Teacher Blog: Carol

Debate Club

Week 4

The students have been exploring gender issues that they think exist at school:

They then generated some ideas that they could do to challenge these issues:

This week they held a boys cake sale for Sport Relief:

 

CRESST Peer Mediators’ Conference

Kathryn and Heather ran a Gender Respect workshop at the CRESST conference for peer mediators on 7^th January, 2016. We ran the workshop 3 times with 3 different groups of children in Y5 and Y6 from 10 schools in South Yorkshire.

Our aims were:

• Explore what it’s like to be a boy or a girl in South Yorkshire
• Identify attitudes we have about boys and girls
• Think as peer mediators how we can make it fairer.

We used the same images of sports, careers and emotions that we had used in the scoping study as stimulus for discussions. We used continuum lines with agree and disagree about a view or attitude that emerged to generate further thought and discussion.

These are some of the attitudes that we drew out from the lively discussions:

Sports:

• Many girls want to play football at play time but don’t because boys are too rough.
• When we asked boys ‘Is this true?’ some replied ‘Yes, because we’re more competitive than girls.’
• Football is a boys’ sport. Boys are tough and can be aggressive.
• Girls are not as good at sport.
• Girls can be stronger than boys and they can play football as well as boys.
• Some boys like dancing and are good at it.
• Boys can be embarrassed to be friends with a girl.
• Some schools had girls only football at play time. Other girls said they did not want this. They wanted to play with boys but for boys not to be so rough and obey the rules.

Careers:

Strong views were expressed about equality, that men and women should be able to do every job.

• Boys and girls can do every job.
• It’s good to see a woman pilot and men looking after children.
• Usually women do childcare. They have carried the baby so they are more in touch. However, men can look after children too.
• Comparisons with the past. Men used to go out to work and women stayed at home. Now more women go out to work.

Emotions:

• You sometimes see women being angry, but they’ve got good reasons to be angry. They do not get equal pay and are often treated unfairly and not with respect.
• It’s unusual to see men cry but they all agreed that it’s acceptable for them to cry.
• Boys and men act really tough. If they cry, they think they’ll look weak.

We asked the children: ‘If you had super magical powers and had one wish, to make things fairer and kinder between men and women, girls and boys what would that be?’

•  Girls and boys can play together
• Don’t judge people by if they’re black or white
• Girls are the same as boys and everyone is treated fairly
• Girls and boys are in the same team in any sport
• Make girls confident to do sports
• Make more jobs accessible to different genders
• Freedom of choice
• Change attitudes
• To make sure men and women get treated equally and have the same rights
• Boys and girls shouldn’t judge each other by what they look like
• Everyone having the same opportunities
• That men and women should share their feelings
• To make every man, woman and child get along so everyone should stop bombing and attacking people.
• For people to aim for their dreams

Finally, we asked them ‘As a peer mediator, what could you do to make it fairer?’

• Talk to the school in an assembly, about genders getting along with being friends and making sure you are able to do what you want to do. E.g. being able to play football if you are a girl.
• Don’t judge a book by its cover
• To make sure you’re not taking sides
• Don’t judge people by their gender
• Giving people the opportunity to play
• Make girls try to play sport and not make boys make fun of them
• Play together fairly. Treat people respectfully. Practise together.
• Collaborate more
• Listen to other people’s opinion
• Encourage people to believe in themselves and do what they want with their life
• Use encouragement to build their confidence
• Make a rota (that’s clear) for girl’s football on a certain day, same with boys, ‘We have a rota but whenever I look at the football pitch and there are always boys, the same boys.’

Our reflections

We really enjoyed the workshops and felt very encouraged by the opinions of the young people. We realised we had the benefit of being with a selected group of hand-picked 10 and 11 year olds, trained in listening and mediation. The children were forthcoming in their views and able to discuss their differences. They had strongly held views about the importance of equality – between men and women, boys and girls, black and white. This held true for occupations, emotions and relationships. We were very interested to hear that some girls and boys did not like the banter about ‘Girls are best. No! Boys are best.’ which they said was very prevalent in their schools. ‘Because we are all human beings. We want to be treated like human beings.’ However, in the everyday experience of playground football, girls expressed their reality of exclusion. This held true across all 10 schools represented. It may be boys had not heard this before and discussions like this could make a difference, especially as peer mediators are mostly engaged because of conflicts at play times. However, some boys’ view that they were more competitive than girls seemed insightful, and may reflect an underlying culture.

Thoughts for the future of the Gender Respect project: We were encouraged that some children spontaneously suggested holding an assembly on gender equality. We hope their teachers will be able to support them in this. This idea may be developed at the young people’s conference later this month. All the children said they would love to come to a Gender Respect student conference if there was one in the future.

 

 

Teacher Blog: Rebecca (and Clive)

Boys’ Talk

The Boys’ Talk lesson (see Secondary lesson plans) was trialled with a Y10 class of 13 pupils (9 male and 2 female), all deemed of fairly low ability.

They engaged well with discussions about harassment and sexual harassment, coming up with good ideas and examples. When looking at the ‘Vital Statistics’ from Everyday Sexism (by Laura Bates), there were some derogatory comments about India.

Forum Theatre:

The script provoked a lot of discussion, with several boys saying this was an unlikely conversation, that boys did not talk like this, that they would not get involved etc. When asked, the girls confirmed that ‘slag’ was the most common word they heard around school attached to girls. The boys seemed to think that a girl was a slag from the way she dressed. A definition was given for the word slag ‘A woman who people disapprove of because she has had a lot of sexual partners.’ (Cambridge English Dictionary) and that this had nothing to do with dress.

For the plenary, comments about what the pupils had learned were:

‘Harassment is very bad and needs to stop.’

‘What sexual harassment is.’

‘The meaning of different types of harassment.’

‘I have learned what harassment is and how to stop it.’

‘I learned today what (slag) means.’

‘You can also in school if it is something of discriminating women.’

‘I have learned what is the importance of women and how to treat them.’

In discussion afterwards, Rebecca felt she needed to do more with them on how to challenge views without escalating into a fight (a concern amongst the boys) and to find ways to give the girls more of a voice and get the boys to see issues from their perspectives. She felt that these pupils were used to seeing issues in extremes, and perhaps a topic like FGM might get consensus on what is ‘wrong’ in gender relations and build from there.

Teacher Blog: Carol

Debate Club

Week 3

Ideas were generated about the practicalities of the club and how we wished it to function.

We decided that the following jobs needed doing:

Register

Marketing

Application Forms

 

To be done by everyone:

Secretary

Chair

Researcher

Teacher Blog: Carol

Debate Club

Week 2 (5 males, 14 females)

Question: Do we need the women’s equality party?

Responses:

• It’s very exclusive to have a women only party.
• Normal political parties should have more women. Women need to be more assertive & stand up for themselves in politics.
• Women have some different concerns to men, for example men just think about war or business and women think about the NHS.

Concern about:

• Unequal pay
• The way women are shown in the media particularly sport
• Unequal divide of labour at home

Stereotypes:

• Expectations start early at school.
• There are gender stereotypes: men do physical jobs e.g. electrician. Nurses are female and doctors are male. There are different male and female roles at home.
• Women are limited by having to look after kids, where as men have their work as their main focus.
• Women are not strong enough and feel intimidated in male dominated fields.
• Concern from a boy about males being expected to be more violent and being treated unfairly as a result.
• From the ‘olden days’, men were always taught to be a gentleman and to look after women as if women needed looking after. This could be why women may feel less confident.

Media:

• In adverts, women are mainly seen as looking nice and doing proper jobs.
• Girls & boys do separate PE and women’s sport gets very little coverage. There are not many role models.
• Positive examples: the Virgin campaign shows women in sport and the ‘This Girl Can’ campaign.

Teacher Blog: Carol

Debate Club

Publicity:

• Skill up – reasoning, communication, assertiveness, getting your point across
• Become more articulate (talking clearly right?)
• Blow you mind on current issues of your choosing
• Hear ideas and views different to your own
• Certification and membership – great for your future CV

Week 1 (3 males, 14 females)

The students were welcomed and thanked for coming. We discussed the badges, certificates and they were told that this was a commitment for 6 weeks.

The students were asked the following questions for a baseline:

1. Are you male/female?                                                                F / M
2. Do you have any good friends of the opposite sex?             Y / N

If NO – What would make you choose not to make a friend with    the opposite sex?

3. How do you rate your communication skills out of 10?

4. Rate your confidence to speak in front of a group of people out of 10

We discussed the basic structure of the club: there will be 2 sides for some topics, you can change your position, there will be whole group discussion for less polar topics. We developed some ground rules: 1 person speaks at a time, addressing the whole group. The students will have the opportunity to chair after week 3.

We chose some more topic ideas and voted for today’s topic: ‘Committing suicide is a selfish act.’ 20 mins 2 sides (4 in favour 13 against)

Summary of debate: possible reasons for suicide, how to get/give help, responsibility for own state of mind, euthanasia, effect on family and friends, depression, self-harm, personal choice, autonomy

We agreed next week’s topic – Do we need feminism?