Empowering oracy

Introduction

Let’s set the scene. You are a 14 year old girl sitting in your English lesson, your teacher wants the class to do a group task and you hear, ‘hey guys what I want you to do now is to underline all of the metaphors in the poem...’ Then two minutes later, ‘Guys, would anyone like to give feedback to the class?’ ‘Guys, stop talking and listen!’ You are baffled and slightly annoyed. You are a growing girl still trying to work out who you are… you are confused that the very female teacher addressing you as ‘guys’ is a 20-something-year-old woman who you trust and look up to! You have counted at least 32 repeated uses of this word ‘guys’ in this one lesson. It feels Americanised, masculine, informal, generic, over-friendly, and to be honest, it is not really motivating you to want to do the tasks being set. This same teacher lectured you the other day about her feminist values, yet she is addressing your class as a bunch of ‘guys’ and you certainly are not one - why can’t she just address the class as ‘students’?

This scenario is a daily commonality in teaching. As a Lead Practitioner for Literacy across the curriculum, I review and support teachers with how to promote exploratory talk in the classroom. Often when carrying out a learning walk, I worry about some of the language communicated by the teachers, in particular teachers using this term ‘guys’ to address their students. In terms of educating young women, the word ‘guys’ does not feel empowering at all to me. It is arguably as bad as the over-repeated use of calling teenage girls ‘darlings’ and ‘sweethearts’ - another bugbear of mine that again creates a gender stereotype not at all associated with the idea of being a strong, empowered girl.  A lot of us are guilty of using gendered language - even those of us who unashamedly identify as feminists. In some ways I don’t blame us; pop culture, the strain to try and get ‘down with the kids’ and the strenuous and constant battle it takes to have a relationship with your class. In many ways I do have sympathy and I myself have used the term ‘guys’ without even thinking. However (and this is a huge ‘however’), there are a million different other words that could be used and we need to expose, question and remove gendered language in schools. 

Why inclusive language matters

Fixed ideas about gender roles begin in childhood, and therefore teachers need to promote the language of empowerment, inclusivity and equality with all students from a young age in order to remove harmful stereotypes from our classrooms. From an article taken from the ACSD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), “research suggests that children as young as five already have fixed ideas about gender,” and many of these ‘fixed’ ideas are picked up from the way adults treat them. This is why in our Be Her Lead workshops we aim to educate girls about gender equality. In one of our workshops, we encourage teachers to show girls a video of an experiment where adults play with a baby thinking it is a girl when actually it is a boy. The experiment reveals how adults talk to babies in a gendered way, calling the girls ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ and forming stereotypes by giving it dolls and pink toys rather than cars and building blocks. The experiment proves that our experiences of gender are grown and created from childhood. We learn fixed ideas about gender and therefore teachers need to know how to ‘unteach’ these stereotypes. The BBC have more clips like these and launched a series called ‘No More Boys And Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?’ based on the idea that there is no such thing as a male or female brain type and instead the brain is a plastic organ, shaped and moulded by experiences. Therefore we need to assume that many students we teach already have these fixed ideas about gender and as teachers we need to help them ‘unlearn’ them. 

In a time of need and comfort then perhaps terms like ‘sweetheart’ and ‘darling’ are understandable, however we need to question these words in terms of gender. Are we building girls up to be ‘sweethearts’ or do we want them to be strong and empowered? Chimimanda Ngoze Adichi also expresses in We Should All Be Feminists how our ideas of gender are learned in childhood: “I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalised while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.” Ideas and lessons about gender therefore need to be part of education. As teachers we need to support this ‘unlearning’ of stereotypes around gender that some of our students may have fixed ideas about and we need to educate our students in creating an inclusive world where gender equality is understood by all.

How can you teach in a gender inclusive way?

As described in an article published by the British Council, “gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.” This does not just refer to the gendered terms we call students like ‘guys,’ ‘girls and boys’ or ‘ladies and gents,’ but even assumptions like doctors often being referred to as ‘he’. As teachers, we need to check that our examples and test questions do not contain gender assumptions about jobs. The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) advise on using gender neutral language in the classroom and state that, “The words children hear affect their perceptions of the gender appropriateness of certain careers, interests, and activities.” Again, these lead to more questions about our curriculum content and the perceptions it gives students about jobs, aspirations and their futures according to what roles they feel best associate with men and women. It is important that we regularly revise our curriculum so that it enhances students’ cultural and social awareness of inclusivity and that they are taught that the future for them is limitless - the simple message that anyone can be whatever they want to be. 

In the same article on ‘What is gendered language?’ The British Council also depicts that teachers, ‘owe it to all women – our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters – to actively think about the language we use, and choose to use words and expressions that are inclusive and do not belittle, discriminate or cause offence.’ This is my exact purpose for writing this blog post. We are doing such an amazing job of making young girls more aware of their voices, their individualities, their cultures and their understanding of what it means to be a young girl in the world today, but yet we still make these mistakes of using gendered language. The way we talk to our students is just as important as what we actually teach them. 

The BCTF also reminds us that, “For students who identify as trans or intersex, constant reminders about gender binaries can be stressful and reinforce traditional gender roles and expectations.” Regardless of sexuality, we must not limit any student to ‘traditional gender roles,’ and we need to transform the language and oracy we use as teachers in order to transform our students. The language we use should be empowering and motivational and we need to think about how our students’ voices will be paralleled by the words and phrases we have taught them in the classroom. 

5 steps to achieving a gender-inclusive classroom

Using the BCTF advice and a number of other sources I have come up with a list of how to create a gender-inclusive classroom:

Step 1: Ask questions - to yourself, your students, and your school

• How are you using language in the classroom? 

• How is oracy promoted in your school? Do all students have opportunities to use their voices in a range of oracy activities in their lessons? Do you have a debating club or team?

• Are phrases like girls and boys and ladies and gentlemen part of your daily vernacular? (ASCD)

• How often do your students question your gender biases? For example: ‘Miss the girls are just as strong as the boys’ ‘Miss why do you always ask the boys to move tables’ ‘Miss why don’t you put us into mixed groups?’ 

• Do you always ask boys to lift things in the classroom? Make sure you always ask girls just as much as boys. 

• Do you encourage boys and girls to play sports together in the playground?

• Do you have mixed gender seating plans in your classroom?

• Do you try to use the terms they, them, and their when providing examples during lessons instead of he and she? 

Step 2: re-examine your teacher-talk

• Use gender neutral-terms 

  • Use empowering phrases to motivate your students: ‘lovely students…’, ‘hardworking students…’, ‘What I want you hardworking students to do now is…’ (Any positive language or adjectives used to describe your students can work: hardworking, caring, incredible, amazing, etc.)

  • Call the class by their year group or their classroom name (such an easy fix!)

• Use inclusive language: 

  • You all 

  • Our whole class/the whole class

  • Our school community

  • Our other classmates

step 3: promote inclusive and empowering oracy in the classroom

• Remove and question gender-biased language; educate your students about it and make sure that you set an example by questioning it when it happens. 

• Educate your students about the term ‘guys’ - get students to challenge you every time you use the term. 

• Use a variety of colours in examples that use girls and boys activities - don’t do the old ‘pink is for girls’ and ‘blue is for boys’. (Again this is something we have even see our own Be Her Lead girls question in our workshops). 

• Have high oracy/speaking and listening expectations for your classroom - evaluate how students address each other too, have a set of rules in place for how they should speak. 

• Create lots of opportunities for talk in the classroom with mix-gendered activities - debates, discussions, group tasks, talking card prompts. 

• Explicitly teach students how important oracy is and the power of using their voices - at Be Her Lead we have some great workshop resources on public speaking which are really powerful (get in touch if you would like to know more about them)

• Introduce students to interesting and diverse motivational speakers - show them TED talks and how important it is to have role models who can articulate their views well. (The obvious female examples being: Malala, Michelle Obama, Emma Watson, Greta Thunberg etc.)

step 4: create gender-inclusive classroom expectations and activities

• Never divide the class by gender, or make statements just addressing one gender - do not make ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ teams!

• Do not create gender stereotypes by selecting girls or boys to do certain tasks - for example do not just ask boys to move and lift things, make sure girls see themselves as strong too.

• Make sure you always pick on an equal number of girls and boys in your lessons. 

• If you do have students who identify as transgender or intersex, ask them how they would like to be addressed. 

• Challenge gender-biased language, and educate students as to why they should not use it. Ban phrases like, ‘you’re such a girl’ ,‘the girls can have their own table’ ,‘only the boys are sitting on this table’.

step 5: Creating an inclusive curriculum

• Re-examine your curriculum through a gender-conscious lens; how are males and females being portrayed?

• Create and adapt resources and examples in your curriculum that show men and women/girls and boys in non-traditional ways - even names that are used in Maths questions can be adapted, and make sure in English lessons you explore a diverse range of characters.

• “Avoid using words like chairman, fireman, and stewardess when discussing careers or occupations. These are gender-specific; instead use the corresponding gender-neutral terms such as chairperson (or chair), firefighter, and flight attendant.” (From the British Colombia Teachers’ Federation) 

• Re-examine your curriculum; are women at the forefront? Are you recommending an equal ratio of female and male historians, scientists, authors? Do students know about a diverse range of people in history and from a variety of different cultures? Are all genders, cultures, races represented broadly in your curriculum? (A really good example I saw in Computer Science recently was teaching students about Ada Lovelace.)

• What texts are you recommending to students? Are there a range of LGBTQ+ characters in the books in your library? (As the Literacy Lead in my school, the LGBTQ+ ambassadors said that there were not enough books in the library with diverse protagonists, which really made me think about what books we get them to read and what characters we get them to learn from and create.)

Next steps

A final note to add is that these steps are not just about gender, they are about creating inclusivity. My next step for this blog would be about promoting diversity and how can we use a similar strategy to re-address how well we promote diversity, cultural capital and inclusivity for all. 

Back to main blog or read part 2