Tag: Linking Theory and Practice

The Downside of Naming “Feminine” Traits

I recently read this article from the Harvard Business Review stating that “Feminine” Values Can Give Tomorrow’s Leaders an Edge.   A study was done asking 64,000 people from over 13 countries all over the world for the traits, skills and competencies that were perceived to be appreciated in leaders in the world of business and leadership.  The conclusions (from statistical modeling) that the analysts came to were that tomorrow’s leaders must overwhelmingly learn to have what our culture has defined to be “feminine” traits.  Here’s the list of the survey said were the top 10 desired traits for modern leaders:

 

I don’t disagree with these traits, honestly, and as a feminist it actually excites me that the values that I work to foster in the classroom are being valued in the boardroom and society in general (Dewey would be proud too).  However, something that is troubling me is the ever-popular dichotomy that is being set up here that seems to always be at the heart of many issues that rise in our society.  Something I wrote about in my dissertation and any time I talk about Relational Pedagogy is the idea of breaking down this concept of masculine vs. feminine thinking, not only in mathematics or education, but in human relations altogether.

I will be the first person to motivate and encourage young women in the STEM fields or take a young boy who likes cooking and say, “you, go guy” and hand him an apron – but that is about individualism and allowing young people to be who they want to be and feel empowered.  In my classroom, allowing students to see multiple perspectives and have their voice heard whether they are male or female is entirely my top priority because they are individuals and their relationship with mathematics is unique.  For a long time in math education, the ideas in this study were how young girls were viewed – researchers thought that if we just saw how girls were different from boys that we could see why they weren’t “doing as well” as boys.  However, we saw that they were doing just as well.

So my problem with this study is not the fact that women will be empowered to become leaders in business – no, that’s really exciting to me.  In fact, maybe some men will see the potential in women and decide to hire more women in the future and this will create more jobs for women and this will in turn, create a more equitable workplace and more favorable working conditions, which will then create more exciting options for business situations because of the fact that different perspectives are being looked at with such different views being taken in problem solving in business.  That is extremely exciting to me!

However, my problem with this study is this.  In order to make such radical changes in how people view gender differences in our society we really need to stop making such huge oppositional statements.  In support of this view, Mendick (2005) stated

By aligning separate-ness with masculinity and connected-ness with femininity, these approaches feed the oppositional binary patterning of our thinking and in the final analysis reiterate it (p 163).

If we just continue to point out how “unfeminine” men are because they are less expressive and how “unmasculine” women because they can be undecisive all we are doing is perpetuating the oppositions that separate us instead of our humanness that can bring us together as learners and our vulnerability that can help us problem solve with our strengths and weaknesses that will make us stronger if we work together.

There was an article published in 2010, about how if you put more women in a group of people the “collective intelligence” increases – the group works better together.  I’m sure there’s some tipping point though that if the group has all women there are diminishing returns for this measure.  There has to come a time when we value the relationships in our learning, our work and our classrooms and as teachers foster all of these traits to the best of our abilities.

Linking Theory to Practice: A Shout-Out to ‘savedabol’

This past January, I gave a key-note address at the ISOMA conference in Toronto and posted my slides from that talk on my academia.edu site that I thought would be a good place for me to easily give other people access to my work. (along with my website).  Academia.edu is great because it gives you lots of information about the stats of surfers who come and look at your information.  All of a sudden I saw that this powerpoint had more than something like 400 views and I couldn’t believe it.  I had to see who was searching and looking at this slideshow.

I quickly realized that someone had seen it, liked it and posted something about it on reddit.  There were only a few comments but one of them went something like this:

“I think the single worst part of being a teacher is sitting through PowerPoints like this, while some earnest non-classroom pedagogue tells us the bleeding obvious.”

Whooo – that one stung…my first instinct was to try and find out who that person was and defend myself to the ends of the earth.  Anyone who calls me a non-classroom pedagogue deserves to be righted…but then I kept reading…and someone with the alias ‘savedabol’ wrote this:

‘Carmel Schettino (the author) led a seminar I took at the Exeter math conference last summer. She is incredible. I can assure you that she is not a non-classroom pedagogue. She has been in the classroom nonstop for at least 20 years (that I know of). She is particularly scholarly when it comes to PBL and other ed topics, but that doesn’t make her irrelevant to what we do every day. Near the end she gives some great resources.’

I can’t tell you how affirmed I felt by ‘savedabol’ and I want to just let them know how nice that was of them to share their thoughts about my work with them.  I have been in the classroom non-stop since 1990 (except for two terms of maternity leave and one term of a sabbatical when I was a full-time student myself) and I pride myself in researching as much as possible about what I do.

I do wish that the first poster had had the chance to hear me speak instead of jumping to the conclusions they had – and it definitely got me thinking about something that was discussed last year at the PME-NA conference in October 2012.  I was one of maybe just a few people in the special category of math teacher/educator/researcher/doctoral students at this research conference where many of the math research folks were talking about ways in which they could breach the great divide of the theory people (them) and the practice people (us).

For many years I have lived this double life of both theory and practice and I have to say, I love it.  Having just finished up my Ph.D. and teaching full time was probably one of the toughest things I’ve had to do in my life, but having my mind constantly in both arenas has only helped me be a better teacher and a better researcher.

Jo Boaler is a great researcher at Stanford University who is doing great work in outreach between theory and practice this summer by offering a free online course called “How to Learn Math.”  It’s a course for k-12 teachers that is grounded in the most recent research in math education.  What a great idea!  She is sharing some of her wisdom freely online with k-12 teachers who want to spend some time learning about new ideas themselves.  I know I’m in.

In August 2008, the NCTM put together a special Research Agenda Project to work on recommendations for just this cause and you can see their report here.  One of the major recommendations that came out of their work was to not only emphasize the need for communication between researchers and practitioners, but in my view to help them realize that this communication would benefit both parties equally.  We all have something to share with each other and I know that I appreciate every classroom practitioners’ experiences.  I learn something from every teacher that ends up in my workshop every summer and often end up using many of their ideas as they do mine.

So let’s keep supporting each other both in real life and virtually, and realize that often times, the “bleeding obvious” is something that needs to be stated and discussed over and over again to be sure that we are still talking about it with the right people.