– Faculty used three dominant discourses to construct student gender expression and teacher identities: gender blindness, gender acknowledgment, and gender intervention. Faculty most frequently utilized discourses acknowledging gender inequity, which often limited their responsibilities to promote equity and highlights the pernicious nature of systemic gender bias.
– Institutions could expand discourse and better align faculty awareness of gender inequity with meaningful, pedagogical change strategies.
– In the first position, gender blindness, instructors in various ways denied perceiving their students’ gender, supporting a discourse that gender had no meaning or influence in the classroom.
– In the second and most frequent position, gender acknowledgment, participants took up positions of observation, drawing on discourse constructing specific gendered trends in students’ performance, preparation, and experiences in college STEM courses.
– In the third and least prevalent discursive position, gender intervention, instructors took up discourse that identified current practices as broadly detrimental to women, and constructed activist teacher identity positions by describing their own efforts to disrupt bias in their classrooms.
2017 - Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses on Student Gender Expression and Equity
As part of a broader study exploring the influence of various pedagogical practices in engineering programs and gendered patterns of academic performance, the authors purposefully selected three educational institutions as study sites. All three institutions are selective, private, higher educational institutions in the United States that offer undergraduate engineering programs.
The authors invited all faculty who taught gateway engineering courses at these institutions to participate in the study, and almost all agreed. The 18 study participants identified as men and women, and were employed at all levels of the faculty ladder.
Questions include: What is it like to work here as a faculty member? What does it mean to have a successful career at [school]? What do you hope that students ultimately learn from your course?
What teaching strategies/methodologies did you use to help students learn/achieve your learning objectives? What role do you perceive you have as an instructor when you teach in front of your classroom? Can you use a metaphor to describe your role? Give an example of the most recent class in which your role as an instructor was exhibited in an exemplary way. Can you tell me a little bit about the students who come to [school]? How would you describe a typical [school] student? Can you describe your relationship with your students? How, if at all, have the demographics of the student body influenced how and what you teach? What types of students seem to excel/struggle in your class? Have you noticed any differences in the ways male and female students participate in your class? In what ways, if at all, do you interact differently with male and female students?
After coding data for ways instructors talked about gender in their work with students, authors analyzed how faculty constructed their teacher identities in relation to each discourse and how these positions affected their promotion of gender equity.