ABSTRACT
At first glance, schools appear ordered, controlled and predictableand, indeed, in many ways they are. This is so with regard to matters of gender and much else. As a result of feminist scholarship it is now possible to predict with some certainty a great deal about who does what, where, how and why, with and to whom in schools. Schools have their gender patterns of difference and dominance and, as we will show throughout this book, these are increasingly being questioned and challenged. Gender orders schools in quite systematic ways. However, to focus only on the ordered and patterned within and across schools is often to miss the fact that schools are also different, complex, contradictory and often confusing places where the unexpected happens just as often as the expected, particularly in the fine grain of the everyday. To be open to surprise is to be open to the richness of schools and the people within them. It is to acknowledge that, because of the many forces at work and interests at stake both within and beyond them, schools are as fluid as they are fixed, as different as they are similar and as surprising as they are tediously predictable.
