ABSTRACT
It is a unique privilege to be able to introduce this new edition of Counting Girls Out. This book, together with the other related publications of Valerie Walkerdine and her collaborators at the Girls and Mathematics Unit, has done more to change the perceptions of ‘the gender problem’ in the educational research community than any other publication in Britain, and probably throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, this shift in perception has been accomplished through a deep and important re-theorization of ‘the problem’, by bringing in a powerful post-structuralist analysis of girls, women and femininity, and of the construction of their identities through social, educational and mathematical discourses. Valerie Walkerdine was an important contributor to the critical re-theorization of psychology in the seminal work Changing the Subject (Henriques et al., 1984), and it is no accident that a chair in critical psychology has been created for her at the University of Western Sydney to further develop her groundbreaking work. The re-theorization of the subject, including the learner, the school curriculum subject, and the academic discipline of psychology, was necessary in order to reconceptualize ‘the gender problem’ in mathematics and science.
