ABSTRACT

In Canadian schools there is a continuing concern about issues of gender, the inequities between boys and girls (Canadian Council of Ministers of Education, 1994, 1995, 1998; Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 1990a; Rice and Russell, 1995), the gendered nature of school harassment (Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 1990b; Kaufman, 1993, 1997; Larkin, 1994a, 1997; Larkin and Staton, 1993; Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, 1994; Staton and Larkin, 1998), the need for discussions of gender in curriculum and pedagogy (Ellis, 1993; Robertson, 1992; Rogers, 1985, 1997), and the gendered nature of literacy (Blair, 1998; Blair and Sanford, 1999; Cherland, 1994; Gambell and Hunter, 1999; Ricker-Wilson, 1999; Wason-Ellam, 1997). Yet in spite of the advances and the contributions of the feminist movement, of men's movements, research, and teacher development, issues of gender inequity continue to surface in public education. In this chapter we discuss schools as one context in the lives of adolescents where they are “doing gender” (Thorne, 1993), and schools involved in rearticulating what school, curriculum, and pedagogy could be for girls and boys. These are single-sex programs in Canadian public schools.