Single-sex classrooms remove the confines of traditional gender binaries and allow students to embrace gender fluidity · ICGS Research Library

Title

Single-sex classrooms remove the confines of traditional gender binaries and allow students to embrace gender fluidity

Author

Schmidt (2020)

Year Published

2020

Description

In a year-long study conducted in Single-Gender Initiative (SGI) classes in South Carolina, Sandra Schmidt (Colombia University, New York) found that single-sex classrooms do not reinforce a rigid dichotomy of male and female gender traits. Schmidt (2020, p. 1093) claims that gender distinctions are “foundational to the institutional and spatial arrangement of schools”, for example through gendered toilets and uniforms. While single-sex schools are free from those internal markers of bias, their very existence does rely on the male/female gender binary construct. Schmidt (2020) therefore acknowledges the potential for rigidity when schools design and program specifically for the single-sex environments, yet her findings indicate that even when this does occur, social fluidity within these social spaces will disrupt stereotypical gender norms.

This persistent dynamism means that even when school policies, personnel, and structures attempt to reinforce gender norms, binaries and hierarchies, students can and will disrupt these societal messages through ‘play’. Schmidt (2020) suggests educators need to be aware of how students “create free space” for “gender non-conforming play”, while encouraging consideration of how educators can create the freedom for students to “play and ascertain the boundaries and possibilities of their (gender) identities” (p. 1111).

Schmidt’s (2020) qualitative study saw her spend one academic year with 97 students in a newly developed SGI class in South Carolina to determine how students negotiated gender dichotomies. She drew on personal experience, observations of classes, informal discussions, and interviews with students to draw her conclusions. These classes were developed from policies that responded to psychologists’ beliefs that male and female students were subject to “innate learning differences” (Sax, 2005; Schmidt, 2020, p. 1094). Schmidt’s work responds to critics who suggest that single-sex schooling does not lead to educational benefits, reinforces sex/gender binaries, and strengthens traditional hierarchies that can marginalise female staff and students (Halpern et al., 2011; Jackson, 2010).

Some have responded to such critiques by showing that young people can enact “moments of transgression in these rigid social spaces” (Schmidt, 2020, p. 1096). Others have suggested that adults are “most influential in shaping” experiences in schools that can “disrupt [the] gender reproduction of schooling” (p. 1096). Schmidt provides important new understandings of the ways young people themselves can become “part of the production of the social landscape”, while applying these findings to key examples of single-sex classrooms in South Carolina (p. 1096).

The SGI classrooms involved in the study were subject to strict reinforcement of a ‘rigid gender-differentiated landscape’ (p. 1100). Learning and motivational techniques were focused around so-called ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ learning styles and identities. Schmidt (2020) observed that teachers in all-boys classes used overt and explicit competition as a behaviour management tool, such as through ‘war’ games to earn privileges and publicly posted grades. Female students experienced a distinctly different approach where girls were “given sticky notes and boxes of markers so they could use colour in their assignments”; collaboration was facilitated and encouraged, as was the celebration of classmates’ successes. Based on an assumption of gender differences in “dexterity”, “boys were given printed PowerPoint slides, while girls copied notes from the board” (Schmidt, 2020, pp. 1100-1101).

Schmidt (2020) observed that students in single-sex girls’ classes challenged the gender stereotypes underpinning this single-sex environment in two particular ways: the development of family trees (during a class activity), and competition. Students were asked to develop a ‘family tree’ of their relationships in their classrooms. One set of female participants challenged heteronormative constructs, developing family trees depicting only female roles – “grandmother, mothers, aunts, cousins and sisters” (p. 1102), while males generally produced mixed sex depictions. Intersections of race, socioeconomics and academic performance influenced these representations. However, Schmidt (2020) observed that the family tree became “an important representation of the social relationships that cohered a group of girls to either collectively engage in or resist the lessons each day” (p. 1102).

While this intersectionality means not all findings are directly relatable to any all-girls environment, two responses were either consistently or intermittently observed in girls: “direct and indirect resistance to teacher practices” and the desire to engage in the more dynamic activities reserved for the boys’ classes (Schmidt, 2020, p. 1104). This resistance included subversive development of their own methods of learning and play that reflected the competitive benchmark