| GLOBE & MAIL | BACK TO MEDIA COVERAGE | |
| TODAYS PAPER | Monday,
February 24, 2003 - Page A12 |
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| COMMENT | ||
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How to encourage Johnny to read |
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| For a
generation, the discussion of gender in the classroom has meant one thing:
What can be done for girls? Now some people are asking about the boys. This
is welcome news, because helping all children reach their potential is the
right and productive thing to do. Canadian culture sends peculiar signals to its boys. Young boys receive a powerful message about the importance of hockey. They receive weak signals about the importance of reading. The problems have been obvious since provincewide testing became popular in the 1990s: Boys are lagging well behind girls in reading and writing in most parts of Canada. (They can't even claim an offsetting advantage in math.) They are also more likely to be in slow-learner programs, to be diagnosed with a behavioural problem and to drop out of high school. At last, educators are beginning to pay attention, as shown in two new Canadian studies. In British Columbia and Alberta, two academics have for the past two years been observing boys in three communities and talking to them about their reading habits. In New Brunswick, researchers are producing fresh ideas to help boys improve their literacy skills. In the United States, educators have long since moved beyond the politics of gender to consider the low achievement levels of boys. Carol Gilligan, the founder of "difference feminism," who turned North America's attention two decades ago to the loss of confidence experienced by many girls aged 11 to 14, swung her attention to boys' issues as early as 1995. Yet in Canada, gender has been discussed as if it were a zero-sum game: Any attention to boys would be subtracted from attention paid to girls. Boys, it was said, are not doing worse than before; girls are simply doing better. (But why not help the boys do better, too?) Men have most of the power in the workplace, so why worry about the boys? (Shouldn't all children at risk be top of mind?) It's not the schools' fault, it's just that, well, to be honest, boys don't like to read -- or maybe it's the culture's fault. (But when the culture implied that girls were not to be doctors or lawyers or scientists or businesswomen, the schools began bringing in speakers and role models and girls-only classes and schools to give them encouragement. Why not figure out how to reach the boys, too?) Thankfully, the excuses are being laid to rest. There are two main reasons. School boards that wish to improve their literacy scores know that the boys are dragging them down; and parents are insisting that their boys need help. One sign of the sea change is the efforts of Kathy Sanford of the University of Victoria to do something for boys. As president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Women and Education, she has spent years trying to help girls. Now she is concerned that males are underachieving and unattended to. Boys, she says, will ignore teachings they see as boring, passive or meaningless, and no one has bothered to design literacy education with them in mind. "In the past decade, there has been considerable thought given to education for girls: how that education can be structured, what curricular areas need focus and attention, and how to create successful environments for girls. However, the same thought has not been given to the curriculum as it is offered to boys," says her study, Morphing Literacy: Boys Reshaping Their Literacy Practices, co-written by Heather Blair of the University of Alberta. In New Brunswick, a university professor, Heather Richmond, and an elementary-school teacher, Cheryl Miles, both mothers of boys, are overseeing a study called Boys' and Girls' Literacy: Closing the Gap, backed by a $220,000 grant from Human Resources Development Canada's National Literacy Secretariat. One project they have started is to bring in 11 hockey players from the St. Thomas University Tommies in Fredericton to act as reading mentors for Grade 4 and 5 students. The idea is to tap into male archetypes to send a new signal to boys about reading and boyhood. (Discouragingly, at a literacy conference at the University of British Columbia last summer, some educators mocked the idea as stereotypical.) Prof. Richmond says there is not a single male teacher in one of the schools served by the project. At the very least, this absence of men may reinforce the impression some boys have that learning and maleness do not go together. The study team has also hired young boys to read a wide range of books and develop a recommended list of can't-miss books for boys. The studies will not, by themselves, solve the problem of underachievement for boys, but they do represent a turning point. While educators cannot solve this problem on their own, they have an obligation to throw their energies behind all students. |
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