Student writing: gender and visibility; then and now

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine a selection of creative writings by students at one Australian secondary school over a period of 50-plus years, charting the frequency with which key markers of gender appear in student storytelling over this period and sampling the types of gendered representation demonstrated in these stories.

Design/methodology/approach

Taken from a larger study, and grounded in feminist and poststructuralist reading practices, the research draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and quantifies verbal processes relating to gender using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (2004).

Findings

The research finds the visibility of females in the selected corpus has increased considerably, yet the nature of female and male participation in these texts remains comparatively unchanged when measured by the process types of Halliday and Matthiessen’s SFL (2004).

Originality/value

If past decades of (pro)feminist choices are only challenging gendered patterns of representation at the level of quantity but not type, this has significant implications for teachers of English. The paper’s conclusion considers what more might be done in present and future teaching to assist students to problematise their own, as well as others’, representations of gender.

Citation

Poulsen, C. (2015), "Student writing: gender and visibility; then and now", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 404-418. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-06-2015-0048