ABSTRACT
With girls’ access to education more or less assured in the UK by the time second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s, feminist educationists’ attention turned to a number of questions relating to the significance of schooling for women’s liberation. In essence, feminist teachers and researchers wanted to understand the ways in which schooling reproduces (intentionally or unintentionally) existing inequalities between the sexes, and they wanted to change school curricula (what is taught), pedagogy (how it is taught) and the school environment in order to produce better outcomes for girls. The conceptual tools used to address these questions have changed and developed over the intervening decades, but the core concerns of many feminist educators today remain very similar.
The first part of this chapter outlines what can be thought of as a gender-critical take on these core concerns, although it is important to note that the term has emerged relatively recently, and most of the authors referenced in this chapter describe themselves simply as feminist rather than claiming the label gender-critical. The second part of the chapter looks at the emergence and subsequent extraordinary popularity of gender-identity theory and its implications for schools. The final part of the chapter compares the implications of the two framings (gender-critical and what the author refers to as ‘trans-inclusive’) for school curricula, for schools as institutions and for the provision of support to transgender-identifying and gender-non-conforming pupils in school.
