to make meaning of issues of sustainability and science, and also more largely, their lives. This means looking within each case as well as across the cases to be analyzed and seeking out the material consequences of normalized and resisted meanings around issues of girlhood and sustainability. The analysis includes a detailed description of each school setting (see Chapter 4). Themes and patterns were sought through a coding of the data. This was done by examining my research notes, journals, interview transcripts, and textual data looking for the performances these girls used to make meaning in their lives. These themes and patterns were found both within each school (within each case) and across the two schools (across the cases), where the analysis focused on searching out similarities and differences between the two cases. Once general patterns were deduced, a number of themes arose around specific questions that this dissertation study seeks to answer. The results will be discussed in Chapter 5. Scriptive Things One might think that adding another method to an already complicated and imperfectly stitched methodology would only make this story less clear. However, I believe that bringing Bernstein’s (2011) scriptive things method into play with ritual critique actually helps to illuminate a number of different avenues of possibility. Ritual critique helps to “...find and illuminate the way in which material power is institutionalized into the nonrational practices of our schools and lead us to replace them with new practices designed to celebrate democracy and justice” (Quantz, 2011, p. 19). It is in the matrix of the cultural and material that ritual critique illuminates power distortions. Using Bernstein’s theory brings the material into a clearer focus by looking at…
lived behaviors—performances in everyday life…the method entails using archival knowledge and historical context to determine the documented, probable, and possible uses of a category of object…The operative questions are, “What historically located behaviors did this artifact invite? And what practices did it discourage?” The goal is not to determine what any individual did with an artifact but rather to understand how a
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nonagential artifact, in its historical context, prompted or invited-scripted-actions of humans who were agential and not infrequently resistant. (Bernstein, 2011, 253/7645)
And so, within the imperfectly stitched framework with which I began this study, I will be exploring Robin Bernstein’s analysis of scriptive things in Chapter 7 to look more closely at how actual material objects affected the ritual performances that I examined in this research. Bernstein (2011) states, I understand a script as theater directors do: a script is a dynamic substance that deeply influences but does not entirely determine live performances, which vary according to agential individuals’ visions, impulses, resistances, revisions, and management of unexpected disruptions… (1470/7465) Using examples from the late nineteenth century, Bernstein (2011) explores how race and childhood were intricately linked through scriptive things such as dolls, books, and handkerchiefs. Exploring white children’s play with black dolls, she goes on to say, Many of these performances…coordinated through a device, a contrivance, that I call a “scriptive thing,” an item of material culture that prompts meaningful bodily behaviors…The set of prompts that a thing issues is not the same as a performance because individuals commonly resist, revise, or ignore instructions. In other words, the set of prompts does not reveal a performance, but it does reveal a script for a performance. (1478/7465) When the white children whipped their black dolls, their performances were “…utterances of thoughts that cannot be expressed in words” (Bernstein, 2011, 1519/7465). Combining cultural narrative, material things (as opposed to material objects), and performances, Bernstein (2011) uses her theory as “…a tool for analyzing incomplete evidence—and all evidence is incomplete—to make responsible, limited inferences…” (1624/7465). Using scriptive things will aid in my understanding of how the objects within the spaces the girls occupied became things that they “danced” with, things that informed their ritual performances.
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CHAPTER 4 SAINT SOFIA AND SAINT AGNES: SETTING THE CONTEXT The schools--with their individual localities, teachers, and students--each brought a unique set of rituals and meaning construction to the topic of this research. This chapter informs the reader of the different contexts in which this data was collected. Understanding the interactions between the unique cultural and material contexts of each site reveals their particular contradictions between performative rituals, lived experiences, and spoken words. Saint Sofia St. Sofia8 is an all-girls parochial school in an urban area of a well-known Midwestern city. A Catholic institution, one of the school’s informal mottos is “Go Green.” This motto holds more than one meaning—the school’s colors are green and white and the school is also known for its recycling efforts (or more historically, its paper drives). Under another name, the school was established in the 1850’s by the Sisters of Charity. In 1928, the school was renamed and the girls’ department of the previous school moved to its current site as an all girls’ school. While tuition assistance is available for students of need, the majority of the students attending this school are from families that range economically from middle income to upper income. Those who receive tuition assistance are expected to give back to the school through service, namely the cleaning of the classrooms after school. On the few occasions where I witnessed this event, girls would come in dressed to leave (coats and backpacks on) with a spray bottle and cloth. They would push in chairs, squirt the top of each desk with cleaner, swipe once with the cloth, and move on. Done quickly (and not well), it could take a student less than two minutes to finish an entire room. The utilities staff, a new group run by a young white woman and staffed by (mostly) African American women and men, would come in behind the girls and (often) do the same task again. However, each of the female teachers I observed noted how much cleaner the school was with this new staff compared to the old one. The school itself is located in an urban space, on the border between a predominantly African American section of town and a predominantly Latino/immigrant section of town. 2010 census data shows average household incomes ranging from $14,000 to $86,000, with 23% of the population living below the poverty line. Racially, 61% of the people within this area identify as White, 31% as African American, and 5% as Latino. With a student population just
8 All names have been changed to protect student/teacher/school confidentiality.
62 under 550 students, 94% are White, 5% are African American, and less than 1% are Latino—a mismatch with the neighborhood population statistics. Located on the “west side” of the city, a traditionally blue-collar area, the local neighborhood where the school is located is a minority neighborhood. The local public schools, however, boast the second largest high school in the state and they were recently awarded more than half a million dollars in Race to the Top funds. Saint Sofia itself is a newer space. Most of the older sections of the school have been renovated or rebuilt. As one of several Catholic all girls’ schools in the region, St. Sofia sought out a number of ways to place itself ahead of other local schools or demonstrate their uniqueness compared to the other schools. For a short time several years ago, it was known as a “spirit- school,” as it won a number of competitive contests which brought in a number of celebrities. With a new administration came new attitudes towards scholastic pursuit, and students and faculty were highly disappointed that these events were no longer allowed. Instead, the science wing was overhauled, classrooms were fitted with SMART technology, and students were given personal computers. These tablet computers and the SMART technology did not necessarily increase the school’s presence around the area as other schools did very similar things shortly after St. Sofia, but it did provide teachers and students new technologies and ways these could be used (and abused) within the classroom. Complaints from the school’s technology staff included the over use of their bandwidth which led to the blocking of a number of popular student sites during the course of my observations. This did not prevent students from going off task during science class, however. Video chats were occasionally seen between girls in different classes (and possibly schools), with the volume muted, of course, but silly faces and sign language still available as a form of communication. The science teachers in particular seemed to not use this technology advantage as an aid to their teaching or increased student learning and engagement. This will be discussed further in a subsequent section of this chapter. Morale, as described by several teachers, was low among faculty and students, due in part to a move away from school spirit competitions (and the rewards these competitions brought) and new policies put in place by a recently hired principal. This year, during my time at the school, the students were allowed to compete in another celebrity contest which they won. Jordin Sparks, American Idol winner, came to the school to talk about her experiences with People to People, an ambassador program that introduces students to different cultures and experiences around the world (for a cost). Not allowed to sing, she talked with the students about her time with People to
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People in Europe. Spark’s ultra-feminine demeanor and purposefully “ignorant” talk was in contrast to some of the performances of strong feminine and feminist students at the school. This is not to suggest there were not girls at the school who did not take up the same performances as Jordin Sparks, but that there were other girls who did not let cultural expectations limit their performances (as far as they understood!). Sparks dressed in a very traditionally feminine outfit (a light blue turtle neck and dress pants) with hair, makeup and jewelry; spoke in a giggly, familiar voice, as though she were their confidante, using simple vocabulary; sat very conservatively in her chair; and kept her shoulders moving forward and upward as an indication of femininity (think of an innocent feminine shrug with a “who, me??” question attached to it). During a slide show of her trip, she talked emotionally about both her brother, who went on the trip with her, and the students she developed friendships with over the course of their several day trip. Spark’s performance was in contrast to many of the performances observed at St. Sofia, which will be discussed in Chapter 5. Class Spaces and Teachers at St. Sofia Over the course of this study, I was introduced to a number of teachers at St. Sofia, but the study focused on just five teachers—three Science teachers, an English teacher, and an Art teacher. While there were five science teachers at the school, the three science teachers that I worked with all had prior careers in the field of science before deciding to become a teacher. Dr. Metz and Mrs. Anderson had returned to school to gain their certification in teaching before entering the classroom, while Mr. Franklin was still completing the requirements. The classroom spaces were all fairly new. Large rectangular rooms, the science classrooms were symbolically split down the center to accommodate a classroom side dedicated to lecturing and a science lab side for experimentation. Each lab side also had an office with a window that looked over the lab space. There was a small entry area from the hallway which opened into the larger spaces as well as the office. Each teacher had a very distinct style and organization to their rooms that will be described below. While styles were different, the equipment (tables, chairs, desks, technology, etc.) was not. The tall black epoxy topped tables on the lab side had stools for sitting and around the perimeter of the lab side were floor cupboards topped with the same black surface as the lab tables. Sinks and outlets were embedded along the perimeter. Hanging cupboards were attached to the wall next to the office window. A safety shower was in each room, located on the classroom side of the room. This was stationed close to the front of the
64 classroom next to the teacher’s desk. The teacher’s desk consisted of an extended lab table which sat in front of the SMART board screen and white dry erase boards replaced chalkboards at the front of the classroom and along the side wall of the classroom. Windows were present along the back wall of each classroom. These were functioning windows (they opened and closed) that looked out over the visitor/faculty parking lot. On the top floor of this wing of the school, the science department could (and seemed often to) stay in their space—only occasionally would we go down to eat lunch with other staff members in the teachers’ lounge. Science Teacher #1: Dr. Metz. Dr. Metz, my school contact through the principal, was a white, middle-aged woman with a doctorate in biochemistry. Short and plump, sneakers, large solid colored tee-shirts and stretch pants were her daily costume. Dr. Metz also sported a chin length bobbed haircut with bangs and wore reading glasses. Multiple pairs of her reading glasses were found throughout the classroom in different areas, and occasionally, when she wasn’t searching for those around the classroom, Dr. Metz would have a pair in her hair and around her neck. Like many of us, Dr. Metz often found herself having to balance family issues with work. The family stress she experienced took a toll on her physically, but may also have affected her teaching. Dr. Metz utilized a very traditional, fixed and prescriptive pedagogy. She stuck to scripted lessons, using the PowerPoint programs that the book manufacturer provided to the school. Labs were not frequently performed, and if they were, they too were scripted activities that did not invite inquiry thinking or learning. Teaching Honors Biology, College Prep Biology and Advanced Placement (AP) Biology, Dr. Metz’s schedule was full. As the AP Biology teacher, she was often frustrated by the lack of preparation that the students had in other science classes as well as the school’s policy (or lack thereof) that permitted students to take as many AP classes as they wanted. She often said that her class was one that was not given due attention by the students and she worried about how this would reflect on her teaching through student scores on the AP exam. With changes in the AP science curriculum beginning the next school year to reflect more inquiry oriented activities, Dr. Metz also worried about how she would incorporate this into her AP classroom, which moved through material slowly. The class focused on one early chapter for the majority of the observation period. After attending a conference for AP teachers, Dr. Metz learned that other teachers required students to complete the first three to five chapters of their AP text book on their own over the summer before classes began. This
65 revelation frustrated her even further and she reacted to this by trying to move more quickly through the information. However, the girls resisted her increased speed through questioning, not completing homework, begging for extensions on homework and tests, and other maneuvers. For all of her frustrations in life and the classroom, Dr. Metz passionately promoted recycling. As the head teacher of the Eco-Club, she taught recycling values to her students and the entire school (including the teachers and administrators). Caps, bottles, batteries, paper, old electronics, chip bags…if it could be recycled, she wanted it recycled at St. Sofia. Some of the projects earned her money that Dr. Metz either handed over to the school or used to finance more recycling efforts. Dr. Metz’s classroom was a cluttered space, overflowing with recyclables, student posters, pots for planting, bags of dirt, carts full of aquariums with either fish or the bugs students were encouraged to bring in from home for extra credit. Butter tubs and other Tupperware like containers covered in cellophane wrap filled an entire lab table and several carts. Inside were spiders of all kinds, crickets, stick bugs, praying mantes, and any number of other live creatures. One container (for a short period of time) held a five-legged frog that a student found on a local camping trip. Dr. Metz would purchase crickets regularly to feed these insects. Often, the noise of the insects was strident. Besides the insect menagerie, every available surface in the classroom and lab area was covered regularly. If a lab was to be completed, the clutter was shifted to open lab tables for the groups to work at. Space was at a premium, and when a load of caps (over 16,000) to be recycled was delivered to her room, the floor was covered as well. Science Teacher #2: Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson was a St. Sofia alumna who attended the school with many of the current students’ parents, aunts, or grandmothers. In addition, the gym teacher at the school was her sister-in-law—another alumna. Family relations were common at the school, making it rather likely that a number of students, staff, and faculty were related in some way. Mrs. Anderson began her career as a science researcher at a local university until she had children. After being a stay-at-home mother for several years, she returned to the workforce as a teacher. A white, middle aged woman, Mrs. Anderson was tall, with a shock of black curly hair kept fairly short. Her daily uniform consisted of dress pants, flats, and a blouse with an occasional sweater or jacket over the top. She wore light makeup to complete her appearance. With a child at a neighboring school, Mrs. Anderson often blurred the
66 lines between parent and teacher with her students. Sharing stories of students’ relatives from their shared experiences as youths in the neighborhood or discussing posts on Facebook, Mrs. Anderson frequently brought her outside life into the classroom. Teaching the basic biology classes, Mrs. Anderson was the only part-time educator at the school. Other faculty and staff who held part time-teaching loads had other duties within the school to bring them to full-time employee status. Mrs. Anderson, through her own choice, did not. And yet, even though she chose to work part time, she was often at the school full time, subbing and fulfilling other administrative needs for the school. In order and organization, Mrs. Anderson’s room was distinctly different from Dr. Metz’s room. Spotless and empty, every available space within this classroom was free from clutter or equipment. Tables, lab space, and her desk were clean and free of paper and equipment. The space was sterile. On a white board in the lab side of the room, a drawing of a giant green frog said, “Go Green.” A wooden skeleton hung in front of the office window. Posters were carefully placed at the correct angles and in an order that suggested it followed their book chapters. Any writing that was on a white board was perfectly aligned and neatly written. I even witnessed Mrs. Anderson erasing her own work and recopying it because it was not straight. This performance of neatness was in stark contrast to her manner of teaching, which bounced from one idea to the next, without linearity or order. Science Teacher #3: Mr. Franklin. Mr. Franklin, a self-described introvert, also had a career in science before working towards becoming a teacher. His novice status was sometimes evident in his teaching. Mr. Franklin appeared to take the school motto, “simplicity, charity, and humility,” as a basis for his pedagogy saying that teachers should simplify the curriculum, teach to the test or the standards, and leave it at that. White and middle aged, Mr. Franklin was unmarried, preferring solitariness. His glasses and introverted mannerisms helped to create a distracted scientist demeanor. Of the three observed science teachers at St. Sofia, only Mr. Franklin began each class with prayer including special intentions and the Hail Mary. Mr. Franklin taught Earth Science, Anatomy and Physiology, and Physical Science. He often showed movies or assigned very short activities and did not appear to be particularly well respected by the students. They often failed to comply with his requests and refused to engage with the material in his class. In our conversations, he often provided me with detailed explanations for his choice of activity, lesson, or movie. His awkwardness with people was
67 explicitly performed with the high school girls, who knew how to take advantage of this trait. In one instance, a young woman asked to go to the restroom. After receiving permission, she went towards the back of the room instead of the door. As she whispered with another friend, who was rustling around in her book bag, Mr. Franklin hollered at her for talking when she was supposed to be going to the bathroom. He attempted to take away the permission he had given, but she ignored him as her friend brought forth a tampon, raised it triumphantly over her head, laughed out loud, and handed it to the girl who headed directly to the bathroom. Her mortification was noticeably less than Mr. Franklin’s who could only sputter, “Well, okay… then.” The visible, material order of Mr. Franklin’s room fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of orderliness. Somewhere between Dr. Metz and Mrs. Anderson, who occupied polar opposite ends, in Mr. Franklin’s room each cupboard was labeled with its’ contents. However, the few times he attempted to look for something in a marked cupboard, he had a difficult time finding the exact thing he was looking for. In one memorable instance, he was trying to change students’ minds about the excitement of the rock cycle by showing them a sample rock. After several minutes of opening box after box of rocks, one student, who resisted “normal” performances of girlhood, said, “I don’t care what this rock looks like, you’re not changing my mind.” Mr. Franklin was the only teacher who consistently had his students at the lab tables, though the activities were scripted and did not provide much room for engaged learning. English Teacher: Mr. Garrison. In addition to these three teachers, two others agreed to participate in this study as measures of comparison to the science classrooms. One, Mr. Garrison, was an English teacher who taught Freshman Honors English and AP English. Many of the students observed in the above science classrooms were also observed in this classroom. The actual classroom was in an older section of the school, and as such had a different feel than the science classrooms. It was located at the end of a hallway, and several times I lost my way as I went to and from the room. The room, in a corner of the building, was smaller than the science classroom spaces with windows on two walls. However, the desk arrangement made the room seem larger. Chalkboards covered the other two walls. The SMART board was at the front of the room, as was a very small desk with no storage space and a podium. In addition to desks, several overstuffed, old chairs were scattered in with the desks. The center of the room was empty with the desks pushed against the three walls facing the front of the room—where the
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SMART board was. A semi-circle of sorts was created with this desk arrangement, presumably to be conducive to conversation, but the classes that I observed had very little student talk. There were no book shelves or storage spaces within the classroom, but a small closet in a front corner perhaps provided storage space. An old radiator stood next to my observation seat, which, according to Mr. Garrison, either ran very hot or very cold. During my visits, the room was so warm that the girls often asked to open the windows. Mr. Garrison was a white middle-aged man of average height and build. He wore dress khakis and button-up shirts with a tie. His voice was very loud. He often kept his door open at the beginning of class, but after the teacher across the hall would close his door (after pointedly looking into Mr. Garrison’s room), Mr. Garrison would follow suit. Mr. Garrison was very adept with the use of the new technology in the school. He kept his computer locked on to the student view so that he could see what site, page or program every student was on during class. He made sure student computers were synched with his and used email quite frequently to make sure students were on the same page. Mr. Garrison’s teaching performance was similar to Mrs. Anderson—never remaining on one topic for very long, but jumping around and moving in a distinctly non-linear format. Mr. Garrison broke his regular teaching format during instruction around a formal research paper, when he brought each freshman student up to his desk and discussed their theme. He kept a ball in the room, slightly under inflated, which he threw towards students when he asked them a question. He often called the girls by their last names and there was a sense of familiarity between him and the students. The girls were engaged and focused in the class, and while energy levels were not always high, there was little slouching or sinking in their seats. Art Teacher: Mrs. Margot. Mrs. Margot was the Art teacher. St. Sofia’s art program was fairly well known—fashion shows, artwork displays, and art competition possibilities were offered during my observations. While student work was prominently displayed throughout the school, the art corridor was particularly interesting and full of student work (and a number of recycling bins—more than anywhere else in the school). The art room, with more student work on display, was actually two large interconnected rooms that were the entire length of a school wing. Full windows stretched from ceiling to almost the floor on one wall allowing plenty of natural light into the room. Tall tables made two U shaped areas at each end of the room. This allowed Mrs. Margot access to both the outside and inside space to observe students at work.
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The room itself was messy and splattered with paint and other art tools and mediums. There was quite a bit of storage along the walls to hold student portfolios; backpacks were stacked along the windows, and computers were hardly ever seen. A radio played in the background, students relaxed as they worked, and a calm seemed to permeate the room. Mrs. Margot helped sustain this atmosphere—her voice was never raised, she seemed to treat students with respect by giving plenty of freedom to the students, and they reciprocated by not taking advantage of their freedom. Not yet middle-aged, Mrs. Margot was a white woman with elementary school aged children. Students At St. Sofia, three distinct groups of girls became apparent through the rituals that they performed on a daily basis. I have chosen to label them in the following ways: the smart girls, the popular girls, and the misfit girls. This brief description of these groups does not begin to lay out all the nuances that were present over the course of my data collection, but does go to show the general performances expected for membership within these groups. The nuances will be explored in the next chapter through examples of how girls made meaning through their performances of these identities. The smart girls privileged a performance that acknowledged their good student status. This often meant performing for the teacher or authority figure. The popular girls privileged performances that recognized their social standing among the other girls within the school. For these girls, performances of popularity meant being the center of attention. The students who performed misfit either resisted performances of girlhoods that were normalized by the school or tried too hard to fit into another group, misperforming expected behaviors. Saint Agnes St. Agnes is a co-ed school, located in a neighboring Midwestern state, but in a very rural area. Founded in 1851 to educate the German immigrants who settled the town, St. Agnes began as an all-girls K-12 boarding school to meet the needs of students who could not travel throughout the rural area to school. In the middle of the twentieth century, the elementary school was closed and the focus became high school education. With changes in student populations and economics, the residential option was eventually dropped and boys were welcomed into the student population at the turn of the twenty-first century. With a student population just over 200, 98% are White and 2% are Hispanic. Again, tuition assistance is available for students in need, but, economically,
70 most students are from middle income to upper income families. The school is located on the grounds of a retirement convent—a number of students participate in an Adopt-A-Sis lunch program where they volunteer to eat with one of the retired sisters on a regular basis. The small city’s German heritage is very much apparent in German street and business signs. The original structures in town are very similar in construction—made of similar brick, there are two story homes, the church, the convent, and the wall that surrounds the convent grounds. Small businesses come and go from the storefronts on the main street (strasse) of the city, which is approximately three blocks long and three blocks wide. While city streets spread slightly beyond this central area, farms are located immediately at the end of the main street’s three block length. The sisters own one of these farms, which they have been running since 1851 and continue to operate through both their work and volunteer efforts. The reach of the Catholic Church is fairly evident in the city and many of the activities that the city supports. With a population under 700 people, more than 99% identify as White within this community and according to 2010 census data, the average household income was $42,000. St. Agnes was an open campus school, with several buildings that the students traversed to and from throughout the day. The academic building, where I spent my time observing, was a U- shaped building with three floors of classrooms, a gymnasium, administrative offices, and a student lounge. Trophy cases, photos of the school sports teams, student artwork, and general school spirit décor lined the first floor walls. Upstairs, the walls were almost empty—a few college posters and reminders were scattered around, but for the most part there was little on the walls. The teachers’ lounge and the guidance counselor’s office as well as several classrooms were on this second floor, including the two interconnected science rooms. A wing of the convent residence hall held the art classrooms, a chapel, the library, and cafeteria. A separate building housed the auditorium and music and practice classrooms. Much like St. Sofia’s, St. Agnes hoped that technology would increase the school’s ability to recruit students. iPads were the technological tool of choice for St. Agnes. Textbooks were supposed to be downloaded here, although neither of the science teachers had their students do this, but instead relied on the actual physical objects. Again, much like St. Sofia’s experience, competing schools followed suit and offered technological advances to their students shortly after St. Agnes did. At St. Agnes, the science teachers did not use the iPads, instead requiring students to put them away during class
71 time. With no real training on how to use these tools effectively, the science teachers felt that these iPads were an inefficient tool for the students and themselves. During my almost two months of observations at St. Agnes, there were only a handful of days that were not special schedules. Shortened class periods made way for assemblies, mass, pep rallies, class meetings, mentor meetings, and other activities on a regular basis. The science teachers often worried about the effect these rearrangements had on their teaching and student learning. Often it was more complicated than simply shortening the periods—periods were flipped and rearranged so that afternoon classes were in the morning or in the middle of the day or possibly in the afternoon. Trying to stay on top of the constantly shifting classes and students was not easy! One of these disrupted days ended with a school pep rally for homecoming. Students were sent to the gymnasium to be entertained and to show school spirit; however, school spirit was missing from student performances. While there was applause for game contestants and contest winners, student performances also included eye rolling, back handed comments, overly exaggerated enthusiasm from students, and outright laughter. Even several of the teachers and staff were critical of the event. The cheerleaders, who came onto the gym floor for one cheer, struggled to balance their desire to fulfill the performance of cheerleader with their performance of girl and student at this school. They were very quiet—one could hardly hear the words they were (not) shouting. They looked uncomfortable in their outfits which were modest in comparison to some uniforms. Cheerleaders often exaggerate their movements, but this team made small movements, never extending their arms or legs during their cheers. They did not stand tall and proud, but rather stood in small groups of girls with their shoulders and heads down. While the crowning of homecoming king and queen is traditionally the highlight of homecoming celebrations, the crowning of the teacher/staff homecoming king and queen was of particular interest. The female science teacher, Mrs. Andre, discussed this event ahead of time. Students voted for which teachers would be part of the contest and she was sure that she was one of the favorites and a shoe-in for the title. She was not even nominated for the court. The male science teacher, Mr. Johnson, resisted the thought of a popularity contest among the faculty and was adamant in his rejection of such a ritual. Interestingly enough, he was one of the favorites forced to enjoy a crown, roses, and (unwanted) attention from the students. For the students, according to both parents and teachers, being chosen for the court was not a prestigious event;
72 instead it was considered a joke by many (although perhaps not by the winners). However, who won the contest was not determined at the pep rally. That was kept for the half-time show at the homecoming game to be held that weekend. Teachers and Class Space at St. Agnes Science Teacher #1: Mrs. Andre. Mrs. Andre was a petite, white, middle-aged woman who both farmed and taught science. With hair kept short except for a “rat-tail,” a waist length, thin braid, she held several undergraduate and graduate degrees (computers, math, science, teaching, etc.). She lived on and ran her own working farm along with providing support for her mother’s farm, all in addition to her teaching responsibilities at St. Agnes. With twin sons at the school, she also balanced rather precariously between her performances of teacher and parent. Family distractions were a constant source of talk from Mrs. Andre to me. The largest distraction was Mrs. Andre’s health. Three years prior she was attacked by a cow, which, after throwing Mrs. Andre across a field and breaking her back, trampled her body destroying a number of Mrs. Andre’s internal organs. Her recovery was deemed miraculous by those at the school and her medical care workers, but the injuries never healed and Mrs. Andre was in constant pain. She moved very slowly, had several different comfortable chairs to sit in throughout the room, including a recliner, and grimaced constantly. She often taught from a seat behind her desk which provided easy access to her computer which was linked to the SMART board in her room. If she did get up to pass out papers, it was an arduous process, as she moved from the front of the room to the back over and over again until all papers were returned. Her teaching pedagogy favored lectures as she did not believe labs were useful with the time constraints of teaching. Much of what she taught was not from textbooks, but instead her own collection of materials and information. When she did use the chosen text, it was not as a textbook, but instead was the manufacturer’s PowerPoint presentations. Concerned with what she considered to be errors in the text books, Mrs. Andre developed her own collection of texts for the students, which consisted of photocopied sections of texts, worksheets, and other forms of information about a topic that she had collected over her teaching career. Her room was a biology lab and classroom in one space. The lab area was not separate as noted in the other science classrooms, but instead, the students sat at the lab tables, using them as desks (which posed no problem since Mrs. Andre did not perform labs). The tables were not tall but did have sinks and gas line hook ups. Students sat on short, uncomfortable stools with no
73 backs. Three rows of tables had room for twelve students in each row. Around the perimeter of the classroom were cupboards with glass doors above, and closed doors below. These glass cabinets were full of biological artifacts—bones, fossils, dried plants, specimen jars with preserved animals, etc. The table tops along the walls were covered with books and folders full of worksheets and other papers. The class was only full during freshman biology, where students sat on both sides of the tables, facing the front of the room and the back. This posed several problems in regards to engagement. Students’ attention to the lecture was short lived, especially in the classes which were full. Instead, there was leg bumping, note writing, silent (and not so silent) communication between friends, iPads on laps, etc. From her perspective at the front of the room, Mrs. Andre either ignored this behavior or did not see it. Science Teacher #2: Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was a retired school administrator and science teacher. Older than many of the other faculty, he was quick on his feet and with his comments. White haired and balding, he wore glasses and a pressed, button down shirt with a tie and dress pants everyday but Friday. On Fridays, school-wide dress-down days, he wore jeans and a button down shirt with a school tee-shirt over the top, but he seemed very uncomfortable on these days. Mr. Johnson was not a regular lecturer like his colleague. His voice almost never rose above a quiet “inside” voice. As soon as he began talking, student talk stopped and students provided him with their (perhaps not one-hundred percent) attention. While students did take occasional notes on lined paper in notebooks, most of the class periods were spent on chemistry or physics problems. Mr. Johnson knew his chemistry from years of teaching and re-reading the book on a nightly basis (which he told me he did). However, he was not as comfortable with physics and relied on the students and book to guide the class through the problem set of the day. There was one female student that he relied on for gauging student understanding in his advanced classes. Even as a junior, she was younger than her junior and senior classmates. Mr. Johnson always checked her understanding of the material being covered. If she understood or could figure it out, he moved on. If she seemed unsure, he covered the material again. Other students, particularly the females, did not receive this kind of treatment. A common strategy for Mr. Johnson was to not respond directly to student distress during problem reviews. When students worked independently, a different pattern emerged. The boys, who sat together along one side of the room, worked together solving their problems. They were not afraid to ask each other for help. The girls, who sat in the middle of the room, did not rely on each other, but
74 instead called on Mr. Johnson to help them out. Mr. Johnson did perform several labs with his students over the course of the observations, but preferred to work with the more advanced groups. While the AP classes had a specific number of labs that had to be completed throughout the year, the general chemistry classes also did several labs. Mr. Johnson’s classroom was a more typical science classroom with a distinct classroom space and a separate lab space. The classroom space consisted of thirty desks that faced the front of the room where the chalkboard and SMART board were located. Mr. Johnson preferred to use the chalkboard only and would write out his notes and problems for each class on the chalkboard. He erased as he went along, writing more notes and problems on the board as the class progressed. Students were required to keep on top of the notes with this method of note taking. When he did use the SMART board, he often struggled with getting the technology to do what he wanted it to do. Students often came to his rescue when problems occurred. On the lab side of the classroom, a safety shower and fume hood were located on the hallway side of the classroom with two long double sided lab tables stretching the width of the classroom. A lab table space stretched along the back wall of the room and also in between the shower and hood. These were storage spaces for the chemicals and equipment that students used. Sinks were located at the ends of the student lab tables, with a drainage area in the center of the tables that led to the sinks. Shelving ran down the center of the student tables, separating the two sides of the tables, and beneath the tables were cupboards and drawers that stored each groups’ lab equipment. How the groups were decided remains unclear, but the groups knew where to go for their labs even if the students were unsure of what to do once there. Mr. Johnson expected the students to have read the lab prior to class and know exactly what needed to be done and so did not review lab expectations during class time. Lab safety was not discussed with the students prior to beginning a lab. This is quite in contrast to Mr. Franklin from St. Sofia, who, when the girls were working with food coloring, soap, and hydrogen peroxide, or food coloring and hot water, required full plastic aprons and goggles from all students before and during the activity. Mr. Johnson liked to do labs that left a memory with the students. According to Mr. Johnson, if it wasn’t memorable, it wasn’t good enough. One lab that I witnessed consisted of students collecting a gas and lighting it to see if anything happened. Mr. Johnson went around to the all-girl groups and did the lighting for them, while the groups of all boys or mixed gender had boys involved in the exploding of the collected gas. While there were
75 no fire balls, there was plenty of loud, explosive pops that excited the entire class including Mr. Johnson. Students At St. Agnes, the co-ed environment affected the ways in which girlhoods were performed. Girls practiced heterosexual girlhood on a more regular and explicit basis. While three groups of girls emerged that mirrored those found at St. Sofia, the lines between these groups at St. Agnes were blurrier and harder to distinguish. There was a much greater crossing of boundaries and a lack of exclusivity between groups. With approximately one fifth the number of girls as at St. Sofia, St. Agnes girls had fewer people to develop bounded groups with as they maneuvered through high school. In addition, these girls came from fewer parishes and elementary schools from nearby cities (three or four compared to eleven or more at St. Sofia), leading to a much greater likelihood that they had been together throughout their schooling experiences and knew each other more intimately than the students at St. Sofia. This is not to suggest that these relationships were not at St. Sofia, but rather, because there were fewer students at St. Agnes, these relationships were more apparent. As stated earlier, these performances and the meanings that girls made from them will be explored in detail in the next chapter.
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CHAPTER 5 THE RESULTS PERFORMANCES OF GIRLHOODS The purpose of the next two chapters is to explore the themes that arose from the data collected over the course of this research. In order to explore those themes it is important to revisit a few items. First, the question being researched is: How do performances of girlhood interact with performances of sustainability? In order to reach an answer to that question, it was necessary to answer several other questions: what performances of girlhoods were observed; what performances of science were observed; what performances of sustainability were observed? Each of these questions provided clues as to how the girls made meaning of the ritual performances that they performed and also shed light on what was normalized and what was challenged when examining how performances of girlhoods interacted with performances of sustainability. Because sustainability is interwoven tightly with science, and because the hypothesis that this research was based on was using sustainability to pull more girls into the science pipeline, it was also necessary to look at girls’ performances in science. In addition, many of the issues discussed around sustainability are, or can be, taught in science and in socio- scientific discussions. Also important to remember is that in ritual critique, while determining the actual ritual is important, it is equally important to understand how the girls make meaning through that ritual. The focus of this chapter will be on the girls’ performances of girlhoods. Therefore, attempts to briefly lay out the different rituals performed by girls around girlhoods will be followed by an in depth exploration of the meaning that the girls were attaching to these ritual performances. In chapter 6, I will explore the girls’ performances of science and sustainability. Chapter 6 will conclude with answers to the research question itself, framed within the context of these sub-questions’ responses. There is one theme that runs through both of these chapters that will be addressed first, so as to pull its threads more tightly together as I examine the other themes that developed over the course of this research. That is the theme of the good-girl student. Because this dissertation looks at high school girls in both co-ed and single sex spaces and because it specifically examines girls in school/student spaces, it is important to acknowledge what McLaren (1986) termed as the student state. Girls’ student state rests on successfully performing the good-girl student (Orenstein, 2000). This is how these specific girls were acknowledged and rewarded
77 within the classroom space. This is how they demonstrated acceptance of and resistance to authorities, science class, sustainability and other girls through their performances of good-girl student (or bad girl student). This good-girl student was observed through a number of ritualized performances, which were necessarily tied up into the performances that will be explored throughout the rest of this chapter and the next. However, many of these performances circled around: following teacher directions; performing “normal” girlhood meaning heterosexual, white, and middle class; not challenging the authority figures; remaining quiet unless called upon; being a “top” student—this did not mean earning A+’s in class, but instead answering teacher questions, being “engaged” in class, showing “respect” for the teacher, and performing a certain level of social acumen (being slightly, but not too, popular). Being the good-girl student required that all of these be performed in tandem—performing one or a few of these traits did not necessarily provide a girl entry into the good-girl student group. However, it is important to note this performance because all of the other performances took place through this one performance. Resistances and taking up of other performances, making meaning of their lives, was often done through the rejection or acceptance of the good-girl student identity. The ways that the girls negotiated these identities and made meaning out of the ritual performances was with, against, and through the good student performance. Performances of Girlhoods The daily performances of girlhoods by the students observed over the course of this research provided a regular feed of ritual performances and girls’ interpretations of what it means to be a girl in these spaces. Of the numerous rituals that were regularly performed, three common themes developed. The first theme, perhaps better understood as how the girls made sense of their performances, was that looks mattered. It was important to dress, act, and look a certain way in order to gain access to, remain involved with, or resist girl groups. The second theme was that it was normal for tensions to exist between the girl groups. Three general groups of girls were found at both schools: the popular girls, the smart girls, and the misfit girls. The third theme, or again, the meaning that was made from these performances, was that gazing was important. This meant that while girls were watching others, they needed to know who was watching them and where these girls were in the group hierarchies. While I address each of these themes separately within this section, it is important to recognize that the performances and meanings derived from these rituals were intertwined and difficult to separate into individual
78 categories because they worked together as girls created meaning in their lives. So, while this dissertation tries to tease them out individually, it is important to understand that these rituals work together and are bound together in what Michelle Fine (1993) described as “braided discourse.” Fine (1993) examined how Western adolescent girls make sense of discourses of sexuality by looking at how girls negotiate their sexuality “by, for and despite” themselves as their reflections are a combination of the intersections of their identities and issues of power. The girls in this study negotiated their understandings of what it meant to be a girl in these school spaces through a braided discourse. Looks Matter St. Sofia chooses traditional dress codes. These codes are intended to: encourage cleanliness, neatness and pride in one’s appearance; foster respect for the way in which one presents herself to others; create a semi-formal atmosphere needed for a disciplined learning environment; and to provide a uniform manner of dressing which minimizes social differences that may exist among students. By choosing to be a student at St. Sofia’s, these codes become the student’s responsibility and are her responsibility to know what the spirit of St. Sofia’s dress code is and to be in compliance while on school property. (St. Sofia Student Handbook, italics added) Performing Looks Matter at St. Sofia. The importance of the way one looked was not only performed by the girls at St. Sofia, it was verbalized by teachers, performed by teachers, and written as a rule in their student handbook that they were required to follow. The girls were not the only ones aware of the importance of looks—they were creating meaning through their observations of each other, their teachers, and what they were told by authority figures. Dr. Metz and Mrs. Anderson both brought the idea that looks mattered to the girls’ attention in a number of ways. During her formal evaluation by the principal, Dr. Metz performed a different identity through costume than her normal stretch pants and tees. She wore dress pants, a dressier shirt, and a jacket. Her hair was neater than usual (it was never messy, but also never done) and she seemed to be wearing some make-up. While other parts of her performance were also different, it is the performance related to looks that is interesting here. She too understood that looks mattered and through a costumed performance, she provided adult guidance for the girls, demonstrating the commonsense idea that looks mattered and how one dressed, behaved, and costumed was something others noticed. This guidance helped direct the girls as they,
79 themselves, performed looks matter. For these girls, the message was, it is necessary to costume correctly (as called for per the situation) as both girls and adult women. In addition to this performance, Dr. Metz drew specific verbal attention to the girls’ performance of girlhood through costume. In one of her freshman biology classes, she specifically called out the school uniform skirts. She talked about how nice their skirts looked compared to the seniors, who had “ratty skirts.” She requested that they, the freshmen, keep their skirts nice because when they became seniors, they would be ambassadors for the school and they needed to look nice to perform that role. This was an interesting interjection from Dr. Metz, who regularly did not seek a fancier or neater costume to enhance her performance of womanhood, but only did so when authority figures were there to judge her teaching performances. Dr. Metz’s messages, both verbal and performed, were that the judgment of others was based on how one dressed, wore make-up, did one’s hair—looks mattered. At St. Sofia, girls wore plaid skirts, polo shirts or tee-shirts under hoodies or sweatshirts as a general uniform. If they wore anything under their skirts, it was leggings, tights, or, for the athletes, shorts. Before the weather turned chilly, girls wore sneakers or boat shoes (both approved footwear). Once the weather became cooler, UGG boots were commonly interspersed with the boat shoes and sneakers. Often, these shoes were not simply shoes—sequins, bows, flowers, faux fur, and any number of decorations were seen on footwear. The shoes were a place where, even within the confines of the uniform, the girls could perform (ever so slightly) their own supposed individuality. Supposed, because while the decorations marked the shoe (and wearer), the shoes remained within a very narrow range of acceptability due to both uniform requirements and social expectations. While the students resisted the uniform in a number of different ways, they also knew when it was necessary to perform the good-girl student and properly wear the required costume. Mrs. Anderson would warn her classes about who would be substituting during her absences. For certain substitutes, adhering to the uniform rules, performing looks matter, was an important disciplinary point. Mrs. Anderson kept her students informed of when the good-girl student performance was necessary and when they could relax that costumed performance (because that specific performance was always necessary, although there were times when its’ performance by the girls was done in resistance to that identity). Looks mattered, in part because gaze and audience mattered as will be discussed in the third section of this chapter. But in addition to looks, race and class mattered. There was very little
80 diversity at either school (financially or racially), but what little diversity there was, could also be differentiated by costume. At St. Sofia, khaki dress pants were also an acceptable way to fulfill uniform requirements, but most girls did not use these, preferring instead the uniform plaid skirt. The plaid skirt could be ordered from a website for $47.75 per skirt; khaki pants could be purchased at Target for $16.99 per pair or $23.99 from the website (which is where the school handbook requires students to purchase their uniforms from). According to the school handbook’s uniform requirements: ….The St. Sofia High School uniform offers options for comfort and uniformity. It is neither encouraged nor required that all options be purchased… The St. Sofia uniform skirt may be purchased at (websites listed)…Pants and shorts must be purchased through one of the uniform companies listed... (St. Sofia Student Handbook) The few students that did wear khaki pants were students of color in the lower level science classes. There were no African American girls in the upper-level science classes; there were a few students who were not white in these classes, but these girls were Asian or not African American. There were no khaki pants observed on students in the upper-level science classes. Additionally, backpacks were also representative of the looks mattered theme as it was braided with performances of race and class. Of the backpacks that were noted in the observation record, girls in the upper-level science classes had bags from places like North Face and L.L. Bean. The African American students who wore khakis had backpacks from Walmart. While there was no Walmart brand on these bags, they were the same bag that I had purchased from Walmart for my own use. During a field trip to the nature preserve, there was again a difference in performances of race and class tied to performances of girlhoods. The lower-level students attended the field trip on the first day and were allowed to be out of uniform for the experience. The African American students did not dress for an outdoors, muddy experience. They wore decorative jeans with sparkles and emblems embroidered onto the pockets and legs, decorative winter coats with faux fur trim, and jaunty hats that sat nicely on their heads, but did not provide warmth. Their shoes were cloth sneakers or sports sneakers. The white girls who were in their field trip group, but who did not seek out the attention of the African American girls, wore jogging pants, decorative rain boots, hoodies, and utilitarian name brand jackets. The white girls who sought out the attention of the African American girls on the field trip dressed somewhere in between these two levels—jeans with decorations, rain boots, utilitarian jackets, and jaunty hats. This
81 field trip experience will be discussed later in this chapter, when the costumes of the girls will be tied to their performances of science, but this brief example does go to show that the performances of girlhoods cannot be separated from the performances of race and class. Turning attention to the rituals involved in wearing skirts and sitting, while the written rules may have said one thing, performances said another. “The skirt must be worn zipped, buttoned, without being rolled up on the waist and at a length that is appropriate for sitting in class” (St. Sofia Student Handbook, part IX, 2011-2012). Among the socially popular girls at St. Sofia, skirts were consistently unzipped, rolled or folded at the top to make them shorter. For the popular athletes, wearing shorts underneath the skirt was common, which allowed for a variety of sitting positions not available to girls who wore only the skirt and who performed good-girl student. However, the rules expressly forbid shorts or pants from extending below the skirt if they were worn under said skirt. Athletes attempted to keep their shorts hidden, but through several different performances, were often unable to do so. The performances that caused these wardrobe malfunctions were often those that occurred when two or more identity performances conflicted. For instance, if an athlete was attempting to perform both popular athlete and good- girl student, she would wear her shorts underneath the skirt and wear the skirt appropriately so that when she was standing up, the shorts were hidden beneath the properly worn skirt. However, when she sat down, the popular athlete often sat in a comfortable (legs spread apart rather than crossed; knees bent and feet on the seat rather than feet on the floor; knees apart rather than together) rather than proper position which resulted in the shorts showing. For the athletes attempting to balance between the popular athlete and socially popular girl, the wearing of the skirt and shorts became even more problematic (according to school rules). These girls wore their shorts under their skirts, but unzipped or folded their skirts down at the waistband to shorten the skirt which in turn allowed for the shorts to be very visible beneath the bottom of the skirt. While the teachers made general comments about uniforms and caring for the way one looked, there were no consequences delivered to any of the students who broke the uniform rules by the teachers that were observed during this research. Hair was one performative space that the school had little control over regulating. While St. Sofia’s school policies tried to regulate hair color by requiring that students avoid extremes in fashion, including unnatural hair coloring, style and color all leant meaning to the performances
82 that the girls were engaged in9. So, while unnatural hair color was not allowed, what was considered unnatural was constantly resisted through performance (never through word in this case). Girls colored their hair on a regular basis. Some students’ hair performances were professionally polished, with highlights and natural cuts to accentuate those highlights and color. Others had self-applied hair coloring jobs that accentuated their resistance to something. In one case, Kelly, a girl who resisted girlhoods as it was generally performed at St. Sofia, dyed her hair black in what others at the school termed a “goth” performance. The freshmen girls, who often were still figuring out who they were and what performances fit them, often resisted the school rules around hair by coloring their hair red with Kool Aid. Red Kool Aid was a temporary dye in a “natural” color that allowed the freshmen girls to practice performances of resistance that could and would evolve as they got older. This push back against the homogeneity that the school authorities sought was, much like the goth performance, a way to resist the identity that the school was offering to them. However, the identity that these girls took up was not an individual performance of resistance, but often a group performance that had strands of the homogeneity they were pushing back against. While Kelly, the goth, might seem the exception at the school, even her performance was based on a group of students’ resistant performances to white, middle class student culture. So, while looks mattered, so too did the group to which one belonged and performed in solidarity with against some other form of homogeneity. The head band, a simple hair accessory, as it was used by the girls at St. Sofia, was used by me to help understand what group girls were performing. There are a number of different styles of head bands and many were present and used differently by the girls at St. Sofia. While all the girls used them rationally (i.e., they held the hair out of the girls’ faces), the different groups also deployed them nonrationally, using them to script different performances and identities. Since head bands were so popular at the school, it was noteworthy when students did not wear them. This most often occurred with students who were resisting and were choosing specifically to not “follow the crowd.” The other group of girls who occasionally did not wear
9 I would like to note that hair is a space where performances of gender, race and class are recognized particularly in research that centers girlhoods and race. See for example Cynthia Robinson’s (2011) article Hair as Race: Why “Good Hair” may be bad for Black Females or Mark Hopson’s (2009) article Language and Girlhood: Conceptualizing Black Feminist Thought in “Happy to be Nappy.” Because there were so few students of color and there was no way of determining individual students’ socio-economic status, I do not feel comfortable generalizing about the few examples of these interactive performances here. Instead, I will focus on the multiple performances seen in the white student population.
83 them were popular girls, girls who were very aware of their status and who seemed to be both resisting and building upon the performance that the head bands signaled at this particular school. Wide head bands, skinny head bands, handkerchief head bands, Alice bands, bands with bows and flowers, brightly colored head bands, all of these and more were present at the school. While the wide array was part of the girls’ performances of girlhoods, it was the rituals associated with the wearing of these items that needs further analysis. What was performed when wearing these head bands? What bodily action was required? Many of these head bands were elastic and movement often caused them to roll back or off the heads of their wearers. The process of putting the headband back on was part of the performance that was done by the girls and their headbands. For some girls, the process of putting on the head band was a utilitarian movement. For others, especially the popular girls, the process of putting their head bands back on or back in place was a process that, while it did not require a mirror, it did require time and practice. There is only one way to put on a head band, but these popular girls made it into a performance of a performance. The look of nonchalance and ease that they worked very hard to acquire followed into their interaction with the head band. This was not an easy process, but one that required putting the head band on, softening the hair by wiggling the head band forward, and pulling out tendrils in just the right places to make it look as though they had not tried to “do” their hair, but instead it had just been that way. This performance with the head band provided a constant message around looks matter, particularly for the popular girls. Neither school officially regulated make-up. However, girls’ performances suggested otherwise. While most girls wore no make-up, those who did were very careful with its application. The make-up that was seen was very rarely obvious; it was very carefully applied so that it created a natural look. And yet, there was a difference between the girls who wore make- up and the girls who did not. The girls who did wear make-up most often performed in the socially popular group. Their application of make-up was able to cover acne and greasy skin, common problems in girls of this age. Very often, the give away as to whether or not a student was wearing make-up was the eyes--light color eye liners and mascara to enhance lashes. Still, the socially popular girls always had very natural eye makeup, if slightly heavy with the eye liner. When girls in other groups wore make-up, it was often applied with a heavier hand. They tried too hard to look natural which in turn meant an unnatural appearance due to too much make-up. One performance that was not seen over the entire observation period was the
84 application of make-up—not even an application of chap stick! The only make-up accessory seen was a make-up bag, which one student was using as a pencil case. The use of make-up seemed a generally known, if unwritten, taboo—only those who (fairly) regularly resisted the “normal” homogeneous performance of girlhoods required by the schools used make-up as a marker of their status. Other girls who tried to use this performance as a way into or out of another group often ended up reifying their (unwanted) position because looks mattered—their inability to use make-up the “right” way identified them to other students. Performing Looks Matter at St. Agnes. The performances around looks matter conveyed the same messages at St. Agnes, but were performed in slightly different ways. Mrs. Andre, whose own costumed performance was read as casual and comfortable due to health restrictions, often commented on other women’s clothing styles and performances as compared to the girls at the school. She often remarked on the ways in which the school attempted to limit and regulate the girls’ costuming, but never addressed other women who represented the school for their short skirts, low cut blouses, and accessories including make-up and jewelry. For Mrs. Andre, looks mattered, but so did the person performing the look—the message and the messenger were both important. St. Agnes’ student handbook was quite ambiguous about student appearances compared to St. Sofia’s guidelines. While the guidelines do provide an outline of what is and is not acceptable, brand names are not listed, reasoning behind choices are not provided, and the verbiage and style used is less polished (incomplete sentences, some headings capitalized, others not, etc.). What is interesting in St. Agnes’ uniform directions is in the hair section, where more detail and requirements are given for the male students than the female student population. Whether this is due to the more recent addition of the male population at the school or the (more regular) performance of good-girl students by the female students at St. Agnes is unclear. It may, in fact, be both. St. Agnes required two different uniforms for the student population--formal and informal uniforms. Formal uniforms for the girls included plaid skirts; white, collared oxford shirts; and sweater vests, sweaters, or school blazers. Informal uniforms included skirts or khakis and collared polo shirts, hoodies and fleeces. Far fewer skirts were observed at St. Agnes than at St. Sofia, where skirts were the norm and khaki’s the exception. For the girls at St. Agnes, khaki pants were the normal instead of the exception. In addition, much more freedom to accessorize and stretch the uniform boundary was given to girls here--decorative scarves (not for
85 warmth) wrapped around many necks, calf high boots with higher heels were present, more fitted pants of the “skinny jeans” style in khaki were worn. Theresa, a senior at St. Agnes, was a perfect example of this boundary exploration. While not privy to who had possible out-of- uniform passes, I noted her costumed performance on the very first day of observations at St. Agnes. During an Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry lab day, she took a test in the hall and came back into the classroom during the second half of the lab. She was wearing a striped blue and white sweater meant to be worn (and being worn) off one shoulder with a bright red tank top underneath. She was wearing black skinny pants and large dangle earrings. Rectangular glasses set off her face and loose hair. She refused to put the safety goggles onto her face the proper way, briefly arguing with the teacher that she had glasses that protected her eyes (rather than goggles which he made her put on anyway). This performance was quite in contrast to her interview, where she talked quite a bit about girls who dressed in a provocative fashion, how she was not that type of girl, and that her brother often talked about how those types of girls did not get very far in life. She also talked about being health conscious, but smelled of recently smoked cigarettes suggesting that her performances do not always align with her thinking and that the girls’ actual performances may not support the ways that these girls make meaning of those performances. In Theresa’s case she actively (if unknowingly) performed resistance to the good- girl student role even as she verbalized her understanding of the expectations of that good-girl student. Policing Borders: Examining Tensions One of the purposes of ritual is to create boundaries that mark off a person’s belonging to one group or another. The girls at both schools performed several different girl groups setting up and policing boundaries between groups. The tensions that arose between the groups were often around crossing boundaries and the tensions that this created for the different groups. Once a boundary was crossed, there often had to be recognition of this and redress to get back to an original group or different performances to remain in the new group without tension. Boundaries were set and distinct; they could not be crossed by “just anyone.” As mentioned above, at both St. Sofia and St. Agnes, three distinct groups of girls became apparent through the rituals that they performed on a daily basis. The girls at St. Sofia spent more time policing the borders than the girls at St. Agnes, but boundaries were apparent at both schools. The three girl groups observed were: the smart girls, the popular girls, and the
86 misfit girls. The smart girls participated in advanced placement classes and took electives that were not necessary for them to graduate. They performed a very good-girl student image— wearing their uniforms properly; wearing clean, neat hair; answering questions (correctly); turning assignments in on time; etc. These girls were able to make the school system work for them—they performed smart girls in order to be rewarded in the only ways possible, good grades and a supposed leg up in higher education. The popular girls broke into two sub groups, where border crossing was slightly easier to accomplish, but not often done. Instead of border crossing as a way to expand circles of friends, it was often done between these two groups when a girl’s own group was unavailable, but they needed to still be seen in the right group. The athletes and the socialites made up the popular group of girls. The socially popular girls wore make-up and often colored their hair as was described above. They had begun to understand that there was power in their performances of (almost) woman. Required shirts were simple white collared polo shirts. The socially popular girls wore them to accentuate their bodies—slightly tighter than perhaps necessary. Both the socially popular girls and the athletes did not wear their uniforms properly—the skirts were unzipped and hiked up and/or sports shorts were placed underneath. There was a practiced nonchalance that these girls attempted to perform, even though they appeared to put more effort into their performance and “costuming” than any other group. A number of these popular girls also tried to walk a very thin line between popular and smart, crossing boundaries at will. Homework was often done in class right before it was due, but there was an ease and, again, a nonchalance about finishing on time or providing “right” answers. While the boundary was not distinct between these first two sets (the “right” girls could cross the boundaries between smart girls and popular girls), the third group of misfits did not have that luxury. The term misfit is not meant to denote a deficiency on the part of any girl who performed girlhoods in a way that suggested they fall under this term; instead it is used to denote those girls not performing girlhoods as was often normalized within these schools. This group again could be further broken down into those who tried too hard, those who did not have the means, and those who resisted girlhood. Occasionally these intra-categories overlapped. Some girls without means had uniforms that did not quite fit properly, were occasionally dirty, had hair that was never done up but often left hanging down. Girls who tried too hard were just a second behind in many of their physical responses, glancing around to see who was watching them, and
87 they were often put together very tightly—not a hair or article of clothing was out of place, but often in a very little girl way or in a very clean way that suggested effort (ironed clothes, tucked in shirts, etc.). They often looked and acted much younger than their classmates, trying to follow school rules to the letter, but still finding ways to express themselves within those rules. For example, boat shoes were allowable footwear, but these misfit girls might have boat shoes that had sequins, flowers and bows as decoration on the shoes. The girls who resisted pulled performances they wanted from whichever category they wanted or rejected all categories and did their “own” performance. Of course this resistant performance was culturally informed and often revolved around material items such as jewelry, clothing, backpacks, etc. As an example, one girl performed resistance as a “goth.” I will use this term loosely since the ways in which this student was labeled this term by others at the school do not necessarily fit with the culturally understood performance of goth. She wore black sweatshirts that were filthy (often covered in paint from the art classes she took), purposefully not washing her hair and letting it obscure her face, and remaining dirty. When I asked about her, I was informed that she came from a “good” family and had been “normal” as a freshman, which is in part why I term her performance as resistance to the normalized performances of girlhoods at St. Sofia. The boundaries that were set up and policed by the girls were more fluid at St. Agnes than at St. Sofia. There was more movement between the groups, but there were also fewer female students and less tension between the groups at St. Agnes. Additionally, these girls came from a smaller demographic than those from the larger city since St. Agnes pulled from a smaller area than St. Sofia. This is not to suggest that these tensions were not there, but rather that the girls were more likely to allow for the fluidity than not. This was especially true with the student athletes at St. Agnes, who could bypass their performed identity because of their sport activity. As an example, one student, Vicky, regularly performed misfit. Her hair simply would not set in popular fashion; she tried to pull it back in ponytails or had friends braid it off her face, but it was always harshly pulled off her face rather than softly framing her face (as the popular girls accomplished). Her clothes never fit quite right; they were either to tight or too new or too pressed. She was never quite aware of her body and how it acted with the clothes that she wore. When she sat down, very often her pants would pull down showing too much flesh and/or underwear. This unawareness was a key identifier for girls who performed misfit. Compare this to a male student, Alex, who, even though he did not perform masculinity as expected, was
88 aware of others looking at him. When he sat down, his underwear showed as well, but displayed the words “naughty” over and over again. Additionally, Vicky can be compared to the other female students who performed popular, who knew, or were aware, when they sat down that their skin and or underwear would be visible and so tugged clothes over their lower backs, or sat slightly up so that their clothes did not hamper their performance of popular. However, Vicky was also an athlete. She played a number of sports, at least one sport every season and was currently a member of the girls’ basketball team, which was having their best season in the history of the school. This allowed her to move into and negotiate positions of power in the school even though she regularly performed a marginalized position as a misfit. She deejayed the homecoming pep rally, was a game show host on the daily video announcements, and was a senior (which provided its own power due to school class rivalries). Again, however, tensions between girl groups was not absent at St. Agnes. In AP Biology, a class that Vicky was in, there were eight girls. They broke into two groups; four performed popular and four performed other than popular. Of this other group, one girl, Danny, performed smart and three performed misfit. Danny was often approached by the populars, who attempted to draw her into their conversations regularly. For example, one day one of the popular students called out Danny’s name a number of times. On another occasion, this student came and stood by Danny trying to engage her. On these occasions, Danny would completely ignore the popular girls’ questions, looks, and attempts to engage her by focusing on the other three girls in her group or by disengaging from both groups by looking downward for the rest of the class period. However, several of these girls were also in another science class together, with this same teacher, at a different time during the day. This included Danny and a few of the popular girls, but did not include Vicky. In this second class, Danny was very involved in the interactions with the girls in the class, engaging, laughing, and being friendly with the girls she actively ignored in the earlier class. At St. Sofia, the tension between the girl groups was even more visible, with much less border crossing by the students. Over the course of the data collection, several different classes were visited, and the girls often sat with other students who performed as they did. So in both biology and art, girls who performed smart sat with other girls who performed smart and girls who performed popular sat with others who performed popular. On occasion, this balance was upset by students who did border cross, but for the most part they sat with those who performed
89 as they did. One remarkable example of the tensions between groups occurred in an Earth Science class taught by Mr. Franklin. It is important to note that good-girl student performances were regularly challenged in this specific class and Mr. Franklin’s control of the class was often lost to the socially popular girls. It is worth the space to specifically describe this class before sharing the example. This class was mostly comprised of students who performed either popular or misfit. This class was not a higher level science (such as the AP level courses) and therefore did not have many students who chose to perform smart in science (some of these students may have performed smart in other classes, but in this class that identity was often rejected). However, the class did provide students with the necessary credits in science for graduation. The popular girls in the class were socially popular, and while they may have played sports, it was not the athlete identity that they sought to perform in this class. These girls unzipped their skirts and/or rolled the tops of the skirts in order to have shorter skirts. Their polo tops were not loosely worn, but rather demonstrated their newer performances of woman rather than girl. They wore make-up much more heavily than other students in the school and their hair was always done in intricately braided fashions or purposefully messy up-dos. Two of these students in particular rejected the good-girl student role on a daily basis in this class. Becky and Rachel were what, in my notes, I labeled “queen bees” in this class (not in the manner of Lesko (1988), who used this term in a positive light). The other popular girls circled around these two students and were constantly aware of both Becky and Rachel’s actions and responses to situations in the class. Becky in particular rejected the good-girl student. She openly defied Mr. Franklin’s requests to find work to do, work on her own, stop talking, focus, etc. Up until the example I will share shortly, Mr. Franklin did not directly confront this group’s lack of respect for him or the class. Instead, he would direct management comments to the entire class, suggesting that all the students focus and pay attention or get work out. His performance was one of anxiety. He regularly put physical distance between himself and these students, whether it was his desk, a lab table, or space more generally. Daily, Becky would openly challenge Mr. Franklin’s requests to redirect student attention and activity. “Are you kidding me?” and “You have got to be joking” were responses that she gave in a voice loud enough for me to hear across the lab room from my observation position in the class on several occasions. Her actions or inactions seemed to lead the rest of the popular girls in the class. Rachel also performed popular, but struggled to resist the good-girl student performance. Her immediate eye rolls and bodily rejection (turning away,
90 crossing arms, looking elsewhere) of Mr. Franklin’s requests were often (but not always) followed by the reluctant performance of whatever request he had made (although when work was to be done, she did not necessarily do science work). Her moods were fairly mercurial, changing quickly from bubbly and happy to annoyed and angry. Only Becky was not afraid of approaching and interacting with Rachel during these shifts in mood. The other popular students usually kept their distance when Rachel was unhappy. One example of the tension that sometimes arose between girl groups began with Mr. Franklin and the students in the classroom space. Here, Mr. Franklin provided directions for a lab activity to be completed in groups of no more than four students only. The activity was a board game that could only be played with four or fewer students. Becky, with an extremely intricate braided up-do, played with her hair and talked to her friends throughout Mr. Franklin’s directions. Mr. Franklin released the girls to the lab side where most of the students broke into groups of three and four as directed by Mr. Franklin. Becky and Rachel, with their friends, formed a group of five. Mr. Franklin, walking around the lab tables, requested three times that they break their group down into four or fewer. The girls completely ignored him. As he approached their table with his third request, they went completely silent and rigid, with only their eyes looking at each other. It was as if they believed that if they ignored him, he might go away but refusing to break the literal and figurative boundary of the group. Mr. Franklin lost his temper, crashing into a lab table in his rush to (finally) confront this group of girls. He put each girl in a separate group so that there were five groups made up of four students per group. This may have been the end of the story had not the reactions of the girls in the groups been so dramatic. First, these girls completely ignored Mr. Franklin for the rest of the period. They physically turned away from him and were silent the rest of the period in a fairly subdued fashion. Even the rest of the students in the class were quiet and performed good student after this. After playing the game, all of the students returned to their seats, not talking to each other, putting their heads down or putting their hands on their chins. All except Rachel and Becky. Once split into their new groups, these two students originally refused to engage with their new groups. They faced away from their new group members, and Becky, who would take her turn, relied on the others to do the physical requirements of the game. She took care of her piece, but wouldn’t read cards or the directions or fill out her worksheet. Rachel’s experience was very similar, except that she was placed into a group of girls who performed misfits. The
91 three girls in the group were Kelly, the goth (who at an earlier instance called Becky a bitch under her breath during a lab); Lizzy, a very large girl who never spoke in class; and Tory, a girl who reminded me physically and educationally of Velma from Scooby-Doo (she engaged in the class by laughing at the science videos at appropriate times when others were silent, had her hand up very often when Mr. Franklin asked a question but was never called on, and often raised her hand to ask a question, but again was never called on). These three always worked together and never engaged any other students in Mr. Franklin’s class. They were invisible girls— ignored by Mr. Franklin and the rest of the class. When Rachel was physically placed in their group, a brief shock wave rippled through them and the rest of the class. Lizzy and Tory’s eyes widened and they slightly pulled away from the lab table, but quickly returned to their game playing. After this, the two sets within the group almost completely ignored each other. Rachel turned away from the group, with her back almost completely towards them, and although she would take her turn in the game, she did not talk to, pay attention to, or interact with her new group. What was interesting was that, after the initial shock, Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory did not acknowledge her either. She seemed as invisible to them as they were to her. The game eventually forced several interactions, mostly from the group towards Rachel. Lizzy helped her at one point with the rules of the game and Kelly answered a question that Rachel was taking too long to answer. Rachel, too, returned some of this interaction, by retrieving enough answer sheets for the group, setting them on the table and then turning away from them again. As they wrapped up the game, Rachel put her piece and several others in the box and returned to her seat, pouting. Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory remained at the lab table, laughing and joking. Once at her seat, Rachel was in tears. Becky, who was already at her seat, attempted to talk to Rachel, ignoring Mr. Franklin’s general request to get something productive out to do. Another girl from the original five joined in, trying to engage the tearful Rachel, who pulled up her computer and was facing away from both Mr. Franklin at the front of the room and her friends, who were still trying to engage her. A third popular girl came over and attempted to engage Rachel, whose arms were crossed and who finally put her head on her desk. After several minutes, Mr. Franklin called for their attention in order to go over the activity sheet answers and prep the students for their upcoming test. While the popular group did not engage in this review or the correct answers (they were too busy trying to watch Rachel and check on
92 her), Rachel noisily and angrily turned toward the front giving Mr. Franklin an evil look that gave new meaning to the phrase “if looks could kill.” Rachel’s response to being placed in a group that not only did she not perform, but a group that was invisible to and less powerful than her own group was very physical. Her tears in reaction to having to work with Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory and the other popular girls’ responses to her tears and attempts to reassure her of their acceptance of her are dramatic examples of how these girls make meaning of their placement in and performance of girl groupings. Being forced to work with others who are invisible to, or marginalized by, one’s own group required Rachel’s response if she wanted to remain in her position of power. She could not interact with these specific others if she expected to remain in her position of power within her own group and she needed to make her rejection of Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory very visual for all girl groups in the class to see. Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory challenged the position of power that popular girls had by making Rachel invisible in their group. Rachel’s response allowed for the reification of power for the popular girls over the other girls in this class—it recreated and reinforced the boundaries between groups. A final example demonstrates how these groups attempt to place other females into their appropriate category through both observations and talk in ways that seeks to continue the tension of these boundaries rather than relieve it. In Dr. Metz’s AP Biology class, I was observing the end of a lab. This was approximately one month into my observations at the school and in this class. The girls were in groups that seemed to mirror the three girl groups observed at the school. The popular girls were closest to my observation space. Another group performed smart, good girls and the third group, while performing smart and good, tried a bit too hard to perfect their performances which fell a little short. This day, I labeled the popular group as “edgy.” They were performing sexy, as far as possible in a Catholic school that required uniforms. Their hair was purposefully messy and tousled, their eyebrows were perfectly sculpted, their ears were double pierced and sporting large diamonds or pearls, and their make-up was applied very carefully to make it appear as though they naturally looked this way. Whispering behind their hands, which amplified their voices and made it loud enough for me to hear them, they were talking about other girls in the school. When their conversation turned to me, my ears perked up. They discussed how “strange” I was and how what I was doing was strange as well. While I am not sure if they meant for me to overhear their conversation, it was
93 interesting to watch them attempt to place me and reject that I belonged in their group. While they knew I was not a student, they also knew that I did not perform popular and, therefore, I needed to be made different than them—hence strange. For just a brief moment, before my researcher performance took over, I have to admit that their talk hurt my feelings. As a researcher, I did not think I would care, but as a female, I found that I cared more than I want to admit. Also interesting to note, Dr. Metz formally introduced me to the class during my very next observation. Two of the girls who performed smart asked me several questions, but the popular girls ignored me. Gazing: Watching and Being Watched The girls at both schools performed with what appeared to be a constant assessment of who was watching them. Each group had a different group that mattered to them. For those who performed smart, they looked to the teacher and authority figure to watch them/engage them. They focused their gaze and looked for a return gaze from the authority figure in the room. The girls who played the border between smart and popular had to balance very carefully between the teacher’s gaze, the smart girls’ gazes and the popular girls’ gazes. This was not always easy to manage and there were failures as well as successes. The popular girls required the gaze of others to maintain their position. The athletes let others gaze upon them—they were used to being center of attention as athletes. They performed for others on a regular basis through their sports, both in practice and in games. Socially popular girls knew others were looking to them, but they also looked to see who watched them. Their status was the least stable because it depended upon them being gazed at by others, so they were constantly assessing who was watching them and trying to get the right people to “see” them. Being aware of the gaze meant performing to meet the expectations for both their social position and of the audience. Sometimes this meant shifting or changing their normal patterns to meet these expectations. As a brief example, students who entered classrooms after the bell had rung had several performances to choose from. Rationally, they needed to make the teacher aware that they had entered the classroom and were present for this specific class. The smart students, who performed good-girl student, would enter with a note from another teacher or an apology and explanation for their tardiness that they attempted to share with the teacher. Popular students would often enter without excuses instead intent on making an entrance that everyone would pause to watch. In Mrs. Anderson’s class, one popular student entered late with a drink from
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Starbuck’s in one hand and her parental note in the other. All throughout class she sipped her drink and the noise of the cup being set down on the desk reminded everyone of her lateness. Those who were balancing between popular and smart sought to make an entrance with their excuse by sharing it with the entire class. Those who performed resistant misfit would slink in late, trying not to be noticed by anyone. Gazing at St. Agnes. Freshmen at St. Agnes worked within and against the identities that they brought with them from grade school and those that they were attempting to put on and to perform as high school students. In freshman biology, there were a number of female students that were finding their way, by watching other students, but it also appeared that they were aware of others watching them. Melissa, a tall blond student who sat at the first lab table facing Mrs. Andre, was very often watched by the other girls in the class. She dressed, groomed, and accessorized herself very carefully. Her clothes were what, in an earlier time, would have been labeled preppy—fitted blazers matched the decorative scarf around her neck and her fitted blouse was in sharp contrast to the white polo shirts and hoodies worn by most of the other female students. Her knee high boots, jeweled fingers, and manicured nails finished her regular costume. The girls who sat at her lab table/desk openly watched her as she exaggeratedly focused on Mrs. Andre’s lectures. Occasionally, Melissa would peek at the other girls at the table. This peek consisted of her moving her eyes to the side to observe the girls, but not her head, which was facing the front board as Melissa rested her chin on her fisted hand supposedly watching the teacher, Mrs. Andre. She was constantly engaging in gazing but it also appeared that she was determining who was gazing at her. Carly, a girl in this class who was struggling to determine what performance best fit her, resisted normalized good-girl student performances, but only within this Biology class. As a student, she openly did work for other classes, occasionally getting out of her seat in the middle of lectures to ask another student a question or pass a paper from another class to someone else. At one point, she spent an entire Biology class period creating a brain for an English class assignment, constantly asking for feedback from the students around her. This resistance of the good-girl student often provoked Mrs. Andre into reprimanding her (but only to tell Carly to continue whatever she was working on when Mrs. Andre was finished with her time with the class). Carly also tried on performances of masculinity in resistance to performances of girlhoods—watching and mimicking the mannerisms and body postures of the boys in the class
95 instead of sitting pretty like the girls. Stretching out, extending her legs in front of her, taking up large amounts of space with her smaller body, leaning back against the lab table on her elbows, all of these performances copied the boys in the class in sharp contrast to the girls, who, either pulled their bodies in to appear smaller or sat up very straight and lady-like, crossed their legs. If they stretched out, they did so in small sections, stretching their arms one at a time, or unfolding one leg and putting it away before stretching the next one. Carly also practiced heterosexual femininity in conjunction with and in contrast to these masculine behaviors, flirting with the boys in class through touch and talk. At one point, she walked over to a group of four boys, where a more popular boy was playing on his iPad. Carly physically moved one of the other boys out of the way by placing her hand on him, pushing him gently backwards, and then standing between him and the popular boy in order to talk with the popular boy before returning to her seat, all during the middle of class. In Mr. Johnson’s room, where she is one of two underclassmen in an upper-level physics course, Carly performed the good female student. She seemed very aware of who was in her audience, who she turned a gaze upon, and how to perform within those spaces to maximize her position even as she resisted and practiced different performances. A final example of the awareness of gaze at St. Agnes brings to light the complications of race, history, religion, and seclusion from difference in this space. In chemistry, a small knot of students often chatted while working during the time Mr. Johnson gave them complete homework. This group consisted of three girls and one boy who performed popular. Those who performed popular often sought out the gaze of others to reassert their own position, and in this example, the girl, Jenny, who sought out the gaze of the other three students made a miscalculation as to the response of the others. Instead of working on chemistry, the group was working on a history assignment. Jenny, laughing, said, “Wouldn’t it be cool to burn a cross on Halloween?” The other students rejected this immediately, shaking their heads with eyes wide open, and responding, “No, not cool.” Jenny immediately covered her face with her hands, but still laughing, tried to remedy her mistake in drawing this particular gaze. “Not in a bad way, but a good way…” was her response to the others as she tried to justify her awkward (and racist?) comments. Her awareness of the gaze of these other students redirected her, pulled her back from continuing these thoughts, but it also exposed these thoughts, which the others immediately recognized as wrong.
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Gazing at St. Sofia. The awareness of the gaze of others and the watching of others was visible in both science and non-science classes at St. Sofia. This is important to recognize, because gazing and being aware of who is gazing back was a way to monitor group boundaries, as well as give them examples of performances that they could try to copy. These successes and failures in copied performances aided in reifying the established hierarchies of power for the three groups of girls, of normalizing who was at the top and who was not. A lab activity measuring heart rates provided the best general example of this theme. In Dr. Metz’s class, the students of her College Prep Biology class were working at their lab tables on an activity that measured heart rates before, during, and after exercising. These college prep students most often attempted to negotiate the places between popularity and intelligence, wanting the success that supposedly comes with a good education and wanting to be well-liked by their peers. While performing this lab, the student recognition of the importance of audience and gaze was particularly interesting. One student from each group was required to be hooked up to a device that measured her heart rate over the course of several minutes of downtime, active time, and again downtime. The device then graphed this information for the girls to analyze. After being hooked up and heart rate measured for a specified amount of time, the student then had to be physically active for a time. Of the three students who were observed doing this activity, their responses to the audience watching them is worth noting. One student, a rather popular girl, ran for quite an extended period of time until her cheeks were bright red and she was visibly sweating. Her group was the first to do this stage of the activity and as she cooled down, she shook out her shirt, smelled herself, and laughed out loud. All of the students who were not working on getting the device properly attached were watching her. Her laughter and then open request to get a drink was heard by the entire class. A second student, Annie, also exercised rigorously, but stopped every few moments to put her headband back in place and shake off her embarrassment. Again, she was aware of her audience and wanted to look like the popular athlete that she felt she was. The third student, who was not as popular as the first two but trying to be socially popular, could not or would not finish the assignment. After running in place for only a few seconds, she stopped, blushing furiously and throwing her head down while shaking her head vigorously. She wouldn’t continue and the group had to hook another student up to the machine. She, too, was aware of the audience, but she was not willing to risk her climb up for a position of popularity for the reaction of that particular audience. Again, as a person who was
97 seeking social popularity, she had to know who was watching her—many other popular students. It is important to recognize that for the socially popular girls the gaze of other students was particularly important. Looking back at the example in the previous section, Rachel was very aware of other girls’ gazes as she was placed with a group of girls who did not perform popular. It mattered that others saw this and that others saw her remedy the situation by ignoring the group and demonstrating emotional distress for having to even interact with Lizzy, Kelly, and Tory. The girls who performed socially popular had to be aware that their bodies and movements could speak to the others without using words. Because of this, there was a constant assessment of who was watching their actions. The athletes, who were also popular, knew they were being watched and performed for others as though they were always on a playing field. There was always a harsh edge on the femininity that they attempted to perform. Annie, who had to stop and put her headband back in the correct way every few seconds, knew that the class was watching her very physical performance. Her running in place, although always in spurts, was a very natural action for her. Hair was an important marker of feminine identity—Annie did her hair “correctly” everyday; but, her athletic running was what marked her as athlete. In addition to Annie’s performance in the lab, student athletes offered other examples of their awareness of gaze and audience and balancing of femininity with athletics. Many of the athletes regularly changed in class for practice, not in close by rest rooms or locker rooms, but before the bell rang in their classrooms at the end of the day. Often this simply required taking off their skirt and hoodie (since their workout clothes were on underneath their uniforms), but occasionally it required maneuvering shirt changing underneath a hoodie without exposing too much flesh or putting on shorts or workout pants without being too indecent. It always meant knowing they were being watched. For the smart girls, it was the gaze of the teacher that mattered most. This meant performing specifically for the teacher and looking for the responses of the teacher. It also meant constantly putting the good-girl student performance first. Often sitting at the very front or center of the class, these students were the first to raise their hands, regardless of their peers’ gazes or performances which were often resistant to the good-girl student, especially in science classes. Some of these smart girls were also highly distraught when they were not called on or when they provided the wrong answers. They would slide down in their seats, putting their heads down, seemingly waiting for the teacher to “see” them again. And, unless there were
98 students who were disruptive, these girls were often rewarded for their efforts in catching the gaze of the teacher with high grades and compliments on good student behavior. For those who attempted to balance between smart and popular, negotiating both gazes, and watching both, was an important process for determining their place and making meaning of that place. A rather lengthy example will be used to demonstrate this. As noted earlier, the college prep classes most often had students who were attempting this balancing act between popular and smart. In Dr. Metz’s college prep biology, students worked on a group biome project for their ecology unit. In groups of three, the students were to create a travel brochure to a particular, assigned biome. All but four students worked from the lab tables. Of the four in the classroom, three were in a group together and these three girls were still working out their high school identities—misfit or smart. The fourth student was Annie, the popular athlete from earlier examples. Her group members were out sick and instead of continuing to work on her own, she was taking this time to perform her position as a popular athlete over the other three girls. The group sat at their three desks in the front corner of the classroom forming a triangle. Annie, whose seat was across the room, moved to sit at a desk next to this group. She did not choose to go and sit by a group of her social peers in the lab, even though, as will be shown momentarily, she was constantly aware of their movements. Annie’s move broke up the triangle that the group had created to converse. When Annie sat down next to them and began to talk to this group, all three girls physically moved to get closer to Annie. Annie’s posture remained upright and turned slightly away—she did not lean in towards these girls, but instead allowed them to come to her. When a popular student came into the classroom space from the lab space to blow her nose, Annie, whose gaze floated between the lab groups and the girls next to her, quickly turned her body completely away from the three girls she had just been speaking to. The student from the lab side ignored Annie completely (whether due to the cold she had or Annie’s lower status, I am not sure). After pulling up a computer, the three girls and Annie, with her body still turned away from this group, made comments about what they were looking at, causing the three other girls to laugh, but not Annie. Eventually, Annie pulled up her computer and used her body and computer to physically block out the three girls that she had just been interacting with. These three girls moved towards each other and reformed their original triangle, continuing to talk with each other. Over the rest of the class period, whenever Annie had something to share, these three girls dropped their triangle and moved in to listen, but Annie did not shift her posture to listen to
99 them. Annie appeared to be constantly aware of who was watching her, making sure that she had an audience at all times, but also always checking for a better audience. For the girls who performed misfit, gazing was a common ritual, but for the most part, no one was looking back at them. As shown in the example above, the three students in the classroom were the audience and gazed upon a more popular student who did not return this gaze even though she appeared to be aware of their gaze. Another student in Dr. Metz’s Honor’s Biology class, Shelley, watched the other students regularly, often using the gaze as a tool to get what she needed but not to enhance her social position. Her performance of misfit did not appear to be in resistance to performances of girlhood, but perhaps instead, appeared to show a misunderstanding performances of girlhood. While always costumed appropriately, it was her behaviors that provided cues to her status. She was always a step behind in social cues and awkward when attempting to interact with the other students and Dr. Metz. At one point, she adjusted an uncomfortable piece of clothing by completely lifting her skirt up in all directions. The other students generally ignored these types of behaviors, but occasionally could not. In one instance, Shelley dropped her pencil repeatedly throughout the entire class, forcing the gaze of others in her direction. In another instance, the students were working on a biome project in teams of two. For the most part, Shelley’s partner ignored her, preferring to sit next to another group and work on her piece of the project separate from Shelley. Instead of going to the authority figure, Dr. Metz, for help, or asking her partner to return, Shelley stood next to her partner, just watching her, until the partner returned to her seat next to Shelley and they continued to work on their project. Summary The girls of St. Sofia and St. Agnes performed girlhoods every day. The performances that were observed suggested three themes around which meaning was made. First, the girls’ performances suggested that looks mattered—it was important to perform the right look, in the right way, at the right time. Second, the girls’ performances suggested tensions at the boundaries of girl groups, with efforts to police those boundaries through their performances. Third, the girls’ performances suggested that watching was important. These meanings, through the girls’ performances, were braided together in girls’ daily experiences. The next chapter will examine how performances of science and sustainability were braided together in girls’ daily experiences.
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CHAPTER 6 THE RESULTS PERFORMANCES OF SCIENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND INTERACTIONS BETWEEN GIRLHOODS AND SUSTAINABILITY This chapter will continue to explore the results that were gathered and analyzed through this research. This chapter will focus on the analysis of the girls’ performances of science and their performances of sustainability, finally returning to the question that began this exploration: How do performances of girlhoods interact with performances of sustainability? Performances of Science There were a number of messages that were normalized within the context of these girls’ experiences around science education. While girls participated in the school science experiences at both schools, the three themes that developed as normalized assumptions through girls’ performances of science were, first, that girls and science do not mix; second, that school science did not connect to the girls’ “real” lives; and third, that “real” life had a way of entering school science. Girls vs. Science The first theme demonstrates how girls’ performances of science suggest that girls do not do science, but more than that, the rituals performed created a girls versus science atmosphere where the girls’ behaviors were set against the science being done within the classroom. These rituals were much smaller, more common, and less dramatic than the ritual performances of girlhood, but because they were much more regular and normalized, the message that girls cannot and do not do science was also more normalized. As will be seen, this does not mean there were not dramatic performances of this message found within the schools, but rather that the daily, embodied message around girls and science was hard not to assume based on the performances of the girls and others within the schools. I want to begin with what occurred everyday in every science class without exception. The bodily actions of the girls included what I labeled “sliding” in my field notes—while in their seats, their bodies would begin to slide down the chair until their legs were extended in front of them and their shoulders were level with or below the back of the chair. Their chins would fold into their chests with their eyes focused on their computer or the desk/table in front of them. If their arms were not crossed, they were resting on keyboards or hugging their computers and
101 papers. At St. Sofia, the girls’ computers served as a barrier to block out the teacher and topic at hand in science classrooms. They were very adept at playing and doing something else on their computers until it was absolutely necessary for them to pull up or switch over to their science work. My gaze was not enough to slow any of them down in their exploration of websites, silent video chats with friends, and gaming on their computers. However, as the teacher wandered from the front of the room towards the student seating, screens shifted very quickly to the notes and homework assignments that were being covered. Interestingly, the higher the student ability level in the class, the more off task they seemed to be. If the girls were not sliding down, they were folding in—their shoulders and bodies would cave in and down, attempting to close out the science space. The loud sighs, hands on heads, and eye rolling completed their bodily distancing with science in the classroom. There were several exceptions—students who were overtly performing good-girl student would focus exaggeratedly on the teacher with their eyes wide open, occasionally fighting their eyes to remain open. In chapter 5, Melissa was described as performing an exaggerated good-girl student, with her chin on her fist, her head always facing the teacher, and her books and materials in the right place, ready to “do” classroom science. It was more than expected. Melissa, and other students like her, however, would eventually fold in on themselves at some point during class. Even when answering questions, most often students raised their hands from their elbow rather than their shoulders—this was particularly the case for those who were attempting to perform good-girl student and knew that the teacher was expecting (and often needing) a student response. Even then, on a number of occasions, the girls refused to answer teacher questions unless directly called upon. One might argue that these examples represent typical student performances of resistance to school or boredom. However, observations in English and Art at St. Sofia found completely different bodily performances. In Art, where students sat on stools and rounded shoulders were almost necessary to reach the tables where their work was located, their postures were very different. There was not a caving in of their upper bodies, but a relaxed, shoulders down and whole body lean into their work. Heads constantly shifted as they assessed their work. They were engaged in their work and the class and very few students pulled up computers unless their work was finished and graded (only two students did this over the course of several weeks). Smiles and conversations with the Art teacher about the project at hand were also common here (and often absent in the science classrooms). In English, where computers
102 were used regularly, there was also no folding in and sliding10. And while the girls were not always completely engaged, they were not resistant to what was going on in the class. Laughter and constant interaction with the teacher kept these classes engaged and moving. While the above examples occurred regularly, on a daily basis in each science class, several more dramatic examples did occur in each space with different teachers. It is important to note that in many of these situations, there was a tension between the girls’ performances as they performed their disconnection with science and their good student identity. It is also important to acknowledge that the small, everyday performances are as important as the larger performances of this disconnect. The smaller, more regular performances point to a normalcy and assumed commonsense about the behaviors and meanings that the girls derived from those performances. In the examples that will be provided, the girls both accepted and resisted the meanings provided to them about science. Teachers as Barriers to Girls doing Science. Very often, the teachers themselves became the representations of science. They were the discipline. So their performances often reified the meanings and performances that the girls took up in their classes. At St. Sofia, Mrs. Anderson was the teacher who represented the discipline of science most often for her students. She was a cutting person, full of sarcasm and wit that often was focused on the girls and their lack of science knowledge. Her teasing included picking on students for misinformation, a lack of information, and not being able to access information (she often allowed them to look the answers up on Google and often lambasted students who came back with the wrong answer). On one occasion, Mrs. Anderson’s facial expressions were so exaggerated that I made note of it in my field notes. A student did not know the definition of biology, the name of the class. After explaining that bio- meant “life” and -ology meant “study of” in a very sarcastic voice, the student still struggled to put the definition together. Mrs. Anderson’s eyes widened, her mouth opened, and her eyebrows went up her forehead in exaggerated fashion as she, herself, resisted putting the pieces together for the student. Mrs. Anderson’s own performances of science teacher built a wall between the students and Biology that was difficult for her students to overcome. As a teacher, Mrs. Anderson chose
10 It should be noted here that the English teacher was much more adept at using technology within his classroom. He used technology as surveillance of the girls’ activities on the computer keeping real time snap shots of their computer screens on the SMART board screen for the entire class to see.
103 pedagogy that made it difficult for her students to learn the science. Much of her teaching was didactic and did not include hands-on experiences. Additionally, she purposefully did not allow her students to access materials that may (or may not) have helped them learn the material. Mrs. Anderson specifically chose to work with the three lower-level freshmen Biology classes, but resisted in providing them with access to that science. For example, in the upper-level biology classes taught by Dr. Metz, students received fill-in-the-blank notes and access to the PowerPoint slides which covered the chapters. Dr. Metz also told her students to rely on figures and tables in their texts, notes, and PowerPoints as these were summaries of the important material being covered. Mrs. Anderson did not provide these to her students, but instead made them write out their notes, refusing to allow them access to the PowerPoints, and telling her students to ignore tables and figures (because she felt that the students would only memorize the information and not apply the information within those figures and tables). This meant these students, who were already considered behind in their knowledge of science, had to summarize Mrs. Anderson’s delivery of science, put it into their notes, and they could not rely on pre-made summaries of the information because their teacher, the science representative, said not to do so. This often led to students attempting to write down Mrs. Anderson’s every word (no matter how many times she said they needed to have their notes in their own words), missing important information and writing down misinformation in their hurry to get it all down as good-girl students were supposed to do. And Mrs. Anderson did not correct this misinformation or missing information. While this seems, on the surface, to allow for empowered students who know how to think for themselves, when compared to the upper-level classes that had fill-in-the-blank notes, access to the PowerPoint presentations, and were allowed to use certain charts and tables on their tests, the message became not only that these specific lower-level girls shouldn’t do science, but also that they were not as worthy as the upper-level students of learning experiences. In one specific case, the students were working on a biome project. Data collection was required and the girls, in groups, searched the internet for information on their biomes. After two days of data collection, Mrs. Anderson provided the girls with cards that had all of the information that they needed about their biomes. These cards were hung on the walls of Dr. Metz’s class during the unit on biomes. In Mrs. Anderson’s classes, during the presentations of this information about their biomes to the rest of the class, much of the information shared by the students was either incorrect or overly scientific (which the girls had simply copied from the
104 internet without understanding). Mrs. Anderson did not interrupt during the course of their presentations about the misinformation being presented. Adding to this message, that these girls and science were not compatible, was Mrs. Anderson’s occasional way of giving the girls several tasks at once, assuming that they could multi-task learning science with some other activity. In one particular instance, it was a clash of expected feminine activities and science. And the fact that these students spent all but the last ten minutes of their science class engaged in the feminine activity placed precedence on girls not doing science, but focusing on more feminine activities. In this case, students were given an elementary student that they adopted for the school year by writing pen pal letters and visiting with these students several times throughout the school year. After being assigned their adopted student, the girls were to write their first letter to the younger adopted students. This was done for most of the period, until Mrs. Anderson attempted to review vocabulary while the students completed their letters. During the vocabulary review, the students spoke to each other about their students, checking each other’s letters, and discussing meeting with these students. While they all participated in the vocab review that Mrs. Anderson attempted to do with them, their attention was not on the vocabulary game, but instead on the personal letters to their new friends. In terms of the theme being discussed in this section, that girls do not do science, occasionally, a counter performance was observed. Interest in science was often displayed as not sinking/sliding down in one’s seat and not putting hands on heads during science class. While there were several occasions where performed interest, which will be discussed in subsequent sections, more frequently girls were shut out of science if they were interested. When girls did show interest in a science topic, through attempts to answer questions or raise questions, they were often ignored or shut down by the teachers as they provided their thoughts. In these cases, it was the teacher performing girls do not do science, not the girls. They were policing the boundaries of science. The girls occasionally resisted this by shouting out their responses, but more often simply put their hands down after an extended period of time. At other times, the teachers were looking for very specific scientific answers, and even though students would provide correct answers, because they were not the right answer, the teachers rejected them. Whether through talking over or through girls’ responses or rejecting their correct answers or simply not calling on the girls, this constant ignoring and rejection of the girls when they attempted to engage with science, provided the girls with one meaning—girls and science are not
105 compatible. If the girls had questions, the performances and responses from the teachers were even more adamant that girls and science did not go together. This was more apparent in the upper-level classes, where it was assumed that their background knowledge of science was solid. When one student in Dr. Metz’s AP Biology class struggled with basic chemistry concepts, she was first reprimanded by Dr. Metz, who only then attempted to help the student with her issues. The student, instead of paying attention to Dr. Metz’s explanations, flipped through hard copies of papers sitting on Dr. Metz’s desk. She finally asked if she could borrow a book, and dragging her feet, went to pull a book off the book cart. This student repeatedly asked to be excused from class to print from the library, have her computer looked at, and any number of other excuses. She rejected science, but Dr. Metz was not interested in bringing her into science either. At St. Agnes, Mr. Johnson used both his performances as a teacher and his performance as a representative of science to work against girls’ participation in science. In Mr. Johnson’s AP Chemistry class at St. Agnes, when a female student struggled with a problem, Mr. Johnson often said, “We’ll work through it” and then moved on without ever addressing the issue. During the course of my observations, when a male student struggled, either the problem was done on the board or the boys worked through the issue together without Mr. Johnson. Another example of the teacher reifying the girls don’t do science message also occurred in Mr. Johnson’s room. During a physics class, students were going over problems. One male student read a problem out loud rather than just doing the problem. Mr. Johnson and the other male students all laughed at the problem, but the girls did not. The problem was about a scientist in a tree watching a lion attack an antelope. The question was: She swings from a branch and grabs the antelope, saving the antelope from the lion but barely makes it back to her branch. How high is the branch? What caused the laughter by the boys and not the girls? The laughter was brought on by the fact that the scientist was a female, the Tarzan references to swinging in trees, or the improbability of the possibility of this actually happening. If they had all laughed, I may have been convinced that it was simply a silly question. The fact that the boys and Mr. Johnson laughed and the girls did not, tells me it has more to do with a female doing science (however impractically) than anything else. On another occasion in Mr. Johnson’s Chemistry II class, students were preparing to do a lab. As Mr. Johnson explained the lab, which students were supposed to have read the previous night, Mr. Johnson put his hand on his hip, and began, “Don’t ask…” He then changed to a falsetto voice and began to wiggle his hips, “how many
106 grams of this? How many moles of that?” He finished in his regular voice, without wiggling his hips, “It’s right there!” tapping at the lab directions. This feminized performance of not understanding science only worked to reify the message that girls and science are not compatible and that girls do not and cannot understand directions in science. Talking Girls don’t do Science. When girls brought verbal responses into conjunction with their bodily performances of this theme, their understanding that girls and science were not compatible was even more apparent. Again, a number of these examples were regular occurrences that demonstrated the normalcy of the message that it was a girls versus science relationship. For example, in AP Biology at St. Sofia, after answering a question correctly, a student said, “I’m so smart” while frowning and shaking her head back and forth to represent no. At St. Agnes, in Mr. Johnson’s classes, when girls answered a question, they ended their response with a question, even though they were making a statement. While the boys did this occasionally, girls did it almost every time they answered a question in Mr. Johnson’s class. Vicky even joked about it at one point, when she provided a different answer than her best friend (which both girls ended with a question). After a brief pause, she said, “Final answer,” and laughed. This caused a bit of a ruckus, and student noise increased, which caused Mr. Johnson to reply, “Someone’s going to ask me this stupid stuff again, so be quiet!” It was one of only two times that Mr. Johnson seemed to lose his temper. The other was when he was nominated for the homecoming teachers’ court. In Art class at St. Sofia, I overheard two students talking. One asked the other what they were doing in Biology class that day. The other responded with, “Probably something stupid.” Another student from a Biology class that I regularly observed, during the same art class period said, “I love art class. I couldn’t wait to come today and work on my flower!” This student was in Mrs. Anderson’s class and had recently had a tragedy in her life. Mrs. Anderson treated her very kindly compared to many other students who she teased rather viciously but her kind treatment was not enough for this student to accept science. Instead she saved her emotional engagement for Art class. Apparently, this student understood that girls did not do science. One of the more dramatic examples of this theme occurred in Mrs. Anderson’s class. A student, Reagan, who regularly engaged with the science with many questions, often performed good-girl student, and who was also an athlete, had a confrontation with Mrs. Anderson over her ability to do science. While reviewing how to balance chemical equations, something known as
107 stoichiometry, Reagan was struggling to make sense of how to do the problems. After flip flopping a number of times between “I can do it” to “I don’t get it,” she attempted to do a problem on the board and failing miserably, she very clearly and loudly stated, “I can’t do chemistry.” Mrs. Anderson was physically upset at this response, and with a raised voice and much faster speech than normal, pointed to research on girls and science that suggested confidence was key in being able to do science. Reagan retreated into herself—for a tall girl, she became very small, putting her head on her hand and sliding far into her seat. Her head dropped below the level of her shoulders. Mrs. Anderson took a deep breath, and moved on…by asking Reagan a question about understanding the problem she had just attempted to solve. Reagan, without lifting her head, responded with, “yeah,” but because there was no re-teaching or correction of her original mistake, I feel confident in saying that Reagan was simply pacifying Mrs. Anderson with her positive response, performing the good-girl student. With her feet kicking the floor (her foot was in a soft cast, it had to have been uncomfortable), Reagan remained with her head down for almost the rest of the period. When she finally re-engaged with the class by attempting to answer another question, she again got it wrong, but was able to correct herself. As she shifted from her performance of rejection, it was not back to good student, but to bored student. It took several days before she returned to her normal performance of good-girl student. Girls don’t do Science Field Trips. Girls resisted science in a number of different ways both through and against the good-girl student performance. The following examples all relate to a field trip to a local nature preserve that the freshmen students at St. Sofia took in early November. Two things that often excite students are field trips and movies in class. When both are brought together through a movie to prepare for the field trip, one might assume an excited student body. This was not the case for these girls. The movie was a Bill Nye the Science Guy video that explored the ecological habitat that the girls were visiting for their field trip. Some familiarity with Bill Nye is required to understand this example. Bill Nye videos are interspersed with humorous mock commercials that try to reinforce ideas expressed in the educational segments. I observed two classes of students watching this video. Not one student laughed at these mock commercials; they didn’t even crack a smile or perform anything other than bored and disengaged. On several other occasions in these classes, some of the girls would engage with the movie being shown, giggling at appropriate times or responding appropriately to the
108 movie. Their resistance to this particular movie, and the field trip itself, seemed to suggest that they were refusing to do science. The field trip itself was a half day event—on the first day the three lower-level classes went and on the second day, the four upper-level classes went. As an aside, it was during this field trip that I received insider status from the teachers where I was asked to serve as the chaperone of a group of students. Even though there were enough school chaperones for each group, I was given a group all to myself. Girls were told to wear clothing that could get wet and muddy since they would be collecting specimens from a wetland. On the first day, most girls dressed appropriately (for their social standing and the activity they were doing) with rain boots decorated with flowers and pretty pictures, jeans or jogging pants, and hoodies with winter jackets over the top. However, several girls wore their UGG boots, jaunty hats, bedazzled jeans, and expensive winter coats meant for decoration, not work. These girls did not participate at any point in the field trip, even though in two out of three of the stations participation simply meant talking with a ranger about animal adaptations and watching for birds with binoculars. They remained on the periphery of the group during the adaptations talk and simply sat in the center of the bird watching hut, always keeping their bodies and clothes as far from the science activity as possible. Once at the wetland collection site, a small pond surrounded by wetlands, these girls walked down to the water’s edge (more because the guide made them than because they were interested) where they watched the other students and complained about the wet, mud, and cold. The students on the first day’s trip, while occasionally resistant to the science being done, did perform good-girl student throughout the trip. They were polite and (fairly) quiet for the volunteer guides and, if dressed appropriately, participated in the activities. On the second day, students, although dressed more appropriately, resisted not only the science, but also the good- girl student performance. The guides and rangers were ignored or talked over by the students, several phones made not-so-inconspicuous appearances, and the noise levels remained far higher than on the first day. Dr. Metz stepped in with several verbal reprimands in the first ten minutes of the rangers’ presentations, although the girls for the most part ignored her requests to pay attention and be respectful. At the end of this day’s excursions, the volunteer guide asked me if these were the lower-level students, making a number of assumptions about student behavior and student ability. He was shocked when I said these were the upper-level students.
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School Science Does Not Connect to Real Life Often the rituals that helped to mark this theme, real life as disconnected from science, were seen in conjunction with a teacher behavior or in response to a classroom situation. Closely related to the previous theme, girls do not do science, and even more closely intertwined with the next theme, real-life does connect with science, the students demonstrated resistance to science more markedly when it did not relate to their lives outside of school. This is even more apparent in the next section, when students brought their lives to the science classroom. It was interesting to see the teachers attempt to bring real life into students’ understandings of science only to be rebuffed, a performance that it may be argued they picked up from the teachers themselves who shut down the students on a regular basis when they did bring real life into the classrooms. The wearing of goggles was one place where this theme played itself out on occasion. During labs, the students in Chemistry and Earth and Physical Science were often expected to wear eye protection. However, dressing the part of the scientist was resisted on a regular basis by the girls. While goggles were placed on the top of their heads, much like headbands, they were often kept there instead of on their faces. While these students performed the labs, they were resisting the performance of scientist as was expected in school science labs because science and goggles belonged to Beakman’s World, Mrs. Frizzle, and Bill Nye. In addition, when the goggles were worn appropriately, the performance of scientist was often interrupted by performances of girlhoods through giggling, pointing at each other and giggling some more, and working together rather than individually as scientists are often represented (Bill Nye, Mrs. Frizzle, and Beakman). Science vs. Real Life at St. Agnes. Mrs. Andre was the teacher at St. Agnes who most often attempted to bring the students’ experiences outside of the classroom into their science experience in the classroom. However, through a lack of engagement, the students resisted even these attempts. Her Biology II students had an assignment that looked at the fossils found in the students’ own backyards, and while the students did the assignment performing good student, they refused to acknowledge that this topic could possibly relate to them. Most of these students could have gone into their yards and found examples of the very things they were presenting to the class through PowerPoint presentations. Instead it appeared that they dismissed the science by laughing at other’s mispronunciations of the proper names of long extinct organisms and attempted to save face by laughing at their own attempts to pronounce difficult Latin names. In Biology, a discussion of iso-tonic, hyper-tonic, and hypo-tonic solutions was lost on the students.
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A video from the 1980’s did not help the students engage with or understand the material. Mrs. Andre recognized this and tried to bring the lecture to the students by describing how these solutions worked with antibiotics, which all of the students had some recognition of. And yet, the eye rolling, sliding down, and resistance to engaging with Mrs. Andre’s questions and comments continued. During the very next observation period of this same class, Mrs. Andre again tried to link the topic to something the students understood. This time she spoke about farming, illnesses, sports, and plants. During this class, students were even more dis-engaged— several students played on their iPads (something that was not a regular occurrence at St. Agnes), several tried to fight falling asleep, and several more sat until so relaxed that their mouths fell open and the pens or pencils in their hands fell out of their hand and loudly banged on the lab tables. This separation between real life and science was again apparent when Mrs. Andre was teaching fault lines in her geology class. She attempted to get students to link divergent lines with divorce and moving apart. While the female students at least smiled to acknowledge her attempt at drawing their understanding, they immediately returned to bored and disengaged students, eating snacks and chatting with each other instead of working through their notes. Real Life vs. Science at St. Sofia. Within the halls of St. Sofia, Mrs. Anderson also attempted to get the girls engaged with the topic at hand, but through sarcasm and off-color humor. Mrs. Anderson attempted to get her students to laugh as she discussed the difference between heterogeneous and homogeneous, but instead found herself being reprimanded for her attempts. One of the socially popular students responded with, “Mrs. A…….” drawing out the end of the A as though reprimanding a child by using their name. These students appeared to reject this attempt to draw them into the science at the expense of a social identity marker. Mrs. Anderson did not attempt this joke in her next class. In this same class, Mrs. Anderson again attempted to engage the girls in the science by picking on a student who was incorrect. A student claimed that the biome in which they lived was the tundra. Instead of correcting this misconception, Mrs. Anderson teased the student with an exasperated look, and later on in the week, asked if this student thought at all. Mrs. Anderson did not rectify misconceptions or misinformation that was provided by the students in class. Students were instead left with inaccurate ideas about both real life and science. In Dr. Metz’s AP biology class, where the girls were perhaps expected to perform the good student slightly more effectively than other students, even here, there was a distinct
111 withdrawal from the subject. For much of the time I was observing, this class was studying biochemistry and the molecular structure of compounds found in the human body. While Dr. Metz tried to explain how important these molecules were for human life, apparently the molecular structure of RNA and DNA can only hold a student’s attention for so long. So, while the students could and did answer and ask questions in regards to this topic and their homework or notes, immediately after asking or answering the questions, they returned to their sliding down, hands on face, folded in body positions. When finishing up these lectures, Dr. Metz often tried to get the girls to determine how the topic discussed in class related to the “Themes in Biology” list that she kept on the side white board throughout the year. Only a few times did the girls offer a possibility, instead they favored waiting for Dr. Metz to provide them with the answer. Dr. Metz introduced the new chapter on ecology to the Biology students by having them read the chapter for homework the night before. As Dr. Metz pulled up the notes, she asked the students, “What do you think of this chapter? Is it new stuff?” Not a single girl looked up from her computer. Dr. Metz pushed them to remember what they knew about ecology, a topic that is covered in middle school science curricula, and still no one responded to her calls to engage with this topic. Ecology is one topic that researchers have suggested might be an area to engage girls with science (Zelezny et al., 2000). Dr. Metz turned off the lights and began going through the notes which the girls followed along with distractedly, often flipping to the internet to play games, search through popular web sites allowed through the school firewalls, or video chat with friends (occasionally in the same class). In Mrs. Anderson’s biology class, Reagan was most often the student engaging with the topic, but her questions, along with the performances of the rest of the class, demonstrated the idea that science did not relate to real life. Often Reagan’s voice was laced with exasperation, and her exaggerated arm movements that accompanied these questions left little doubt as to how she was making sense of these topics (i.e., they do not relate to her outside this classroom). She often asked questions like, “How do we know this?” or comments like “It makes sense, but we can’t see it…” This, in combination with Mrs. Anderson not correcting misinformation or not providing correct answers and her frequent rejection of correct answers in search of the right answer, allowed for science to remain a subject that was not related to the students’ experiences.
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While more about this will be discussed in the next section, even when students attempted to bring their lived experiences of science into the classroom, the teachers pulled very hard to return them to the topic at hand. They effectively shut down the girls’ interests in science through their everyday experiences by constantly returning to the PowerPoints, notes, homework, worksheets, and what they had planned for the day. In Mrs. Anderson’s and Dr. Metz’s classes, this was a regular occurrence. During AP Biology’s discussions of macromolecules, students often tried to link the topic to their own experiences and Dr. Metz would pull up the notes, re-calling the girls’ attention to the science she had planned, and say something like, “This is important/exciting/interesting, too.” The girls would immediately become quiet and begin sliding down in their seats. Even when Dr. Metz would use an example that would excite the girls, she would disengage the conversation and bring them back to classroom science space and performances. In one specific example, Dr. Metz brought up a point about evolution using monkeys as an example (nothing like evolution and monkeys at a Catholic school to bring about excitement). After creating a buzz around this topic for thirty seconds, Dr. Metz forced their attention back to the “Themes in Biology” list attempting to get them to make connections between the original topic and the list. Interestingly enough, Dr. Metz’s brief off track discussion would probably have garnered more connections to the list by the students that could have then been brought back to the original discussion than the silence she received by forcing the conversation back to macromolecules. Perhaps Dr. Metz felt bound by the normalized performances of teacher, preferring what was “natural” for her to be covering and teaching. Mrs. Anderson’s classes often bounced from one topic to another, creating a rather schizophrenic feel for an outside observer. This constant movement from one topic to another and back to the first topic and then onto a third or fourth forced good student performances from students because the girls never knew where the class discussion was moving. One might assume that this would be an interesting way to pull girls into science because of the large variety of topics that were touched upon. However, because the students were so focused on writing down every single word that Mrs. Anderson said—performing good students--both the girls and Mrs. Anderson missed opportunities to connect science to their everyday lives. One example of this occurred during a lecture on biomes and vocabulary words. Trying to get the
113 girls to understand the difference between the intra-coastal “highway11” (not a word in their notes or vocabulary list) and an estuary (part of their vocabulary), Mrs. Anderson allowed the students to search on Google for a definition for intra-coastal highway. After several attempts, one student finally procured a correct answer, which Mrs. Anderson accepted and then immediately left to return to the computer voiced PowerPoint notes. She never returned to intra- coastal even though she engaged the students in figuring out what this was and how it compared to an estuary (which she also never discussed). This lack of follow through on science topics could also be contributing to the girls’ understanding that science is not connected to real life in meaningful ways. During the field trip preparations, Dr. Metz’s biology classes watched the Bill Nye video on wetlands that was discussed earlier. This video and the field trip’s preparatory materials were given to Dr. Metz by the park educators for completion prior to their field trip. Dr. Metz did not preview the materials, but instead passed out a worksheet with blanks to be filled in during the watching of the Bill Nye video. This type of activity also reifies the idea that science does not relate to real life because the students are not allowed to explore the science being presented, but instead must perform good student and fill in the blanks. In their performances of good student, the girls missed all of the humor in the video, another way that they could have found connections with real life, but instead were shown that science and real life do not connect, at least not through expected good-girl student performances in these classes. The girls picked up on these performances and the meaning that the teachers were making for them and their own performances mirrored these. At the lab spaces, they talked about non-science topics. They wondered if things done in science labs mattered. They called the activities done in class dumb or stupid. They refused to participate in test reviews that went over every assignment that they had already completed for the unit. When something in science did surprise them, they responded with phrases such as “oh my god,” “holy crap,” and “what the heck?” indicating that science could in fact draw their attention and interest them. And yet, the girls continued to understand that science was not a part of their lives. This was very apparent in Dr. Metz’s freshman Biology classes. During one particular unit, Dr. Metz tried to help her students understand the term “organic” for their unit on ecology. In each class, she asked for
11 Intra-coastal waterway is the more proper term for this body of water, but it was called the intra-coastal highway in class.
114 students to share their experiences and explain the meaning of the word as they knew it. The girls, reluctantly, offered up answers that, in each class, revolved around grocery stores, ideas of natural, and organic farming. While Dr. Metz told them that these were the answers she expected, they were not right. She was looking for the technical definition of organic, meaning an organic object contains carbon and an inorganic object contains no carbon. The girls’ experiences were deemed wrong. Their knowledge was denied, even when they were asked to bring it into the science classroom at the teacher’s request. Real Life Does Connect With Science When the girls brought their own experiences of life into the science classroom, on their own terms and not necessarily at the request of the teacher, the performances that were observed were much more engaged and excited. The ability to share their own stories allowed for the meanings they created around life and science to be more relevant. The girls asked more questions, sought out answers on their own, listened intently to each other, and shifted (occasionally dramatically) from the resistant student of science to engaged and enthusiastic girls who wanted to share their voices and experiences. Mrs. Anderson’s girls, the lower-level Biology group, often tried to bring their own experiences into the class. This was their way of understanding the science. Anytime the conversation turned to their own experiences and stories, the noise level increased and their bodies became more upright than during Mrs. Anderson’s discussions of science. They paid attention to each other by looking at the person speaking, and while they still raised their hands, they often spoke out without waiting to be called on. Their engagement with science was increased when they were allowed to bring their own experiences into the science classroom. During one class, students were able to link their experiences with pets to the discussions occurring in class around genetics. They remained engaged until Mrs. Anderson refocused the attention of the class. Mrs. Anderson and Real Life. In Mrs. Anderson’s class, being off topic was a frequent class trait, but not necessarily due to the students. Interjecting funny stories into her questions, Mrs. Anderson often attempted to engage the girls through her constant redirection. On one occasion, she asked students about recycling and who participated in recycling their waste. Only a few students raised their hands. Mrs. Anderson’s request to bring their lived experiences into the classroom was rejected by the students. As Mrs. Anderson continued talking about recycling and teasing the girls who did not recycle, the girls, striving to perform good-girl students,
115 redirected her back to the vocabulary that they were supposed to be going over. When the conversation redirected again, the girls joined the discussion with stories about their experiences in Kindergarten. This time, they enthusiastically raised their hands, but instead of waiting to be called on, jumped into the conversation when another student finished her story. The girls’ performances changed--they watched each other, turning their bodies to hear and see each other better as they listen to the different stories. This required that they not perform the slouched/sliding student in seats; they couldn’t put their heads down onto their hands when they turned and watched the others in the class share their experiences. When their own lives were part of the knowledge they were learning, their performances took on new meanings. The girls, again, could see the science in their lives and experiences. They giggled through each other’s funny stories and Mrs. Anderson’s running commentary on student stories. During a particularly dis-engaging class about ecology vocabulary in Mrs. Anderson’s class, one student linked her knowledge of plankton to Sponge Bob Square Pants, which again shifted the girls bodily performances from doodling, off task, sliding, heads down, and leaning to excitement and listening to each other through the sharing of their own experiences and pulling in other ways to know this science from popular culture and additional lived experiences. Mrs. Anderson attempted to bring them back to science by giving them a random word to look up on the internet (see the intra-coastal highway example above). This ended with Mrs. Anderson dropping the word completely after the girls had been brought back into her control—she had been re-centered and school science was again the focus of the class. However, enough avenues of escape to their own knowledges and experiences had been created and one girl asked about diving, pressure, and the bends, linking her experiences with the intra-coastal highway to school science. A second student shared her experiences in a SCUBA diving class, which in turn led to more girls sharing stories about their experiences with the ocean. At this point, a few girls began to ask questions of each other. With very little time left in class, Mrs. Anderson still sought to shut down this avenue of possibility, of connection, by assigning homework. Demonstrating how interconnected the themes in performances of science are, while this may have needed to be done as part of her lesson plan, it also did double duty by reifying the idea that real life experiences are not related to science, even when they are! Dr. Metz and Real Life. In Dr. Metz’s classroom, one of the students brought a five legged frog into school for extra credit. The student had collected this frog during a family
116 camping trip at a local state park. This frog drew a lot of attention, questions, and possibilities for engagement in science for the girls. The frog was in a large Tupperware like container with a lid. Dr. Metz informed her students of what was in this particular container, since her room was littered with similar containers holding any number of insects and spiders. Her entire AP Biology class came over to observe the interesting specimen. At first, a number of the girls held back, but when Dr. Metz opened the container, they all leaned in over the lab table to see what was inside. After a few moments, the girls headed back to their seats, and as Dr. Metz reclosed the lid and washed her hands, the girls began to speculate on the possible causes of the fifth leg of the frog. They spent about five minutes using their computers to search for the reasons a frog may have five legs. Several girls were able to find possibilities and they shared the results with other students sitting nearby, tapping each other’s screens and asking each other questions. While they came to the conclusion that the fifth leg was a sign of environmental problems, they also began to ask other questions about signs of environmental problems, what other organisms may have visible signs of environmental problems, and questions around breeding for specific, strange traits. At this point, Dr. Metz was ready to begin class and pulled pulled up notes on proteins, which she described to the girls as "really important and interesting.” The students resisted this call to return to school science, instead pushing Dr. Metz to allow them to keep exploring. Dr. Metz momentarily allowed them to continue by directing them to the issue of ethics and whether or not the breeding of animals for strange traits was ethical. Many of the students responded with, “I don’t know,” looking at each other and Dr. Metz. Again, Dr. Metz questioned them, “If it’s not natural, is it ethical?” And again, the girls responded enthusiastically, bringing up the breeding of dogs and how humans select for different types of dogs. Many tripped over the ends of each other’s sentences, turning and looking at each other as they talked. While engaged in discussions that linked their lives to science, the girls’ performances were energized and connected. They seemed to be able to see the science in their lives. At this point, Dr. Metz redirected their attention back to proteins. The girls immediately began sliding down their chairs and rolling their eyes as they pulled up their notes, hiding internet sites behind their class work. In Dr. Metz’s AP Biology class, macromolecules was the topic of the students’ notes for much of the observation period. One student, who regularly performed good-girl student, asked, “How do they find these? Can they find more?” Her interest pulled in a few other student
117 comments and discussion, but only briefly. Dr. Metz summarized this brief distraction by replying, “There is so much we don’t know.” The girls, resistant to the school science, refused to return to proteins, though, and another student began asking questions about plants and biomes. Her off-topic questions could have been due to the items around the room that the freshmen Biology classes were covering (ecology), or it could have been a question she had wanted to ask. In either case, this led the girls into an active discussion about invasive species in which they discussed their own experiences with invasive species and trying to grow plants in the wrong biomes. Their excitement levels increased, through noise and bodily positioning, which again switched from down and folded in to up and moving and turning. These girls, as AP students, went beyond sharing their own stories, though. Ever the good-girl students, they went an extra step, seeking out videos to watch online which led to discussions of socioscientific issues with each other. Dr. Metz was no longer the center of the science experience—they were, thanks to the real life experiences they had shared. They watched each other as they shared experiences, turning their bodies toward the speaker until Dr. Metz, re-centering herself and school science, pulled them back to macromolecules. This shift to engagement with science when real life was pulled in was an immediate reaction, as was the return to dis-engagement when school science was yanked back to the center of the girls’ attention. A simple word or picture on a PowerPoint slide could provoke this shift to laughter and engagement and sharing of personal experiences and just as quickly be lost to the sliding/slouching, heads down performance when the teacher moved to the next slide. Again, what is interesting is that when the teacher attempted to draw in their everyday experiences, the girls still reject this entry into science. Dr. Metz, who was struggling with personal issues, asked the students how they brought God into their everyday lives. Asking again and again how they gave their life up to God, Dr. Metz kept trying to draw them into the conversation, which they continued to ignore. Perhaps as freshmen, they were unsure of how to answer this question. But they were attending a school where God was central to the beliefs and meaning making they were supposed to be doing. Their slouching/sliding, heads on hands, and folding in of their bodies was a refusal to engage. And yet, during whole school masses, the girls (perhaps not these girls) were honored to be made extraordinary Eucharistic ministers, portray long dead saints, and share their faith in God within the mass space. When their experiences drove their knowledge and learning, they engaged. When it did not, it was resisted. Additionally, when
118 girls brought forth experiences that made the teachers uncomfortable, the teachers would simply move to the next on topic discussion point and often ignored the students’ request (whether bodily or orally performed) for more information. This performative ritual will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Performances of Sustainability Over the course of this research, three students were interviewed. Each was a senior at her school and each fell into one of the three general girl groups discussed earlier. Two were from St. Agnes and one was from St. Sofia. While each school had different levels of awareness and activism around the recycling movement, when asked in the interviews about recycling, all three respondents talked about recycling as one of the most important things that they and others could do to help the Earth. Their performances, however, provided a much more complicated and nuanced understanding of how these particular girls made sense of the sustainability movement, of which environmentalism is a part. What was made commonsense by their performances worked to generally reify these girls’ positions as females within this particular society and the expectations that have been built around what it means to be a girl. While the idea of girlhoods and sustainability will be discussed further in the next section, the themes that arose out of the data collected on performances of sustainability alone were uncertainty around issues of sustainability and a search for guidance; issues of sustainability as not related to school science; and caring for others (the Earth or people) as an important feminine performance that working with issues of sustainability allowed. Uncertainty Sustainability was a term that was generally unknown as a whole. While the girls understood and attempted to make sense of the “three E’s” of sustainability (environment, equity, economics) individually, when brought together, there was little understanding of their interconnectedness unless there was an explicit teaching of the definition. This occurred during each of the three interviews that were conducted during this research. Each of the girls asked if I could define the term sustainability for them, but once the term was defined, they responded with “ahh’s,” “oh that makes sense,” and other phrases suggesting understanding. Noel, a senior at St. Sofia, looked the term up on her own prior to the interview. While I defined the term again during the interview, Noel had already begun to make sense of the relationships between the “three E’s” and her own experiences with Eco-Club and a current issues club. While Noel was
119 able to make new meanings around the term “sustainability” and work it into her already admittedly liberal point of view, the other interviewees were slightly more resistant to the intertwined complexity that sustainability insists upon. Vicky refused to acknowledge that Earth and equity had anything to do with one another, insisting, while vehemently jabbing at a drawn representation of sustainability, that the economy was what needed to be focused on; that attention should not be on poor people, who took advantage of systems in place to help them. Sustainability within the framework of this dissertation is about the interconnectedness of the “three E’s” of sustainability. The girls’ interviews suggested that these girls understood the “E’s” as pillars, but were not aware of their connections. In an attempt to help students understand the interconnections between the environment and the economy, Dr. Metz asked one class, “Why is the economy important for the environment?” The girls were completely disengaged with school science, sliding down in their seats, placing their heads on their hands, leaning over their computers, and yawning. One girl attempted an answer by questioning, “Money?” Reifying girls don’t do science as discussed earlier, Dr. Metz did not accept this technically correct response. Instead, Dr. Metz placed her hand on her hip (while sitting on a stool), and impatiently responded, “Biodiversity is very important for our economy. Why?” No one offered an answer. One student, a girl who performed good-girl student, finally suggested food webs and food chains, but without raising her hand. The rest of the girls continued to yawn, and heads drooped. Dr. Metz moved on to the fill-in-the-blank notes and the girls continued to understand the environment and economics as separate pillars, uncertain of the ways in which they were connected. In terms of economics, St. Sofia earned money for their collection of recycled paper. This money was used as seed money by the Eco-Club to fund other recycling efforts. While in science class the girls refused to link economics to the environment as described above, when it came to the recycling done at the school, the girls made some interesting and naïve assumptions about the ways that economics and the environment interconnected. The Eco-Club attempted to help other students perform sustainability by linking their activities to economics. In an attempt to sell their projects to the student body at large, the Eco-Club created a commercial, which they presented over the daily announcements. This intricate and complicated plan was for students to use recycling efforts, to perform sustainability, to gain access to the newest cell phone. Ironically, they were using consumerism to engage other students in sustainable behaviors. This
120 was their sales pitch: If your parents are refusing to let you buy or get the newest cell phone because they have to pay such high levels of tuition for you to go to school, start bringing to school the paper and cardboard that can be recycled at your house. This will go into the paper drive dumpster and will earn the school more money. This will in turn allow tuition to be lowered at the school, giving your parents more money to buy you the cell phone you have always wanted--a technological tool that ironically earned students the highest number of demerit points if it were found, used, or taken out at the school. This naïve understanding of how economics played into the small amount of recycling done at the school suggested a much larger disconnect and uncertainty about how the environment and economics were connected through sustainability. During an informal conversation, Dr. Metz discussed with me how she talked with the girls about their understanding of the economics they had presented during their commercial and how she corrected some of their misinformation. The Eco-Club’s efforts to create understanding around the connection between the environment and economics also suggest that the girls are looking for ways to make their own meanings around these connections. Vicky, a senior from St. Agnes and interviewee, also represented some of this uncertainty in her interview. In trying to make meaning around the term sustainability, she struggled to combine the contradictory information she had access to around the “three E’s” of sustainability. In her high school religion class, there was an emphasis on issues of poverty, where she felt the focus was too much on the needs of those in poverty. “I feel like, when I look at the poor, they need a good home, yeah, [but] you know, they have welfare and resources and I’m like we need to focus on the middleclass….think about the majority.” However, as much as she struggled against equity in terms of economics, she was highly aware of issues of equity around gender. Watching political commentaries on television with hosts such as Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, Vicky often talked about a lack of women in the news stories, a lack of women making decisions around issues of economics, and even the decentering of girls at her school (through the creation of a co-ed school) as problematic. Yet, she still struggled to make sense of the term “sustainability” and the ways in which gender and class issues are connected more generally. Even her solutions, voiced while stabbing forcefully at the word economy on a sheet of paper used to represent the “three E’s” of sustainability, were uncertain and unclear. She felt the only way to improve the world was to fix the economy, but because there were no solutions or voices from women, she felt very pessimistic about our chances.
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Climate Change Uncertainty. In terms of uncertainty, discussions of climate change12 provided some provocative data as well. During one observation period in Mrs. Anderson’s biology class, the girls had a number of weather related questions as they wrapped up a quiz on ecology and biomes. What began as questions about their quiz turned into a discussion about climate change, with more questions from the girls. When this discussion began, the students were beginning to pull up computers and look up different sites online, as they had just finished their quiz and had not yet transitioned into the next class oriented task. Some girls turned to talk with their neighbors and friends. Others slid down their chair seats and generally began to disengage with the class. Mrs. Anderson began to get nervous discussing climate change. Her hands came together as she walked at the front of the room, but the students continued to ask climate change questions, to which Mrs. Anderson replied, “I don’t want to get into the middle of this.” A student in the back, not raising her hand, said that she had done an eighth grade report on this and that her conclusion was that humans and pollution were causing the changes in the climate. Mrs. Anderson challenged her sources, saying that they could not have been reliable since they were for an eighth grade report. During this exchange, four other students had their hands up, waiting to be called on. All the other students became silent—all typing stopped, all discussions stopped, and the girls leaned forward waiting for Mrs. Anderson’s response to these questions. While the four students asked their questions, the rest of the students had their eyes on Mrs. Anderson, waiting for her answers. They were waiting for guidance, aware of the uncertainty that is created around climate change. Mrs. Anderson, however, provided no guidance, instead forcing the topic back onto the girls’ shoulders, pushing off her desk with her hands and saying, “I will leave the research to this to you.” At this point, the girls who were watching, silently, returned to typing on their computers, chatting with their friends, and sliding back down into their seats. Mrs. Anderson seemed subdued—for the rest of the period she was quiet and did not provide any sarcastic taunts to the girls, or even speak to them except as a science teacher. The students’ performances, shifting from dis-engaged with school science to searching for answers around a complex topic and then back to dis-engaged, demonstrated an awareness in girls around the topic of climate change, but also an uncertainty. They did not
12 While climate change is not the same as sustainability, it is one of the hotter environmental issues of today which makes it an avenue of possibility for students to understand the connections between the “three E’s” of sustainability.
122 know what to think and were waiting for the science expert—the person who represented science to them--to provide them with direction (as they did with all other science topics). Later during the same class period, habitat fragmentation, one of the vocabulary words, became a point of discussion. Mrs. Andersons’s performances at this point in the class suggested her own uncertainty with a topic like climate change. She began to list the numerous ways that humans have created fragmented habitats and destroyed a number of species’ habitats. Her performance suggested she was passionate and sincere as she shared these examples—there was no sarcasm in her voice and her voice was faster and more excited. Taking about five minutes of class time, Mrs. Anderson talked about invasive species and offered extra credit to the girls if, in the spring, they would go to their local parks and remove the invasive honeysuckle plants. Her acceptance of human actions causing terrible habitat destruction for animals through this one definition was in stark contrast to the defensive performance she gave only a few minutes earlier around humans and climate change. However, it was in the next few moments that Mrs. Anderson’s own understanding of habitat fragmentation became clear and how she was able to accept one commonsense idea over another. She proceeded to link this discussion of habitat fragmentation to immigration and the bringing of invasive species (via seed carriers) over in the clothes and shoes of immigrants (legal and illegal). Mrs. Anderson was willing to recognize the human construction of an environmental problem if it were caused by immigrants, who may or may not have been here in the United States legally (habitat destruction). But she appeared to be reluctant to recognize the human construction of an environmental problem if it were caused by natural-born Americans (global warming). The girls were more attentive to this conversation than to others that occurred in class, whether due to the extra credit opportunity or the previous discussion is unclear. They were not as slouched and folded in and instead, engaged with questions about invasive species and renewable and nonrenewable resources, which were the next two terms on their vocabulary list. Mrs. Anderson managed to instill both an environmentally friendly message and hegemonic messages about immigrants at the same time immediately after rejecting human involvement in climate change. Her own ambivalence about climate change, about immigrants, and about the environment more generally, only added to the ambiguity that surrounded this topic for the girls. Sustainable use was the last vocabulary word, but the students were already packing up to leave as Mrs. Anderson attempted to share the definition.
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Dr. Metz demonstrated a similar ambivalence around climate change and environmentalism leading to students who were uncertain and searching for guidance. A passionate activist for recycling, the meanings that could be attributed to Dr. Metz’s performances often contradicted each other. On one occasion, the students were watching a film on Emperor Penguins and climate change. During previous movies, Dr. Metz would stop the movie regularly to answer student questions or engage the students in an important point in the film. On this occasion, she kept the film running, talking over the narrator to answer student questions, which were more numerous than during other films. On another occasion, during Dr. Metz’s AP Biology class, students practiced answering multiple-choice questions like those that might be on their final exam. In competition format, teams of students answered questions for points. On a particular graphing question, which looked at data outliers, Dr. Metz discussed climate change scientists who removed their outliers attempting to make their data more effective. After sharing this anecdote, she left the discussion there, providing no other explanation or reasoning for bringing up this point. During her story, again much like in Mrs. Anderson’s class, the students stopped typing on their computers, and instead looked at and leaned towards Dr. Metz, focusing on her face rather than their computer screens or team members. The girls became very quiet, waiting. Even during the next round of questions, the students remained quiet, hardly talking to each other as they answered the next question. Dr. Metz, the woman that these students associated with recycling and the Eco-Club, provided opaque guidance at best about climate change. The very next question that the girls were looking at asked the students about incorporating diverse points of view from different cultures into science discussions. Dr. Metz skipped this question, again performing ambivalence toward possible avenues for understanding the connections between the “three E’s” of sustainability. Sustainability as not related to School Science Performances of sustainability were de-linked from the learning of science at the schools. At St. Agnes, where the online presence of a recycling club was a highlight on the school website and newspapers wrote up their recycling program, there was very little recycling actually being performed. The resistance this rural school community gave to recycling was much different than the ways sustainability was performed at St. Sofia. As a rural community, they understood the need to protect the environment—there was talk about protecting small farmers, land, crops, etc. from larger corporations and pollutants. But they refused the suburban/urban
124 messages to perform the cultural expectations of recycling. In addition, recycling was not something that was easily accomplished—there was no regular pickup of recyclable items. If someone wanted to recycle, they had to take the items to one of several recycling stations around the county. However, instead of recycling, people in these communities raised their own meat, grew gardens, attended and supported other local growers, and fought to keep their “way of life” from disappearing13. Papers and bottles went straight into the garbage cans; very often the recycling bins were empty week after week. However, Mrs. Andre used a thermos to avoid plastic bottles and aluminum cans. When she did use a plastic bottle or pop can, it went into the trash can even though the recycling can sat right next to her desk. She was performing sustainability, just not in the way that was being normalized in urban/suburban societies. Occasionally male students would use the blue recycling bins as garbage cans instead of walking to the other side of the room where the garbage can was located. Girls never used the blue recycling bins inappropriately, but they also never used them appropriately in the science classrooms. Much less interested in community than at St. Sofia, the students (and teachers) of St. Agnes were interested in their individual rights (and much less often their individual responsibilities). The blue recycling bins were shifting normalized performances, which for some students meant uncertainty. The efforts to normalize recycling were not a part of their schooling or science instruction, but sustainable living through other performances was a part of their everyday experiences. Sustainable living was something that a number of these students already did; not, perhaps, in the way that others expected or wanted, but in a way that they knew how to do. At St. Sofia, where community connections were key to school identities, recycling and caring for the environment were very important performances for the students and faculty. However, it was not the facts or science that mattered; it was the actions that were taken that mattered. For St. Sofia, paper drives (collection of paper for recycling) were a cultural and historical part of the school. Recycling was done, not because Dr. Metz pointed out the naturalness of it, but because it had always been done that way at the school. The science did not
13 During the course of my observations, the new laws limiting the age at which children who lived on farms could begin working was being discussed in Congress. This was quite an excitable topic for Mrs. Andre and her children, who attended St. Agnes. Mrs. Andre’s children were the primary caretakers of the farm that they lived on due to unforeseen circumstances.
125 matter, the act of recycling did. Dr. Metz often pointed out the “naturalness” of recycling to the girls and how going against this naturalness by not recycling was unnatural. All of this was in the context of class lectures, where the girls did not move from their disengaged positions of heads on hands, sliding down the seats, and eyes focused on computers. They would not perform sustainability in the classroom during a school science lecture, but they would perform sustainability to recycle because it was a normal, commonsense thing to do at the school. Dr. Metz was able to capitalize on this already normalized behavior and increase the recycling efforts at the school beyond paper, but she (and the other teachers) was not able to bring that enthusiasm into the classrooms where science linked into the environmental aspects of sustainability. Mrs. Anderson had to bribe her students to attend the first Eco-Club meeting of the school year—they were given extra credit on their first test if they showed up. The Eco-club itself was a performative space that demonstrated all three of the themes around sustainability. The first meeting met after school at 2:35 p.m. on a Wednesday. One upper-classman sat up front and directed the traffic of girls into the room. The girls signed in and took seats throughout the classroom. Approximately seventeen girls attended the meeting and were a mix of students from different classes and levels (although there were a number of students present for the extra credit). Noel, an interviewee, senior, and the president of the Eco- Club, took charge of the conversation, talking about starting up the recycling competitions, but then stopped to remind the girls, “This is a democracy, so let us know” if they liked or disliked what the older girls suggested. Noel was very active, jumping around, waving her arms, speaking very fast and often not completing a sentence when her excitement levels were high (she performed similar high energy during her interview). Three girls up front, including Noel, began to list possible ideas for expanding the recycling efforts at the school. Dr. Metz jumped into the conversation as the excitement levels of the girls began to get contagious—more students were sharing ideas, but the focus was moving away from the recycling efforts towards more club-like activities. Interestingly, the activities that the girls were suggesting were about creating a cohesive and recognizable group, about creating rituals that defined them as a unit— fundraising ideas, tee-shirts for the group and for sale, bake sales, etc. Dr. Metz’s points brought the discussion back to practical problems, like creating a list of students who could meet in the morning to take the paper drive materials every Friday to the dumpster. Noel, the president of the group, was the only student to shake her head yes and “mmhmmm” during Dr. Metz’s
126 interruption. This interruption slowed the conversation briefly, until Noel jumped back into the conversation and began talking about making posters, turning the club into an official club, and beginning the competitions for caps and tabs by homeroom. She touched on what other schools were doing around recycling and the new cafeteria recycling effort to collect drink boxes and chip bags alongside the caps, tabs, and cans/bottles recycling already being done. Dr. Metz again jumped into the conversation and began talking about the strategies necessary to do all of this. As she continued to talk, the girls in the room began to slide and sigh and put their heads down. Several girls did ask questions, but it was Noel who pulled the energy in the room. She never sat still, but wiggled, moved and wrote on the board their previous statistics. She took the leadership role seriously, talking about beating her previous recycling records through the club’s competitions and trying to sell the club to the girls who were there. Noel pointed out the difference between this club and other organizations at the school, “We’re not asking for money, we’re asking for your garbage!” At 3:00 p.m. sharp, eight girls left together without offering an excuse or saying goodbye, leaving only nine girls, three of whom were leading the meeting. Their talk moved back to tee-shirt designs for the club, getting everyone’s emails in order to organize through email, and possible field trips for their group to Rumpke dump, a water recycling station, and community outreach programs because, “every club should have” interactions with the local community. By 3:05 p.m., the meeting was done and the girls had left. While this was the first meeting of the year, the three leaders performed their enthusiasm for this club and its efforts for the other students. The other students, however, were not so sure—their performances, especially when they were interacting with the school science representative (Dr. Metz), mimicked those of their interactions with science in the classroom. When they were a part of the sharing of ideas and interacting with the student leaders, their performances were more engaged and active. What Noel and the other student leaders wanted to see was that energized performance, but many of the girls were there for extra credit, not to actually participate in the club. However, Noel and her co-leaders must have pulled more energy from this group, because in December, the Eco-Club decided to sponsor and create a roof-top garden at the school. At the end of my observation time at the school, the girls were looking for possible grants and working with a staff member who had certification in roof top gardening to move their idea forward.
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Noel’s excited performance did not slow down when she discussed Eco-Club, but when observed in an anatomy class, she, like the other girls, was not engaged. During our interview, Noel talked about her passion for science generally and environmental activism more specifically. But what she talked about and what she performed demonstrated a disconnect between school science and science more generally. Her interests in science were around making connections between science and her lived experiences—she loved anatomy because she could link it to how her body worked not because she could name the bones that made up her foot or wrist. Her passionate performance as an environmental activist, a title she proudly took up, began, not in the classroom, but at home while learning with her father. And even while she could see the connections between what was taught in school science and the topics we discussed during our interview, when pushed for examples and talking about sustainability, she always moved back to her experiences with the Eco-Club and another club that she created to discuss current issues, not what she learned in the classroom. For her, sustainability occurred outside of the classroom and was not linked to the science she learned, but the activities that she did. The collection of recycled paper at the school was a constant chore that Dr. Metz took upon herself to complete… by having her students collect and dispose of the paper in the appropriate dumpster outside of the school. Her classes would collect the multiple bins and cans throughout the school on a weekly basis, much to the chagrin of the administration who felt this was a waste of class learning time. Dr. Metz felt that this activity, collecting and recycling the paper, was as important, if not more important, for these girls to do and understand than their classwork. She was seeking to normalize performances of sustainability. Each week, Dr. Metz would choose a different class and send girls to the different floors to collect the recycled paper collection cans and boxes. These smaller collections would be placed into nine larger garbage cans on wheels, which were then rolled through the halls and out the back of the school to a large green and yellow dumpster that was specifically for recycled paper and cardboard. The school was paid for this paper by weight, so in Dr. Metz’s quest to instill Earth stewardship through recycling, the school was earning money from this process, which was not the case with the tabs and caps and other recyclables that they collected. This regular collection of recycled papers was a place where the girls dropped their good-girl student performances—they were active, boisterous, and excited. More analysis of the performances that the girls demonstrated during these collection times will be discussed in the final section. By dropping their good girl
128 performances, the students were disconnecting recycling from their school science experiences. Recycling was a school performance, yes, but not related to the science they were learning in the classroom. Instead, these performances were calling upon the historical, material, and cultural experiences of being a student at St. Sofia within this community—their faith, their history, and their school, but not their experiences with science, suggested that this recycling was a normal, commonsense thing to do. Caring Part of the reason that these girls’ faith, school, history, and interactions with the local community suggested that their recycling efforts were a commonsense performance for them to take up, was because it was very intertwined with the idea of the girls as caring individuals. Their performances of sustainability as a way to show caring were wrapped up in their justifications for doing certain projects and actions, the joining (or not) of specific clubs, and the naming but not doing of certain activities. They appeared to understand that performing sustainability was a good thing to do because it was what girls were supposed to do—care for others. They performed the assumed normalized behaviors for a girl, but only as it applied to the environment and issues of equity. Economics was still a difficult concept for them to incorporate into their performances of caring, although again, there was a naïve understanding of the ways economics might interact with the other “E’s.” Noel was an unapologetic environmental activist and Catholic. Her interview and her performances at St. Sofia were strongly imbued with feminine caring. At a school wide mass, prior to the actual event, several students performed as past saints. Noel performed as Mother Theresa, one of the most widely recognized religious women in the modern world, known for her care of the poor. Her excitement at the Eco-Club meetings also suggested her attempts at placing caring centermost in her reasons for participating in activities. As the president, it was Noel who suggested community outreach as something every club should be doing. During the interview, she expanded upon this, talking about stewardship and protecting what God had given humans. At one point, while discussing what it meant to be a girl, she said, I’m just going to say it. We’re [girls and women] the caregivers of the species and so we take care of our mother [earth]…with all of the emotions we are just so driven to take care and so with all the new freedoms we have, we can take care of the environment, protecting it, and of course we’re going to be talking about it…
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Her understanding of the school’s motto “Go Green” meant performing sustainability both environmentally by taking care of the earth but also in terms of equity by caring for others. Her linking of both environment and equity through community interactions was something that she referenced a lot during her interview, So like for St. Sofia, we’re already green, we’re already ready, we just need to give back. So the Eco-Club, for the community, there’s so many things we can do. Like adopt-a- spot…it’s so neat when you drive down the road and outside their building or a school is planting a garden or getting up trash. Later on, after discussing her plans for the roof garden at the school, Noel began making plans for a community garden at the college of her choice. Her plans included a garden where the food would be donated to a local food pantry and charities so that she could help out the planet and people’s health. During one observation in Dr. Metz’s classroom, the students were watching a movie on climate change and Emperor Penguins. The performances that they displayed during this film supported the idea that sustainability was linked to girls caring. The opening scene of the movie was a dead penguin, which the audience is told is dead due to climate change. The girls’ response was a collective “Awwww…” as the film continued. One student placed her head on her desk and disengaged with the video and the class, very similar to the disengagement seen in science classes throughout this research. But, the rest of the students that I could see put their knees up and hugged their folded legs. Their Friday casual dress--jogging pants and yoga pants-- allowed them to relax their performances of proper St. Sofia girlhoods. Collective gasps and responses such as “Oh no!” were delivered at video segments showing melting icebergs and other warming consequences. There were a number of questions from the students after they watched the largest iceberg known break apart on the video. While the girls’ performances began to shift as the movie and class continued (they began to chat with each other), their performed responses to the video were of care and concern for the dying animals and lost habitats. In addition to caring about the environment, the students at St. Sofia also spent a lot of time addressing issues of equity. Beginning as freshmen, the girls were shown that their performances needed to incorporate caring. In Mrs. Anderson’s class, students were given a student from a local school to adopt for the year, writing letters and meeting with them
130 throughout the year. In the hallways, signs calling for caring action were on every wall. Pro-life signs hung in every stairwell alongside signs affirming girls’ identities (“Be YOU tiful!,” “You ARE be-you-tiful!,” etc.). Donation posters, sponsored by different school groups, called for students to donate goods for the needy. One poster called for shoes, another for coats, and another for canned goods. During one of the all school masses, an announcement at the end of mass calling for donations of feminine products reminded girls of their privilege and responsibility to help care for others. The student doing the announcements asked the girls “How would you like to not have a pad or tampon and then not be able to leave the house?” Even in terms of recycling, the girls performed caring through their sustainable actions—the collection of pull tabs from aluminum pop cans for the benefit of the Ronald McDonald house was a popular contest sponsored by the Eco-Club. All of these equity issues that the girls participated in revolved around performing sustainability through acts of caring. INTERACTIONS BETWEEN GIRLHOODS AND SUSTAINABILITY Looking at each of the earlier themes—what was normalized through performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability leads to an answer for the question of how do performances of girlhoods interact with performances of sustainability? As I return to answer the question that framed this research, the purpose of this research was to find the assumptions and normalized performances within the interactions of girlhoods and sustainability and shine a light on the power that is a part of them. The interactive performances reified certain taken-for-granted assumptions about girls, sustainability, and science, but the interactions also demonstrated challenges to those ideas. To begin, performances of sustainability reified the position of these girls within society by reinforcing assumed and normalized performances of girlhoods, but it also allowed for the girls to challenge certain normalized girl behaviors. In terms of reifying the structures that are already in place around expected performances for girls, performances of sustainability as done at these schools attempted to normalize sustainability as a feminine act. This worked in two ways to keep girls in marginalized positions within circles of power. First, because sustainability was understood to be an act of caring, going green and doing sustainable actions was understood to be a feminine action and performance. While many schools, both single sex and co-ed, participate in sustainable activities, St. Sofia students followed the go green motto of their school because it represented not only their school colors, but also acts of service toward others and the
131 environment. It was an historical and cultural expected performance linked to their girlhood performances as well as their faith and service. It was interesting to find out that St. Sofia’s brother school, an all-boys’ school located nearby, refused to participate in any recycling projects, even the ones that would earn the school money. While this all-boys’ school’s rejection of recycling was not something that was common in the area (other all-boys’ schools had very large recycling efforts), their rejection of these actions may also have been a rejection of localized and situated performances that they considered feminine and for girls. While performances of feminine caring are not in and of themselves problematic, the ways in which they were used to make meaning and to structure levels of power in this particular space become problematic because it marginalized the girls’ actions, identities, and ways of making meaning. The second way that this worked to keep girls in marginalized positions was in relation to the larger scope of science. Because traits deemed necessary to do science are often linked to masculine performances, for performances of sustainability to be linked to feminine performances, sustainability is distanced from science; sustainability and girls are delegitimized. The rituals observed around all three of the earlier themes (what was normalized by performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability) reify the idea that girls do not do science. Girls at both schools disengaged with science through their daily performances. This was the case even when they were learning about sustainability issues. However, once involved in actual performances of sustainability, the girls were engaged and lively—as long as they understood the activity to not be linked to school science. By removing scientific legitimacy from sustainability and placing it in the realm of service, an activity normalized as female, girls are not allowed into science through sustainability because performances of sustainability are considered unnatural science performances. So, the activities that were normalized for girls, activities around sustainability, were the same activities that were made unnatural in science. This feminization of performances of sustainability also worked to keep issues around sustainability, especially those around equity and the environment, marginalized in larger societal discourses. This too was observed at these schools, where the teachers’ performances shut down and marginalized discussions of difference, equity, and the environment unless it was in the expected lesson plan. Linking into this marginalization through feminization, discussions and performances around the third “E” of sustainability, the economy, were often deemed male space, similar to science. Two of the three students whom I interviewed spoke to economics as being a male
132 space and if only girls/women were in the space, there would not be the problems we currently have with the economy. Vicky spoke of the importance of fixing that space first before the other two could be fixed or even thought of, continually redirecting conversations back to the economy and the need to fix the problems within that space first. She also linked poverty to abuses in the economy—using the narrative of blaming the victim to understand and make meaning of the “three E’s” of sustainability. Her linkages of the economy to issues of equity were not that unequal economic resources are unfair and cause issues of poverty, but that those in poverty take advantage of the economic system as it is currently set up. By fixing the economic system, Vicky wanted to reduce the abuses of those in poverty, not the abuses by those in power that remained hidden for her. Many of the meanings these girls demonstrated around the economy reified the economy as something these girls don’t do because it is space that men control. The interactions between sustainability and girlhoods were not all about the reification of their marginalized positions. There was room for resistance, and the girls, through their performances of sustainability, resisted some of the commonsense and normalized performances of girlhoods. As has already been noted, during students’ performances of sustainability, the girls became much more active and engaged, contradicting the expected performances of girlhoods within these school spaces. This was particularly the case at St. Sofia, where Dr. Metz had her classes gather the recyclables that were collected throughout the school hallways. Dr. Metz constantly warned the girls to be quiet when doing this because she said she did not want them to disrupt the other classes during these collections. However, this could also demonstrate a policing of expected girlhood performances. Problematically, the actual cans on wheels were extremely loud as they rolled over the tiles on the hallway floors. Banging over each crack and space in the tiles, and squeaking, the bins, which were very full, were easy to push, but hard to control. This led to a lot of giggling and very active girls as they attempted to steer, catch, push, and maneuver the carts to the outside dumpster—performing distinctly “unnatural” girlhoods within this space. During my first observation of this collection process, as they collected the paper in the school, the girls were again very active, climbing into the cans to compress the paper, lifting large boxes and bins full of paper and carrying the large boxes that refused to fit into the cans. When they got outside, their noise levels increased as did their outright laughter. Girls climbed into the dumpster, jumping up and down to make more room in the dumpster for their new loads. One student carried a large stick that was used to open the dumpster and push
133 the paper around inside the dumpster. In every instance, those students who were engaged in the recycling were pushing back against, resisting, what was normalized behaviors for girls. They were performing actions that were normalized for boys—noise, action, lifting, playing. Due to good timing, during one of these experiences, a local businessman arrived with a truck full of cardboard. All but two girls immediately lined up and began a cardboard brigade from the truck to the dumpster. The two girls who stood off to the side did eventually join the line after Dr. Metz asked for their help. Dr. Metz also used her phone to take pictures of the students as they worked and in a group picture where the girls stretched out their bodies in cheerleader like poses in and out of the dumpster. They were having fun. A week later, a different class collected the recycling. These girls needed no directions, but went off to collect and Dr. Metz and I caught up with them outside, already tossing the cans’ contents into the dumpsters. Again, the girls were very playful and engaged. This class chased their wheeled cans down the halls and parking lot, banged into each other with the cans, and were generally very active with the entire process. Even once back inside, the groups resisted returning to performances of the good-girl student, taking a much longer time getting back to the classroom than Dr. Metz expected! These resistant performances did not go unnoticed, however. At one point, I entered the school several minutes late. The halls were quiet momentarily, until I heard the telltale noise of the recycling carts coming down the hallway. I paused at the elevator, not pushing the button, but waiting to see who was recycling in case it was Dr. Metz, in which case I planned on joining her and the students. Instead, I saw three upperclassmen girls running down the hall pushing the can, with one student inside the can, arms stretched out waving up and down, posing with her arms stretched out to the sides or waving like a float queen. While not shouting, they were laughing and generally enjoying themselves in the process of emptying this particular can. They were not students that I recognized from my observations.
Only a few days later, Dr. Metz informed me that the administration had requested she not use class time for recycling collection. Instead, Dr. Metz had to develop a collection schedule with her Eco-Club students for before or after school. The unnatural behaviors of the girls did not go unnoticed by the authority figures of the school. It made too much noise and the girls were too “rowdy.” The Eco-Club took up the collection efforts before and after school, but
134 in this performance tug-of-war between sustainability and girlhoods, the performances of girlhoods won out. However, in interviews with students, the girls recognized the performances of sustainability as a necessary service to the community and, more largely, the environment, even at the expense of their performances of girlhoods. It was their responsibility to the community, to their faith, and to the future, once again linking their performances to a marginalized position. In conclusion, girls are doing sustainability because commonsense tells them to. It is “natural” for these girls to follow the school motto of “go green”; it is a “natural” part of feminine nurturing and caring. For these girls, sustainability is not a way into science because science, as it is performed in school, is divorced from rituals of sustainability. This allows for the legitimacy of science to be upheld at the expense of both girls and sustainability. The girls do not challenge science’s meaning making or rituals or norms because they cannot access the science through their performances of sustainability. However, for these girls, sustainability is a way to challenge gender norms and expectations. This was particularly the case at St. Sofia, where girls’ performances of sustainability allowed the girls to challenge the good girl student performances that were expected within the school. This resistance is one small way of pushing back against their own marginalization.
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CHAPTER 7
NEW SEEDS: IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
This study looked closely at the rituals that girls in two Midwestern private high schools performed around girlhoods, science and sustainability. As Richard Quantz (2011) suggested, “…the interaction patterns of the classroom…when properly understood, reveal important ritual aspects” (p.5) that are necessary to illuminate in order to better understand how those in power maintain the status quo by continually creating and recreating through those rituals what is considered normal and commonsense. This was apparent in the girls’ performances of girlhoods, science, and sustainability as well as in the interactions between performances of girlhoods and sustainability. The girls made meaning through their performances that reified the status quo. Whether maintaining marginalized positions through their performances of girlhoods or reifying that girls do not perform science, the ways that commonsense ideologies flowed through their performances as well as how they made meaning of those performances was apparent. However, “…as the multiple voices within the individual and within the community struggle to control the direction of the acceptable dialogue, ideological expressions may be reinforced, reinterpreted, or rejected” (Quantz, 2011, p.52). Resistance to the commonsense ideas was also apparent in the performances of the girls at these schools. In their performances of sustainability, girls challenged the commonsense behaviors expected of girls in those spaces—they challenged the good girl performances that were normalized within their schools. They also attempted to make meaning around difficult issues, often ending up with contradictory meanings, which while confusing for the girls at this moment, provide liminal spaces of possibility. This chapter will explore some of those possibilities, some of the ways in which the results from this study can help to move out from the limitations of what is considered normal and commonsense. This requires both theoretical work and pragmatic work—both of which will be addressed in this chapter. First, the theoretical possibilities of adding another layer to an already theory thick analysis will be explored. Robin Bernstein’s (2011) theory of scriptive things brings a unique perspective, seeking to draw the material closer to the cultural through the analysis of how objects become things and script our performances. Looking at the results of this study, I will briefly explore how adding Bernstein’s theory to how the girls performed in lab spaces at lab
136 tables might offer other exciting possibilities for using ritual critique in schools in order to find and illuminate places where power attempts to control what is legitimate and what is not. I will then move to the pragmatic possibilities offered by the results of this study, exploring the ways that service-learning, something that most of the girls in this study actively participated in, might provide ways for girls to develop, share, and legitimate their knowledges. I will revisit the idea of STEM and stems to examine the ways in which STEM might be rearticulated by moving it toward “meaningful action” (Quantz, 2011, p.140). This means looking for ways that stems/STEMs can develop in girls specifically, and students more generally, “…the ability to interpret and critique, to make moral choices and to commit to some action even when all the relevant information is not available” (Quantz, 2011, p.140). Finally, I will explore the implications that this project has for teachers and teacher education by examining how nature of science might provide a science pedagogy that is able to take up the critical thinking required of a re-articulated STEM. Rituals and Scriptive Things Rituals, those formalized, symbolic performances examined in this study, are not done in empty space. Quantz (2011) reminds us “…that ritual is one place in which the symbolic aspects of culture become merged, quite literally, with the materiality of the human body” (p.18). That materiality of the body is done in relation to and in conjunction with objects—the materiality of life. These objects can get in the way of our performances and they can script the performances that are seen in research. While the most potent rituals are those that are often not recognized as such, so too the potency of those things we interact with everyday can be invisible. So to study performances through ritual critique alongside Robin Bernstein’s (2011) theory of scriptive things provides an opportunity to not only illuminate those places where those in power legitimate what is considered normal and commonsense, but also how the things of our lives both help to reify and resist that power. As a reminder, Bernstein (2011) defines a script as “…a dynamic substance that deeply influences but does not entirely determine live performances” (1470/7465). However, it is the scriptive thing that is of interest in this analysis, “…an item of material culture that prompts meaningful bodily behaviors…[it]…does not reveal a performance, but it does reveal a script for a performance.” (1478/7465) While Bernstein’s analyses of scriptive things centered issues of race in an historical context, my research has worked to center girlhoods within the discourse of science. While this
137 dissertation sought an answer to how performances of girlhoods interacted with performances of sustainability, science, and girls’ performances of science, was a constant throughout both the data collection and data analysis. Therefore, I will use Bernstein’s (2011) theory of scriptive things to better understand how the seemingly innocuous lab table, a material object that the girls interacted with regularly, affected the girls’ performances, which in turn affected the meanings that were available to them. The science lab table is one of the most utilitarian science tools at a scientist’s disposal. Black epoxy topped tables with drawers and cabinets for the storage of materials, these universally recognizable work surfaces are ubiquitous in school lab settings and many scientific lab facilities as well. Always close to a sink and gas line, these nearly indestructible surfaces are perfect for science experimenting—they are nonporous so chemicals cannot leach into them; they are fire retardant so Bunsen burners cannot cause through their surfaces; they are easy to wipe down and clean so that dissection messes are easily removed from the table top; and because they are level and flat, microscopes can sit on their surface without fear of someone bumping into a loose table which could cause a shift in the field of vision or worse, the scope to fall. The objective, sterile notion of science is reflected in the surface of the lab table itself. Both of the schools where this research was conducted used these tables. St. Sofia’s science rooms were set up to represent two separate areas—a classroom area that housed the teacher’s and student desks, a SMART board, and other typical classroom items and a lab area with lab tables and banks of storage around the walls. At St. Agnes, the chemistry room followed a similar pattern—a classroom space and a lab space all within one room, but with distinctly separate areas. This separation of the actual “active” science space from the learning space begins Bernstein’s (2011) shift of the lab tables from objects to things. Certain rituals were required to make use of those lab tables and the rituals that were meant for the tables had little to nothing to do with what occurred in the learning spaces of the classrooms. If the lab tables were not enough to let one know that these areas of the rooms were dedicated to the teaching of science, then the extras present in the space were giveaways to these areas’ functions. Science equipment and models were found throughout every room—from the stereo-typical flasks and beakers full of chemicals to the skeletons, rocks, microscopes, and other science equipment, the rooms were very obviously meant for the learning and enacting of science—the girls were expected to perform science in these spaces.
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The biology room at St. Agnes begins the exploration of how lab tables “dance” (Bernstein, 2011), or at least move with the performers. This specific classroom space blended the learning area with the science area. Lab tables served as desks, and while this room was much smaller than any of the other classrooms I observed, it was a science room. It was again obvious by what else was present within that space—sinks, gas link ups, artifacts, etc. However, it is important to note that Mrs. Andre never did labs with her students in this space. There was one outdoor science experience for her AP Biology students, but for the most part she felt that there was not enough time to “do” science with the students. As stated earlier in the dissertation, Mrs. Andre preferred to lecture. Therefore, the interactions students had with these lab tables were much different than the ones in the other classrooms. This was apparent in their lack of respect for the lab tables, where they often piled their books, bags, and coats, doodled on surfaces, banged on the tops, and threw small trash into the sinks. It is the properly performed rituals that turn a space into sacred science space. The behaviors that were scripted by the lab tables within this specific biology class space were not those that a proper science lab requested (and “required”). The space was not sacred science space. Lab tables require necessary science rituals. It is necessary that lab coats and goggles be donned to perform the part of scientist through costume. It is necessary to use equipment at these tables—there is nothing “to do” unless there is equipment added to the space. Working at a lab table requires the proper investment of the actor. It is necessary to perform the serious scientist—to take up the rituals of the scientist. The lab table is also solitary space—it is not meant for group work or for collaborative endeavors, but for individuals to enact—to perform-- science. These performances of science at the lab table are all a part of the identity one puts on when doing science. The image of the solitary scientist looking into a microscope (which incidentally can only be looked in by one person at a time), or of mixing chemicals (which again can only be done by one person to ensure the correct amounts/orders/chemicals are used) is an iconic image. Ask a student to draw a scientist and you will get a single individual often working at a lab table (Steinke, et. al., 2007). As Bernstein (2011) reminds us, “…the competent performer understands how a book or other thing scripts broad behaviors within her or his historical moment—regardless of whether or how the performer follows that script” (1600/7465). The students knew what was meant to be done at a lab table.
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However, the students (and teachers) often danced with lab tables through their rejection of some of the images presented above. The first image resisted by the girls was the popular image of the solitary scientist at a lab table. First, it is important to remember that for all but one class, these tables were in a separate space. Additionally, lab tables are set at an above average height so that accessing the work surface requires one to stand or sit upon a stool. Finally, it is important to remember that these lab tables are not in “real” science space, but instead in school space which suggests other scriptive things and performances. One of the other performances is that of group work. Within schools, group work is a very popular teaching technique and it was no different in these science classrooms. But transferring this performance to the science space required a “dance” with the lab tables—a constant shifting and moving of bodies. Science lab tables are not meant for group work; they are meant for individuals to work on their own projects. Group work requires sitting and standing in different ways at the lab table to accommodate the group thinking necessary to complete the school science activity. So the lab table as an object represents science but within the school space, the students work around the expected performances of the lab table and science to fulfill the performances required of school. The “…distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet…” (Bernstein, 2011, 1517/7465) worked as an upsetting of the boundary between the students’ bodies and the tables. The leaning across, sitting upon, placing of elbows and foreheads on the tables was a negotiation on several levels—between student and scientist but also between girls and science with the table literally and figuratively in between them both. As Bernstein (2011) notes, “a thing forces a person into an awareness of the self in material relation to the thing” and girls were forced into an awareness that recognized science as not something they were a part of. The lab tables actualized this as girls attempted to perform girlhoods at the table but could not because the table did not allow that performance. The act of dressing the part of scientist caused no end of playful improvisation by the students. These costumed performances, goggles and giggles, seemed to be intimately intertwined as students donned their protective lab coats or aprons (or didn’t) and placed or almost placed goggles on their faces as they headed for their lab tables. Additionally, the equipment used by the students on the lab tables was part of the expected performance. The students were invited to be scientists in their interplay with the lab tables, equipment, and clothing. But their responses to that invitation were varied. Some girls studiously followed the
140 directions of the lab activity at their group station, placing their goggles over their eyes and wearing protective clothing, setting out their equipment on the lab table in precise and orderly fashion, making room for their directions, and giving each person in their group a specific job to do. They were performing scientist in order to fulfill the expectations of another performance— that of the good-girl student. Others were disdainful of the proper performance at the lab table. They talked and laughed, only putting their goggles in their hair when the teacher came around to their lab tables. They laughed out loud when the teacher reminded them to wear protective aprons. They couldn’t/wouldn’t follow the directions and often ended up copying other groups’ results. Their bodies refused to bend over the tables, but instead they traveled around the lab tables and sat back from them. They were resisting the normalized performance scripted by the science lab table. The Possibilities of Service Learning Girls…have the right to contribute to the improvement of society, to make this world a more fraternal and more habitable place (Batlle, 2009, p. 1) St. Agnes and St. Sofia students had access to a number of different service-learning experiences, both through the classrooms and outside of school through participation in after school clubs as well as organizations that were not associated with their schools. Partly based in their performances of faith, these activities had a strong impact on the ways that the girls made meaning of their lives. From campus ministry programs to environmental clubs focused on recycling, these spaces provided girls with active, hands-on experiences around issues within sustainability, especially around issues of equity and the environment. While it was not the intention of this dissertation to look at service learning, because the girls in this study accessed sustainability through acts of service, it is important to see what possibilities might lay in this direction. The interviewees were able to provide the most information regarding girls’ connections to service learning. Vicky, a sports enthusiast, was highly involved in the local Relay For Life, an organization that raises money for the American Cancer Society through a 24- hour walkathon. Noel was president of the Eco-Club at her school and highly involved in the campus ministry efforts at her school. Teresa, a life-long Girl Scout, also volunteered with a local organization to aid students in Appalachian communities. While I did not observe these girls performing service regularly, during the interviews, their performances shifted to brighter eyes, quickened speech, and excitement in sharing their experiences with these organizations.
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This becomes an important link to service learning when it is compared to some of the data collected for this dissertation which suggested that girls were active, engaged learners when their knowledges and experiences were legitimated. This occurred a number of times in the science classrooms when the girls shared their personal experiences with the other students in the classes. Their performances of interest in each other’s personal stories and the sharing of knowledges contrasted sharply with their performances of disengagement with science more generally. This shift in performance from disinterested when their experiences were de- legitimated, silenced, or ignored to engaged when linked to their own experiences opens up a space of possibility for service learning. Service learning is based in progressive, Deweyian ideals of education. Students’ knowledges and skills interact with their experiences to generate learning within a community where the interactions, connections, and relationships between stakeholders are made explicit. Often, critical thinking and critical reflection are interwoven into service-learning projects, providing space for Quantz’s (2011) meaningful action to develop. Additionally, Peter Felten and Patricia Clayton (2011) suggest that “[c]ritical reflection is the component of service learning that generates, deepens, and documents learning” (p.77). Furthermore, “[t]he interdependence of learning processes and outcomes with community processes and outcomes… renders service-learning powerful as a vehicle for learning and social change” (Felten & Clayton, 2011, p.76, italics added). Ritual critique, standpoint feminism, and eco-justice, the three theories that are the foundation of this dissertation, all attempt to bring into the light hidden places of power in order to work towards just social change. Service learning may be a place to begin, by challenging the status quo around what it means to be a student and what it means to be a producer of knowledges. According to James Kielsmeier (2011), normative views of students suggest that students’ participation within society is weak, at best. Kielsmeier (2011) suggests the normative traits are of students as consumers of resources, passive victims in need of help, and recipients of others’ efforts. Kielsmeier (2011) proposes that service learning challenges these normative assumptions and instead sees youths as resources, active producers of help, and leaders willing to give of their time and knowledges, however limited or in process they may be. Felten and Clayton (2011), too, look to the non-normative possibilities of service learning, “With its interdisciplinary, experiential, reflective, nonhierarchical, and unpredictable nature, service-
142 learning is among the most “counternormative” of pedagogies, by design deviating in significant ways from traditional teaching and learning strategies” (p.76). Students’ involvement with service learning may provide avenues of resistance to the techno-orientation that schools have taken up in order to reify positions and hierarchies of power because it legitimates their own experiences and knowledges, recognizing that students, too, are producers of knowledge. Once again, Felten and Clayton (2011) state, “Fundamentally, service-learning challenges the traditional identities and roles of students and calls on them not only to consume knowledge but also to produce it” (p.82). Students challenge their traditional roles through the performances that they are able take up when involved in service learning. “Through service learning, young people don't simply study in school, but they become urban planners, engineers, urban farmers, microbiologists, community organizers, or playwrights, tackling important issues in their neighborhoods or cities” (Kielsmeier, 2011, p.3). These experiences can provide transformative ways of seeing and being in the world (Felten & Clayton, 2011). The embodied ways in which we perform our being in the world carry significant meaning. According to Quantz (2011), these rituals, our formalized, symbolic performances, construct our reality, morality, and identity. This is in contrast to the current technorationality that pervades our institutions and cultural experiences, shutting out issues of morality and ethics.
Technorationality reduces all problems to a mechanical means-ends reasoning that sets aside questions of the moral desirability of the ends. Consumer materialism promotes the idea that all problems can be solved through the consumption of commodities. And intransitive consciousness removes any language of possibility that things might be otherwise. (Quantz, 2011, p.128)
Performances of service learning may be an avenue away from this technorationality. Service learning requires that participants “…evaluate differing perspectives and complex situations…[and] consider perspectives other than their own…” in order for them to “…cultivate capacities for making informed judgments…” and develop “…their capacity to think critically and to understand social issues” (Felten & Clayton, 2011, p.79). Service learning, when linked with communities, also allows students to realize that much more is at stake than their learning and may “…prompt students to understand more fully the true complexity of social problems and
143 thereby cause them to lose previously held, often naïve, confidence in their individual capacity to effect systematic change” (Felten & Clayton, 2011, p.81) through the technorational techniques they have been taught. Instead, the complexities of relationships and consequences of actions become important, where an end is not a legitimate answer but discussions around desired and just ends becomes important (Quantz, 2011). “In service-learning, students often come face-to- face with troubling social realities, making connections between emotion and learning, a particularly salient consideration for this pedagogy” (Felten & Clayton, 2011, p.80). This does not mean that service learning is the answer to the myriad of problems currently facing education generally, or this project specifically. All performances are bound up in normative and resistant meanings and the ways in which service learning is used, performed, and learned may be much different than the justice-oriented intentions discussed here. It may lead to the reification of hidden power that maintains students’ and others’ marginalizations. However, for the girls within the spaces studied for this dissertation, service learning may provide an avenue of counter-normative performances that legitimate their experiences and knowledges. This may be particularly important in terms of science, where these girls’ experiences and knowledges were continuously de-legitimated within the science classroom through the rejection of their lived experiences. Centering service learning in the teaching of science may provide a way for performances of girlhoods to be legitimated, as service learning relies partly on the affective domain. Performances of affect are linked to performances of femininity and are rejected in normalized performances of science. Within this research, performances of girlhoods, while dependent upon the physical performance, also included affective performances. Rachel’s display of tears at being forced to work with a group she did not belong to demonstrates the use of emotions to make meaning. Within the science classroom, girls’ affective displays, most often linked to the sharing of their own experiences, were shut down and rejected by the science teachers. However, research in service learning is beginning to suggest that “…the emotional dimensions of experience can contribute to developmental outcomes, including enhanced motivation, empathy, and persistence” (Felten & Clayton, 2011, p.80). Service learning may provide a way to legitimate performances of girlhoods as well as challenge the quest for objectivity found within science, an assumed and taken for granted performance of science.
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Service learning, when performed in ways that normalize critical thinking, connectivity, relationships, and learning, also holds great potential for normalizing radical performances of sustainability that center issues of equity and the environment in the quest for just social change. According to Felten and Clayton (2011), “it positions students, faculty, and community members as colearners, coeducators, and cogenerators of knowledge. Thus, unlike much other pedagogy, the defining learning outcomes of service-learning transcend students to encompass learning and development for everyone involved” (p.82). While I might suggest a less anthropocentric view of service learning, a pedagogy steeped in the relationships and complexities of a community is suitable for adding discussions of sustainability. This may be particularly important for the girls from this study who were often unable to make the connections between the “three E’s” of sustainability until explicitly discussed. A New Stem: Re-Articulating STEM At the conclusion of this research project, it is necessary to revisit the first chapter of this dissertation, where I brought the metaphor of plant propagation into play. At this point, is it possible to propagate a new stem, a rearticulated version of STEMs in order to draw girls and science together in a way that legitimates their identity and their knowledges? Clark and Button (2011) began this process of redefining STEM to mean Sustainability Transdisciplinary Education Model which seeks to examine sustainability through art, science, and community engagement “…in a manner that empowers and inspires community members to imagine what is possible and to take action individually and collectively” (p.43). Seeking a way to engage an entire community on a college campus and the town in which it was situated, Clark and Button’s (2011) model was put into play at all levels of formal and informal education. This revised STEM has some growing potential, but it does so without yet questioning some of the underlying issues of power within science. The individual presenters who were discussed in the article were all male, and while this representation may be distorted due to the limited space of the article, deciding who to use to legitimate a project matters. There were representations of females in the article—a nurturing female student teacher and a struggling second grader who learned to write poetry. While it is important to legitimate the knowledges available through narratives, it is also important to see how science may still, even in a revised version of STEM, work to marginalize certain groups of people. While Clark and Button praised the successes of the STEM program they developed, without an illumination of how power works in and through our performances of
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STEM (in either representation), understanding sustainability remains at the nodes of the elaborate Cat’s Cradle game that was suggested in Chapter 3. The “three E’s” of sustainability remain disparate, unconnected, and within a technorational realm. Even Clark and Button’s choice of the words “education model” suggests a static, step-by-step process with a one-size- fits-all, technical response to complex issues that sustainability tries to address. What is needed is a rearticulation of STEM that seeks to address the connectivity between the “three E’s” of sustainability in order to illuminate relationships, power, and consequences. Re-articulating STEM. While it is not the purpose of this section to find the answer, or even an answer, I would like to suggest the following terms replace science, technology, engineering, and math in the STEM acronym—Sustainable Transformative Educative Movements. Looking at sustainability through Sustainable Transformative Educative Movements moves away from examining the “three E’s” of sustainability as separate pillars, and shifts to the relationships between the “three E’s.” This acronym suggests sustainable, long lasting, transformative work that is ever in motion, adjusting to the ever-new issues of equity, economics, and the environment that evolve in our ever-changing global world. It works to see science in relationships, as interconnected with, other issues, peoples, spaces, etc. Such a re- articulation favors “… the thinker to recognize and to construct larger patterns that can be used to make sense of particular instances. It requires creativity. It requires wisdom. In other words, it requires intellect” (Quantz, 2011, p.140). Once science is seen in relation to and connected with the world, technorational responses can be decentered—the puzzlemaster is no longer in charge of the game (Quantz, 2011). Instead, morality and ethical decisions are necessary points of discussion because the acts performed through this rearticulated STEM return thinking and action to a practical realm not colonized by the technical. In this move to see science as connected and relational and to engage with a practical realm of ethical considerations, this rearticulated STEM can perhaps work to center and maintain girls’ interactions with sustainability, if this STEM is performed through service learning as the educative movements. Current research suggested the importance of values based experiential learning in promoting sustainability education (Lugg, 2007; Lewis, et al., 2008, 2010; Sutton, 2009). Within this dissertation, girls’ performances of sustainability were intricately interwoven with their performances of caring as a feminine trait through their service efforts. This suggests a way for girls to participate in STEM as Sustainable Transformative Educative Movements
146 without having to reject their identities as girls, but instead, expanding the identities that could and should be legitimated within STEM. These girls’ interests in issues of equity and environment were centered in their acts of service. By using service as a transformative educative movement, the knowledges that these girls created through their performances of sustainability could be brought from the margins to positions in the center in order to, not only legitimize their knowledges and performances, but also open up possibilities for other girls’ experiences with sustainability to be brought into the light and legitimized, creating a cycle of transformative movements focused on education for sustainability. In focusing on education for sustainability, a STEM that fights against the erasure of ethics seeks to rebuild a morality not based in the “…manipulation and exploitation of the external world” (Quantz, 2011, p. 150) but one based on an understanding of our connectedness and complex, ever-changing relationships with the rest of the world. Looking at this STEM through the lenses of standpoint feminism, eco-justice, and ritual critique, requires that interactions with sustainability include this transformative aspect, a seeking of a more socially, economically, and environmentally just world where decisions are based on ethical and moral considerations. When our actions are linked to these new possibilities, new ways to make meaning can arise, as Collins (2000) reminds us, “On both the individual and the group level, a dialogical relationship suggests that changes in thinking may be accompanied by changed actions and that altered experiences may in turn stimulate a changed consciousness” (p. 30, italics added). A STEM that seeks to shift the meanings we make through our performances, through the small, daily rituals we participate in, changes what is commonsense and made normal. While resistance to new normals will not only be expected, but necessary to constantly address a changing world and changing relationships, a STEM centered on the relationship between the “three E’s” of sustainability might have a chance to flourish. Implications for Growing New Plants: Science Teachers and Teacher Preparation This dissertation began by seeking a way to engage girls with science through sustainability in order to plant new seeds of thought and to introduce new genetic material into the current STEM project in a way that acknowledged and legitimated girls’ knowledges and experiences. The study was designed and carried out with girls as the center of this project— they were the seeds of knowledge. However, if a new plant is to grow from a re-articulated STEM or new seeds are to germinate, then it becomes necessary to look at the landscape into
147 which these plants and seeds are being sown—the soil must be rich and fertile. Within this study, and often integrated with the observed performances of the girls, that landscape included the teachers and their performances of science, sustainability, gender, and teaching within the school spaces. As Quantz (2011) states, “By embracing the performances of one group we publicly create our self as…belonging to one group while distancing ourselves from other groups” (p.160). The teachers’ negotiated performances between their roles as teachers and as scientists moved these individual teachers away from their students, marginalizing the students’ knowledges in the process. However, in many ways, the female and male teachers could be seen performing good girl teachers/good boy teachers as expected by higher administrative groups— the teachers met the content standards using the appropriate materials as chosen by the schools; they sought to maintain control and discipline within their classrooms; and they attempted to maintain their appropriate gendered roles as teachers while negotiating with their identities around their content. If the landscape to grow girls and science needs fertile soil, the teachers’ performances and the rituals that are performed are necessarily a place of future study to create that landscape. Illuminating the ways in which power works through the teachers’ performed rituals to maintain the marginalized positions of girls within both the classroom and science needs to be a priority. Such examinations also suggest a shift in curriculum for science, which in turn might suggest a shift in teacher preparation. The teaching of science and the pedagogical responses to the implementation of certain science curricula has a varied and complex history that is beyond the scope of this dissertation. Current research suggests, however, that it is the nature of science, a way of understanding science in relation to other issues and itself, that is important and necessary for scientific literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2012; National Research Council, 1996). However, the teachers within this study focused solely on the delivery of science content to the students, suggesting a ritualized and expected performance that normalizes the compartmentalization of science information away from the critical perspectives that a more relational understanding of science as promoted through the study of nature of science promotes. This focus on content is not surprising. As Nazan Bautista and Elizabeth Schussler (2010) note, Most science courses are focused on science content knowledge and process skills and lack instruction on nature of science (NOS). This means that students learn the scientific
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concepts and technical skills necessary to do science, but not the underlying principles of how scientific knowledge develops. (p.56) By shifting the curriculum of science away from content and towards a more relational and interconnected perspective that focuses on science as a way of knowing and that “…consists of the values and beliefs that underlie scientific ideas and activities” (Bautista & Schussler, 2010, p. 56), we can move science education/literacy, and hopefully science teacher preparation, towards Quantz’s (2011) meaningful action. This is not to suggest that science content is not important, but rather that it needs to be taught as in relation to multiple voices, histories, and dialogues that are available in and through science, sustainability, and lived experiences. For science teacher preparation, this means engaging in education rather than training or schooling; it means resisting and re-articulating the commonsense rituals and performances that the teachers within this study followed. It is appropriate to end with a quote from Quantz (2011), “The greatest irony in schooling today is that the most dangerous, revolutionary act that any teacher and student can engage in is education itself” (p.145). Concluding Thoughts Given that science teachers can only rarely expect a well-developed interest in their subject and, especially not amongst girls….. Kerger, Martin, & Brunner, 2011, p.4 The messages start in infancy, and they continue steadily, filtering into girls’ consciousnesses so that they think these definitions simply seem to be just “the way things are.” Lipkin, 2009, p.3
Patricia Hill Collins (2000) states “…the primary responsibility for defining one’s own reality lies with the people who live that reality, who actually have those experiences” (p.35). This final chapter looked at ways that these girls’ experiences might be used to legitimate their knowledges and identities, suggesting a critical engagement with service learning around issues of sustainability to lessen these girls’ uncertainty about the relationships between the “three E’s” of sustainability. Additionally, a re-articulation of STEM, Sustainable Transformative Educative Movements, was suggested as a way to decenter technical responses to the problems and issues of sustainability and reframe them in moral and ethical discussions and decisions. Also, Robin Bernstein’s theory of scriptive things was suggested as a tool of analysis that, in conjunction with ritual critique, might make stronger the illumination of hidden power by helping researchers see the ways that things, the objects of our daily lives, script some of the performances that we do and which, in turn, we use to make meaning of our lives.
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This dissertation began by laying out a hope, a hope that girls could access science through their performances of sustainability. Through an examination of the performances that the girls in this study took up in their daily lives and used to make meaning around girlhoods, science, and sustainability, what has been brought to light is the hidden power in the nonrational aspects of these girls’ lives. As Quantz (2011) reminds us, [T]he nonrational aspects of our society’s institutions including the media, churches, government, and schools utilize nonrational mechanisms such as ritual to lead us to accept them….. When the ritual itself becomes “natural” or “ordinary” or “normal,” its form recedes into the background and the narratives and meanings of its symbols become accepted as true and good, as natural, as commonsense. p.148 Within performances of girlhoods, the girls of St. Sofia and St. Agnes understood that looks mattered, determining which hierarchical group one belonged in, and that the policing of the boundaries between groups was normal, which created tensions between girls, hardly allowing them to work together if they performed different girlhoods. Finally, girls understood that they and their performances were meant to be looked at and that looking mattered. Within performances of science, girls came to see as commonsense that girls and science were not compatible and that science, as it was performed in school, did not connect to their lives outside of school. Girls’ performances of science, much like the opening quotes in this section suggest, continued to reify the natural and normal hierarchies that science takes for granted, which continued to marginalize these girls. However, in a resistant performance to the commonsense narratives surrounding science, the girls attempted fairly regularly to bring their lived experiences into science. Finally, these girls’ performances of sustainability normalized acts of sustainability as acts of caring, a feminine trait, while de-linking issues of sustainability from formal science. Additionally, girls performances suggested uncertainty around sustainability— uncertainty that the “three E’s” of sustainability were linked, uncertainty that issues of equity and the environment were as bad as some claimed, and uncertainty about how to make meaning around sustainability because of the mixed messages that they received from authority figures. While the girls in this study were resistant to some of the commonsense narratives that they received on a regular basis, they accepted and reified others, refusing to perform what might have been deemed unnatural.
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The question that this dissertation sought to answer was: How do the performances of girlhoods interact with performances of sustainability? Enlightening the ways that power was skillfully applied, and just as skillfully resisted (Quantz, 2011, p.44) by these girls, these interactions determined that these girls are doing sustainability because commonsense tells them this is an expected performance for girls. It was natural for them to follow a school motto that said to “Go Green”; it was natural for these girls to show that they were caring through their acts of sustainability linked to equity and the environment. Because of these normalized, taken for granted narratives around issues of sustainability, these girls were not able to use sustainability as a way into science. These girls’ performances of sustainability were divorced from the rituals of science, upholding the legitimacy of science while delegitimizing both girls’ participation in science and issues of sustainability. However, not all of the interactions between performances of girlhoods and sustainability observed during this study illuminated power reifying oppressive situations. For these girls, performances of sustainability allowed them to challenge the expected and normalized behaviors for girls. As the girls performed sustainability, they were loud, active, engaged, and dynamic. This often contrasted sharply with the expected performances of girlhoods within these schools, where girls’ passive, submissive behaviors were rewarded. As Quantz (2011) states, “Far from there being “a status quo,” the status quo must continually be created and recreated by the forces of the powerful within a society. And, equally important, that reality is constantly being challenged by the less powerful” (p.36). Through their performances of sustainability, these girls challenged the status quo around performances of gender. In closing, using the lenses of standpoint feminism, eco-justice, and ritual critique to center the lives of girls and the relationships and meanings that they practice and perform has provided me with seeds of transformation. Through a continued analysis and critique of the ways that cultural and material relations are realized in ritual (Quantz, 2011, p.17), the illumination of hidden power that can result provides these seeds of transformation with sunlight and fertile soil for growth. Going green does wear a skirt, but the girls who performed sustainability in multiple and contradictory ways, challenging and reifying what was deemed normal for them, these girls can throw away dead, rotting stems/STEMs and replace them with diverse and healthy stems and seeds of possibilities. I am looking forward to gardening with them.
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APPENDIX
Photographic Evidence
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Top photo: Information on recycling caps
Bottom photo: Recycling collection center
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Recycling reminders and collection center next to the drink vending machine
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School banner in the main entrance hallway at St. Sofia
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The noisy paper collection carts
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Eco-Club and Recycling poster from St. Sofia
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Student posters and messages throughout the hallways
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Student posters and messages in the hallways
Recycling Containers at St. Sofia
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Top Photo: Recycling collection center
Bottom Photo: Student Ecology Science Work
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Artwork representing the paper dumpster outside of St. Sofia
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More artwork from recycled materials
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A small collection center outside a classroom
An environmentally friendly reminder on a classroom bulletin board
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A recycling station in a hallway at St. Sofia
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The cap collection center in Dr. Metz’s room
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The insect collection station in Dr. Metz’s room
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