Pat Mahony

How Alice's chin really came to be pressed against her foot: Sexist processes of interaction in mixed-sex classrooms

Abstract This paper looks at the processes of interaction between members of the mixed-sex classroom. It is argued that girls are marginalized from education in a number of ways, not least by the active efforts of boys to put them in their ‘proper place’, and that male control of the classroom and the school poses a direct threat to the formal ‘authority’ of female teachers.

Policy and Practice in the Professional Development of Teachers

ABSTRACT This paper is intended as a contribution towards understanding recent developments in government policy for teacher education by providing an account of the dilemmas and issues the authors are encountering in the course of developing practice in three key areas in the education of teaching. These are: the implementation of school‐based forms of initial teacher education in partnership with schools; the development of higher education involvement in and responsibility for teachers’ professional development in their first year of teaching; the development of profiles of competence by which to evaluate and assess the progress of beginning teachers. Opportunities for the creation of coherent, principled progression in the early years of teaching are identified, as are sources of confusion and tension in current policy changes.

Oppressive pedagogy: The importance of process in women's studies

Abstract In British Universities, Womens Studies courses are often structured in a conventionally academic way. This raises a number of problems in that the academic model contradicts some fundamental feminist principles. The first part of the article consists of a discussion of these contradictions. In the second part, some attempts to develop a feminist pedagogy on one course are described.

A Gap in the Market? A consideration of market relations in teacher education

Abstract Government policy for teacher education can be linked to policy developments in other sectors of the ‘public’ services. These can be understood as taking the form of a reconstruction of provision in an attempt to make it conform to a particular model of the market. In the paper we describe some of the key concepts, debates and issues concerning the political economy of markets. We identify likely problems and sources of tension and dysfunction which mark the points at which market failure might occur. These constitute areas which warrant further research in order to deepen our understanding of the impact on teacher education of the introduction of market principles.

‘Silence is a woman's glory’: The Sexist content of education

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to pull together some of our understandings concerning the sexist content of education (which is only half the story), in order to demonstrate what is involved in change and in the light of this to show just how little has changed since men first formulated their prescriptions for womens education.

Which way forward?: Equality and schools in the 1990s

Abstract This paper explores what we as feminists might mean by developing a radical education for girls. It is particularly important to address this issue in the British context because the recent legislation [Education Reform Act (ERA) 1988] has so overwhelmed and preoccupied us that it is difficult to see a way forward in continuing our work. However, the issues of what would constitute a feminist education and how to find the spaces to develop it within any countrys legal parameters are of more general significance.