This thesis explores students' experiences of specialist information technology (IT) courses at the secondary school level in New Zealand. It asks whether students experience a gendered curriculum culture in relation to specialist IT subjects. The exploration involves a survey of national curriculum arrangements and detailed consideration of the manner in which the curriculum is implemented in practice by teachers and experienced by students in three case study classes in a conventional high school, Kahikatea High School (KHS). These classes are year 12 computer studies (CPS) and years 12 and 10 text and information management (TIM). Twenty-two students were the focus of detailed observation in the course of a year. It is found that students experience a gendered IT curriculum culture at KHS, which takes form in both gendered subject and classroom cultures. Gendered subject cultures are established in part through national curriculum structures that maintain subjects from historically gendered domains. Conservative local subject arrangements at KHS contribute to a gendered curriculum in practice. The curriculum takes on a gendered character as a function of choice - teachers' choices about subjects they will offer and the way courses are organised and presented, and students' choices about what subjects they will take. Particular subjects and courses are associated with nominally masculine and feminine computer practices and are thereby imbued with masculine and feminine subject identities. There is considerable variation and nuance in the way students experience different IT courses and in the meanings they make of their experiences. In short, individual students experience the same course differently. They are influenced to greater and lesser degrees by a range of factors, including expectations, prior experience, classroom pedagogy, classroom relationships and performance. Also, individual students are negotiating their masculine and feminine identities as students of IT and computer users as they participate in specialist IT courses and in other arenas of their lives. As they negotiate their roles as computer users and students of IT at KHS, males and females are established in relations of power or authority with the technology and with each other - as computer controllers, aspirant controllers and competent users. These relationships have a gendered character that derives from the attribution of the status of controllers to (some) males and the exclusion of females from this group. However, individual males and females aspire to and are attributed the characteristics and status commensurate with a range of user roles. Gender is a factor in individual students' experiences, but in ways that defy stereotyping and that are highly individualised. All this suggests that gender is not essential in the sense that it implies sameness, but also that gender is not passé or inconsequential as a factor in students experiences of specialist IT courses. Gender relations are a fundamental and inescapable feature of students' experiences of the IT curriculum in practice at KHS.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T14:30:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Edson Martins Junior.pdf: 926005 bytes, checksum: 70b13eacfdd6e648f250d7363f9e45a0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-05-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This doctoral thesis entitled "Intercultural cultivations: a study of the National Education Plan (2011-2020), its fields of race and curricular possibilities" discusses and analyzes the challenges and opportunities that are set curriculum beginning of this century, marked by the intensification processes of globalization and new faces of his relationship with the National States, particularly on educational policies and, consequently, the national curricula. When considering in particular the prospects for Nestor Canclini and Terry Eagleton, this paper recognizes the cultural and contextuality of social processes, and therefore its manifestation in education and curriculum, which implies the choice of play or destabilize hegemonic models through actions of cultural hybridization and cultivation producing, via labor, material and immaterial conditions of life in society. As this scenario theoretical formulation of this work builds on the bill No. 8035/2010 proposing the PNE (National Education Plan) for the decade 2011-2020 and exposes the difficult balance between the economic development along capitalist lines and social gains in the sense emancipation in educational practices, particularly through the doings of the curriculum. The work, at its end, the tendency of the PNE to expand the possibilities of deepening capitalist logic in Brazilian society through public education, and presents flanks that represent strategic opportunities to build an educational system that promotes social and cultural diversity and intensification of cross-cultural creations through policies, practices and actions to destabilize the hegemonic cultural order in this educational doings / Esta tese de doutorado intitulada Cultivações Interculturais: um estudo sobre o Plano Nacional de Educação (2011-2020), seus campos de disputa e possibilidades curriculares discute e analisa os desafios e oportunidades curriculares que estão postos neste início de século, marcado pela intensificação dos processos de globalização e por novas faces de sua relação com os Estados Nacionais, particularmente no tocante às políticas educacionais e, consequentemente, aos currículos nacionais. Ao considerar, especialmente, as perspectivas de Nestor Canclini e Terry Eagleton, este trabalho reconhece a dimensão cultural e contextualidade dos processos sociais, e, consequentemente, sua manifestação na educação e no currículo, o que implica na opção por reproduzir ou desestabilizar os modelos hegemônicos por meio de ações de hibridização e cultivação cultural que produzem, via trabalho, as condições materiais e imateriais da vida em sociedade. Como cenário desta formulação teórica este trabalho toma como base o projeto de lei nº 8035/2010 que propõe o PNE (Plano Nacional de Educação) para o decênio 2011-2020 e expõe a difícil conciliação entre desenvolvimento econômico nos moldes capitalistas e ganhos sociais no sentido da emancipação nas práticas educacionais, particularmente por meio dos fazeres curriculares. O trabalho, em seu final, apresenta a tendência do PNE em ampliar as possibilidades de aprofundamento da lógica capitalista na sociedade brasileira por meio da educação pública, assim como apresenta flancos que representam possibilidades estratégicas para a construção de um sistema educacional que promova a diversidade sociocultural e a intensificação de criações interculturais por meio de políticas, ações e práticas de desestabilização da ordem cultural hegemônica presente nos fazeres educacionais