ABSTRACT
The introduction to Dale Spender’s (1982) Invisible Women begins with the statement ‘Schools cannot teach what society does not know’. Her point was that the knowledge children were taught in schools was ‘male knowledge’ in that it was written largely by men, about men and from a male perspective. Hence, in terms of the content of what pupils were being taught, women’s knowledge, writing and viewpoints were either unknown or unrecognised. This identification paved the way for research and initiatives on the school curriculum that, first, revealed how what was being taught in schools was ‘male centred’ and, second, offered ways in which women’s knowledge could be included. Since these initial forays into examining links between gender and curriculum, feminists and pro-feminists have provided insights into how girls and boys locate themselves in relation to specific subjects as a means of constructing their identities, e.g. being good at and enjoying English is discursively constructed as doing femininity (Rowan et al., 2002;Martino and Pallotti-Chiarolli, 2003). The same has been shown to pertain to teachers’ engagement with pupils whereby their expectations of pupils’ abilities, motivations and interests for a subject are related to their own knowledge and understanding of, and training in, that subject (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007).
