Literacy Gender And Work

Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.

This is the first in-depth study of gender issues in early literacy learning. It provides vivid portraits of the difficulties that both boys and girls experience in learning to read and write at home and in classrooms due to gendered divisions of labor in families and schools. The portraits are based on data from a three-year ethnographic study, in which learning biographies were constructed for thirteen children from their entry into kindergarten until the completion of second grade. The biographies show that in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and negotiate their social relations with parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. Even in supportive families and progressive classrooms, children face difficulties in literacy learning as a result of family and classroom practices organizing literacy on the dimensions of male/female and work/play. The result is often the unwitting perpetuation of traditional gender roles in families, schools, and the larger society. This account of early literacy learning links the personal and social meaning of literacy in children's everyday lives with the larger cultural and political significance of gender. The theoretical arguments and questions raised in the book challenge prevailing psychological and sociocultural models of literacy learning and set the agenda for future research on literacy and gender.

This is the first in-depth study of gender issues in early literacy learning. It provides vivid portraits of the difficulties that both boys and girls experience in learning to read and write at home and in classrooms due to gendered divisions of labor in families and schools. The portraits are based on data from a three-year ethnographic study, in which learning biographies were constructed for thirteen children from their entry into kindergarten until the completion of second grade. The biographies show that in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and negotiate their social relations with parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. Even in supportive families and progressive classrooms, children face difficulties in literacy learning as a result of family and classroom practices organizing literacy on the dimensions of male/female and work/play. The result is often the unwitting perpetuation of traditional gender roles in families, schools, and the larger society. This account of early literacy learning links the personal and social meaning of literacy in children's everyday lives with the larger cultural and political significance of gender. The theoretical arguments and questions raised in the book challenge prevailing psychological and sociocultural models of literacy learning and set the agenda for future research on literacy and gender.

Reading and Writing in the Global Workplace: Gender, Literacy, and Outsourcing in Ghana by Beatrice Quarshie Smith explores the conditions that underlie the outsourcing of US data-processing work in Ghana. Here Beatrice Quarshie Smith describes the convergence and interplay of at least four different socio-economic forces: (1) the digital and satellite technology enabling virtual environments for global outsourced data-processing; (2) the historical development of Ghana as a politically-stable Anglophone society with a relatively strong tradition of public education; (3) the neoliberal economic restructuring policies advanced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and (4) the ready availability of women seeking to enter the formal wage economy either to seek independence from their roles within traditional families, or in order to support their families. The author's comparative study of two distinctly different workplaces reveals significant insights about problems of organizational hierarchy and management-employee relations in the cross-cultural environments of out-sourced business and IT process work. Through extensive interviews, the book sheds light on the educational backgrounds, day-to-day struggles, fears, and aspirations of the workers. Quarshie Smith develops this multi-faceted analysis with keen insights into the representational limitations and ethical responsibilities of the researcher. This pioneering study about outsourced data-processing work in West Africa opens up a new area for research and offers a fresh perspective from which to consider outsourcing in other regions of the globe.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

First Published in 1996. Gender, Literacy, Curriculum is a major contribution to research and theory in literacy and curriculum studies. Alison Lee looks at how the texts and discourses of schooling construct 'geography' as a curriculum field, and how this construction is tied closely with students' gendered identities and practices in the classroom. She brings together discourse analyses of research texts, textbooks, classroom talk, students' and teachers' accounts, with a detailed linguistic analysis of students' written work. This title is of particular interest to those working in literacy education and curriculum, discourse analysis and applied linguistics, feminisms and critical pedagogies.

This fascinating compilation of the recent data on gender differences in education presents a wealth of data, analysed from a multitude of angles in a clear and lively way.

Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today? To date, there have been few attempts to answer this question. Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools. In studying schooling as a social process, this book focuses on the links between literacy, gender and attainment, the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond. Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls’ relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class. Using fine-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context, this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site.