Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Despite renewed interest in single-sex education, these classrooms remain relatively unstudied, even in Catholic schools, which have a long history of single-sex education. Although there are over 460 single-gendered, Catholic K-12 schools in the United States, which educate roughly 215,000 students (McDonald and Schultz, 2011), these schools are often ignored in educational research. Practitioner research in this area is almost nonexistent, yet it can generate and disseminate insider knowledge that directly improves the educational sites from which it emerges. For the past 11 years, I have taught English at "St. Albert's Preparatory School," an all-boys suburban secondary school serving over 1,100 students in the Northeast. The school regularly speaks of fostering a brotherhood among the students, and I see evidence of this on a daily basis. However, St. Albert's has not always been an easy place to work. My own experience is consistent with research studies that have found all-boys schools to be more sexist environments than all-girls schools (Lee, Marks, and Byrd, 1994) where students generally afford their female teachers less respect than their male teachers (Keddie, 2007; Keddie and Mills, 2007; Robinson, 2000). Based on my experiences as a female teacher at this school, I conducted a teacher research study on how my students and I constructed gender in the context of our English classroom. Drawing on a wealth of qualitative data sources, this study builds three main arguments: the school community built a brotherhood in part by engaging in silence and othering; the all-boys environment acted as a double-edged sword in that it contributed to a comfortable setting for the students to explore gender issues, but it also encouraged the students to shed their unique, multi-faceted masculinities and enact hegemonic gendered behavior that perpetuated an unjust order; and though I was well versed in issues of gender equity, I, too, was affected by the all-boys classroom space and contributed to the hegemonic gender order at the school. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101658 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | McEachern, Kirstin Pesola |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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