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119: The Gender Equation in Schools w/ Jason Ablin
12 Plays2 years ago
Gender is one of the most contentious topics in the United States today, conversations about gender in education have even been the targets of so-called “divisive concepts” laws in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Alabama. The Alabama “divisive concepts” law, for example, would ban any discussion in K12 schools around the idea that Alabama and the United States are “inherently racist or sexist: ” that anyone should be assigned bias “solely on the basis of their race, sex, or religion;” and that anyone should be asked to accept “a sense of guilt, complicity, or a need to work harder” because of their race or gender.
However, schools are as much as any other social institution a place where our constructed biases, expressions, and expectations about the performance of gender, leadership, the perceived attributes of students, and our response to student behaviors deeply influence not only the academic outcomes of school but the lifelong outcomes of students themselves. The focus of my conversation today, The Gender Equation in Schools: How to Create Equity and Fairness for All Students, is not a book directed at the culture war’s so-called “divisive concepts”, but rather a book for educators and parents desiring a framework for understanding the gendered construction of schooling and its impacts as informed by experience, social science, and neuroscience alike.
Joining me today is the book’s author, Jason Ablin. Jason Ablin has served as a teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He holds national certification in leadership coaching and mentoring from the National Association of School Principals and has been supporting and mentoring new leaders throughout the country for over ten years. At American Jewish University and in school-based teacher workshops, he trains teachers to create gender aware classrooms and has taught year-long courses to teams of educators in graduate level seminars regarding the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and education. He is also the founder and director of AJU’s Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
GUESTS
Jason Ablin is a former teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He now works at the American Jewish University to train teachers on gender-aware classrooms, and is the founder and director of AJU's Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Motivation
00:00:00
Speaker
The impetus for the book, the thinking about it, was both kind of my outrage about what was going on at the time and how little progress we had made culturally and socially around these issues, but also my frustration with the fact that I felt if we ever wanted to make any progress around this issue, we needed to stop having conversations about 50-year-old men.
00:00:20
Speaker
That was not going to get us anywhere, and it hasn't gotten us anywhere, really.
00:00:25
Speaker
And we need to start talking about two-year-olds, and we need to start talking about their experiences, at least in part within their communities and within their schools, because as you know, Nick, that is such a shaping narrative for them of who they become ultimately.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:42
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 119 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:47
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington and I'm the creative director for the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:52
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Lisa Wenner and Kimberly Baker.
00:01:00
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:01:02
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website or find us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Gender Education Challenges in the U.S.
00:01:11
Speaker
Gender is one of the most contentious topics in the United States today.
00:01:15
Speaker
Conversations about gender and education have been the targets of so-called divisive concept laws in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Alabama.
00:01:23
Speaker
The Alabama divisive concepts law, for example, would ban any discussion in K-12 schools around the idea that Alabama and the United States are inherently racist or sexist, that anyone should be assigned bias solely on the basis of their race, sex, or religion,
00:01:40
Speaker
and that anyone should be asked to accept a sense of guilt, complicity, or need to work harder because of their race or gender.
00:01:48
Speaker
However, schools are as much as any other social institution, a place where our constructed biases, expressions, and expectations about the performance of gender, leadership, the perceived attributes of students, and our response to student behaviors deeply influence not only the academic outcomes of school, but the lifelong outcomes of students themselves.
Introducing Jason Ablin and His Work
00:02:09
Speaker
The focus of my conversation today, The Gender Equation in Schools, How to Create Equity and Fairness for All Students, is not a book directed at the culture war's so-called divisive concepts, but rather a book for educators and parents desiring a framework for understanding the gendered construction of schooling and its impacts as informed by experience, social science, and neuroscience alike.
00:02:35
Speaker
Joining me today is the book's author, Jason Ablin.
00:02:38
Speaker
Jason Ablin has served as a teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school.
00:02:42
Speaker
He holds national certification in leadership coaching and mentoring from the National Association of School Principals and has been supporting and mentoring new leaders throughout the country over 10 years.
00:02:54
Speaker
At American Jewish University and in school-based teacher workshops, he trains teachers to create gender-aware classrooms and has taught year-long courses to teams of educators in graduate-level seminars regarding the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and education.
00:03:10
Speaker
He's also the founder and director of AJU's Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
00:03:15
Speaker
You can find him on Twitter at Jason Ablin and on his website, ablineducation.com.
00:03:29
Speaker
Thanks for joining me today, Jason.
00:03:31
Speaker
I'm glad to be here, Nick.
00:03:33
Speaker
Nice to be here.
00:03:34
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:03:35
Speaker
Let's just start by talking to those in our audience who aren't familiar with your work.
00:03:39
Speaker
What have you been doing for the last 30 years?
00:03:43
Speaker
What's the impetus for this book, The Gender Equation in Schools?
00:03:47
Speaker
And perhaps what's the biggest takeaway that you'd like readers to walk away with?
Early Education's Role in Gender Narratives
00:03:53
Speaker
Well, if I can start at the end, which is, I think I'm gonna cut and paste your introduction to this and just use it every time someone asks me that question, because it's so articulate and clear.
00:04:07
Speaker
I'll start with the last 30 years.
00:04:08
Speaker
In the last over 30 years now, I've been in education, working with students and working with schools and improving schools.
00:04:14
Speaker
And for about the past five or six years, I've been out on the road myself doing consulting with schools.
00:04:20
Speaker
And one of the areas I do significant coaching and mentoring of faculty members and also trying to create school cultures around is a question of gender.
00:04:31
Speaker
And really trying to make faculties very aware of the way that schools are constructed around gender and gender biases and implicit bias.
00:04:42
Speaker
That's been going on.
00:04:43
Speaker
That has been going on in my thinking since my second year in education.
00:04:47
Speaker
You know, this goes back 30 years, 33 years.
00:04:49
Speaker
I was 26 years old, 27 years old when this conversation really started for me back in the 90s.
00:05:00
Speaker
And I, you know, in the book, there are all these stories that kind of unfold about my understanding of this and how this, how this got to this place.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I started to do some very serious work when I was a principal of a school in Los Angeles, a K through eight.
00:05:17
Speaker
I typically worked in high schools before, and I became principal of this really wonderful old school.
00:05:24
Speaker
elementary school, K-8 elementary school.
00:05:27
Speaker
And we did some wonderful work around this issue for a number of years.
00:05:32
Speaker
And then hashtag MeToo happened.
00:05:37
Speaker
And at the time, as I mentioned in the book, I was also teaching this class, this all girls class of girls who were really challenged in terms of mathematics.
00:05:48
Speaker
They were all in seventh grade.
00:05:50
Speaker
And I said, this is all coming together for me.
00:05:53
Speaker
And I really need to start writing about it and blogging about it and writing a book.
00:05:59
Speaker
And the book actually took me four and a half years to write.
00:06:01
Speaker
It took me quite a long time to write.
00:06:04
Speaker
The impetus for the book, the thinking about it, was both kind of my outrage about what was going on at the time and how little progress we had made culturally and socially around these issues, but also my frustration with the fact that I felt if we ever wanted to make any progress around this issue, we needed to stop having conversations about 50-year-old men.
00:06:26
Speaker
That was not going to get us anywhere, and it hasn't gotten us anywhere, really.
00:06:30
Speaker
And we need to start talking about two-year-olds.
00:06:34
Speaker
And we need to start talking about their experiences, at least in part within their communities and within their schools, because as you know, Nick, that is such a shaping narrative for them of who they become ultimately.
Personal Stories and Gender Bias in Classrooms
00:06:47
Speaker
We have this oversized influence on children's lives, and we have to take that extremely seriously when we think about the cultural constructs of our schools.
00:06:58
Speaker
It's really interesting that you say starting with two.
00:07:01
Speaker
One of the framings of the book that made this, I guess, so deeply personal for me is that I have a four-year-old son.
00:07:07
Speaker
And one kind of of the shaping experiences that I can recall in his young life was when he was about two years old.
00:07:15
Speaker
And the daycare provider that he was going to at the time told us one day, and this still is kind of a running joke in our household, that, oh, he's such a boy.
00:07:24
Speaker
Oh, he's such a boy.
00:07:26
Speaker
And for someone who's trying to, you know, give my son a fighting chance to not kind of fall into those gendered hazards and the barriers that we build for kids, to kind of have him set by his own teacher along that path and sort of to fit whatever criteria was in her mental model for, you know, how two-year-olds perform of masculinity, he's such a boy, was kind of shocking to me.
00:07:52
Speaker
that here's somebody who we trust with our kid and is obviously going to be treating him in this particularly gendered way based on her own experiences.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a comfort level, right?
00:08:07
Speaker
I mean, it really, for teachers, I think it's a way to make sense of what's going on inside their classrooms and inside of schools.
00:08:16
Speaker
And we have a lot of inputs going on for teachers and educators, right?
00:08:19
Speaker
We have to...
00:08:21
Speaker
We have to do a lot of work along those lines.
00:08:24
Speaker
And so I think what happened, and which I mentioned in the book, is we gender default.
00:08:30
Speaker
We gender default in order to create order and understanding for ourselves so we can move forward in other realms and educate the kids, teach them how to read and teach them how to write.
00:08:42
Speaker
But at the same time, we don't understand the enormous impact that that actually has on the success of students in classrooms.
00:08:51
Speaker
In the short term, we're doing this gender default work.
00:08:54
Speaker
In the long term, we are doing things that actually inhibit their ability to learn well.
00:08:59
Speaker
it becomes a heuristic for our ways of organizing, not just organizing our practice, but organizing our students as well.
00:09:08
Speaker
A student acts like this or performs in such a way because they fit some sort of gender criteria.
00:09:14
Speaker
One of the activities that I loved in the book was you had this list of adjectives that you would use to describe students and you would actually write, what kind of gender codes do these words fall into?
00:09:26
Speaker
Are these masculine words, these feminine coded words,
00:09:29
Speaker
Which ones would you use to describe boys and girls?
00:09:31
Speaker
And I kind of, I found myself going along.
00:09:33
Speaker
It was interesting.
00:09:34
Speaker
The layout in the book has on the one page, it has the full list.
00:09:38
Speaker
And I was kind of mentally going through as I was going through it.
00:09:40
Speaker
And I was like, oh, you know, I bet I probably was fairly even handed.
00:09:43
Speaker
I turned the page and you're like, here's usually how this exercise goes.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I was like, dang.
00:09:48
Speaker
Foiled again, you know, and it just is one of those things, you know, as much as as as much as we would talk about, you know, our racial biases or other kinds of things, just the insidious way that that gender kind of infiltrates and guides the way that we think about students in classrooms.
00:10:05
Speaker
I took your book with me through airports on Labor Day weekend.
00:10:08
Speaker
It was really interesting being pretty self-conscious about the title of this book and how it would be perceived by people at the airport, people on the plane, et cetera.
00:10:18
Speaker
Considering that narrative about the way those two words, gender and schools, have been deliberately constructed over the last, I think just maybe the last year or so, and how that association of gender and schools has been meant to trigger
00:10:33
Speaker
immediately hostile reactions, right?
00:10:35
Speaker
To bypass the frontal lobe, go right to the amygdala.
00:10:40
Speaker
So this book and your work can't be separate from that broader conversation and their public response to it.
00:10:48
Speaker
You say you started on this book four years ago.
00:10:51
Speaker
Have you seen a way, a change in the way that people respond to your work in schools or to the book?
00:10:57
Speaker
Or how have you addressed those concerns or those criticisms broadly?
00:11:01
Speaker
Well, it's a great question because, first of all, I think the airports probably tell us more about the way people are interacting with gender than any
Public Reactions to Gender Discussions
00:11:11
Speaker
other place.
00:11:11
Speaker
There's people who's running around.
00:11:13
Speaker
I saw that question that you sent me and I was, wow, this is a great exercise in and of itself, thinking about these airports.
00:11:21
Speaker
I get some very typical reactions.
00:11:24
Speaker
And you can imagine, on the one hand, I'll get either when I'm talking about it with people who are lay leaders, people who are not in education, or even when I'm dealing with faculties,
00:11:38
Speaker
I'll get the eye rolling on the one hand, and the eye rolling usually to, oh, we're going to this woke conversation.
00:11:46
Speaker
You know, that's the immediate visceral reaction that people have.
00:11:49
Speaker
When you talk about triggers, right, that's the language trigger for a number of people.
00:11:55
Speaker
We're going to have that kind of conversation.
00:11:58
Speaker
But there's another kind of reaction that I get, which is also equally as present, which is, you know, people looking at me and saying, who is this white person?
00:12:08
Speaker
57-year-old cisgender male going to teach me about gender equity.
00:12:17
Speaker
And both of those, for me, are fairly problematic responses, but fairly typical given the ideological landscape we find ourselves in.
00:12:31
Speaker
I'm not surprised by them at this point or shocked by them at all.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so part of what I tell teachers is, I really want to give you the tools necessary and the language necessary so you can detoxify this conversation.
00:12:47
Speaker
So you can express to other people, particularly parents or in school board meetings or in highly divisive environments, you can explain exactly why we need to have this conversation and why it's so important for children and for education.
00:13:02
Speaker
Ultimately, what you, Nick, you and I, and I've, you know, read your stuff before, and it's such a pleasure.
00:13:10
Speaker
But one of the things that we're both interested in, we're looking, we're looking for student success.
00:13:16
Speaker
We're looking for students to feel the joy of learning.
00:13:20
Speaker
And we want to take away any barriers towards that.
00:13:24
Speaker
And therefore, gender becomes the examination of gender becomes a tool to get to that end.
00:13:32
Speaker
So if we don't want to engage in conversations about indoctrination and in conversations that are going on all over this country, then what we really need to do is be able to have the language necessary to do that and be able to inform and educate other people about it.
00:13:50
Speaker
I also tell people very clearly from the beginning when I'm working with faculty members, I say, I've been on a 30-year journey with this gender question.
00:14:01
Speaker
A lot of it has been very personal, and a lot of it has been also obviously bleeds into the professional and how I behaved as a professional.
00:14:10
Speaker
These stories and memories are incredibly revelatory.
00:14:15
Speaker
They are also incredibly difficult at times to deal with for who I am and the age in which I grew up with.
00:14:21
Speaker
I've had to come to terms with a lot of things and a lot of experiences I've had in the past.
00:14:26
Speaker
and things that I've done and things that I've said.
00:14:29
Speaker
And, you know, you know, you're doing, you know, you've got to kind of sing the redemption song at a certain point and move on.
00:14:36
Speaker
But I also tell people that it's made me a better person.
00:14:42
Speaker
Having this experience has transformed me, I feel, into a better father, into a better educator, into a better parent and partner to my wife.
00:14:51
Speaker
All these kinds of things, I think, have been improvements.
Intersectionality and Allyship
00:14:55
Speaker
And I want to be able to give that over to the future generation to be able to have that experience of transformation as well.
00:15:04
Speaker
And maybe a couple things to unpack from this.
00:15:06
Speaker
I think one of the, I guess one of the revelations for me, because I think I've done a lot of work in kind of consciousness raising in my own regard to students from the LGBTQ community, you know, in regards to issues with race and students who are otherwise marginalized based on, you know, income status or immigration, those kinds of things.
00:15:27
Speaker
And one of the things I think that was a big
00:15:29
Speaker
Again, revelation and kind of a transfer of that other understanding for me, too, was the notion that, right, just like we would say racism in schools, even though the perception and probably rightfully so is that it benefits certain groups over others, but also racism is a limiting factor for the people who are also positively benefiting from racism.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:51
Speaker
And in the same way that we would talk about sexism or gender biases in schools, those same lenses that are used to put girls in boxes, you know, speaking, you know, as maybe a minority group in schools would also be used against boys as well.
00:16:04
Speaker
So those gender biases and the sexism is something that also limits the ability of boys to behave in ways that are not coded as, you know, in relation to their gender or coded as masculine either.
00:16:17
Speaker
And
00:16:18
Speaker
I think the other takeaway for this, for me, is that notion of allyship.
00:16:22
Speaker
It is important, I think, as, you know, straight white men not to center ourselves in these conversations.
00:16:28
Speaker
But I also think, right, we have to be able to figure out a way to...
00:16:34
Speaker
leverage our own power and privilege within our own context and say, knowing better about these issues and how they're impacting either at a systemic level or at a classroom level, then doing
Practical Tools for Educators
00:16:46
Speaker
better.
00:16:46
Speaker
And I think, I don't think it's exactly fair to, for people to levy that criticism that we don't play a role in that process because we play a very important one, right?
00:16:54
Speaker
Which is sort of validating perspectives and approaches.
00:16:58
Speaker
And if we can sort of be that ally and
00:17:01
Speaker
for people who might not otherwise have that much of a voice or who may be marginalized or underrepresented in those conversations, then we can help shine a light on those things as well.
00:17:11
Speaker
To bring it around to that work that you've done with teachers, the last quarter of the book is excellent.
00:17:17
Speaker
It's called Tools for Teachers and Schools and contains exercises to use or ostensibly that you have used with faculty and
00:17:25
Speaker
for teachers to use in their classrooms, even a section for learning goals on physical education and awareness goals for middle school students.
00:17:33
Speaker
I thought those were really incredible.
00:17:35
Speaker
So what does your work with school faculty look like?
00:17:37
Speaker
And I'm especially curious about the conversations, reflections, even the revelations that you've been privy to as a result of that work in schools.
00:17:46
Speaker
What do all of these school communities have in common when they interact with your work?
00:17:51
Speaker
Well, I think that, you know, you mentioned it right away, this kind of sense of who gets to center the conversation, right?
00:17:59
Speaker
That's a really important part of this.
00:18:01
Speaker
And the way I start with faculties is that I decenter myself almost immediately.
00:18:07
Speaker
You know, that to me is a critical part of this process.
00:18:11
Speaker
And I begin by, again, showing them how I can take out or detoxify the ideological issues by having them tell stories.
00:18:22
Speaker
That's always where I begin, particularly with a community that's never had this conversation before.
00:18:27
Speaker
And the, you know, I have four templates basically for stories and narratives that teachers can tell each other.
00:18:35
Speaker
And they get into groups and they start telling gender stories to one another.
00:18:39
Speaker
And they can be gender stories from their own experiences in school or from their experiences as professionals in school.
00:18:47
Speaker
But I want them to become aware of how sort of ubiquitous that
00:18:53
Speaker
the gender story is in their lives.
00:18:56
Speaker
And what that tends to do is by personalizing it, it tends to create a sense of we're all in this together.
00:19:03
Speaker
We all have stories to tell.
00:19:05
Speaker
We all have experiences which talk to us about the way we were masculinized, right?
00:19:11
Speaker
The way we were brought up to understand our masculinity.
00:19:15
Speaker
And as you say so well, how damaging that can be.
00:19:18
Speaker
Right.
00:19:19
Speaker
It gives us enormous privilege in the society, but it comes it comes at an enormous cost.
00:19:25
Speaker
The mental health costs, the the cost to creating relationships and being vulnerable and all these kind of narratives, which men are very much in touch with.
00:19:36
Speaker
They know these stories.
00:19:38
Speaker
And women get to tell their stories.
00:19:41
Speaker
And probably the most beneficial for me over the last 10 years has been having stories with Black women in our communities, in our educational communities.
00:19:49
Speaker
They have schooled me and taught me an enormous amount about this issue from an intersectional standpoint.
00:19:56
Speaker
So we all get to hear those stories and we all get to humanize the issue of gender.
00:20:02
Speaker
One story which I'll share with you, which was with a school, which I was a very conservative community.
00:20:09
Speaker
And for the most part, the school was a very conservative place.
00:20:13
Speaker
And I was very grateful that they had invited me in at all to have this conversation.
00:20:17
Speaker
I thought it was pretty brave, right?
Personal Growth Through Gender Awareness
00:20:20
Speaker
And after we had done this first session on stories, I had one of the teachers come up to me and I suppose he was a little scared to have shared this in the group.
00:20:28
Speaker
And of course, I always tell people, you need to share the stories you're comfortable with.
00:20:32
Speaker
You need to tell the stories that you can't, not everything is good for professional development inside of school, right?
00:20:40
Speaker
But he came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, Jason, I wanted to tell you that I grew up in an extremely to the right religious environment.
00:20:49
Speaker
And it was very strict and very conservative.
00:20:53
Speaker
And it was me, my mother, my father and my seven brothers.
00:21:00
Speaker
OK, and he said, because of who we were religiously,
00:21:05
Speaker
The only woman I had really had a full conversation with before I got married was my mother.
00:21:14
Speaker
And he said, it took me years to figure out how to communicate with my wife.
00:21:20
Speaker
And then we started having children and we had five daughters.
00:21:24
Speaker
OK, you know, and you can imagine the tension and the angst.
00:21:28
Speaker
But he said, I had to literally educate myself on how to raise daughters and and see things through their lenses as they were getting older.
00:21:40
Speaker
I don't know if if I hadn't been in that PD session, I don't know if he ever would have shared that perspective or that would have come up in his memory as a significant understanding of not only who he was as a person, but who he was as an educator.
00:21:54
Speaker
Right.
00:21:54
Speaker
How that impacted him as an educator.
00:21:56
Speaker
So those stories are absolutely essential.
00:22:01
Speaker
They they really get people galvanized around the work that we're going to that we eventually embark on after we tell these stories.
00:22:10
Speaker
After that, then we start talking about teacher-student interaction.
00:22:14
Speaker
I start giving them very clear, as you know from the book, I start giving them very clear understandings of the data and the research which is done, which is pretty robust.
00:22:23
Speaker
It was done, a lot of the work was done during the 70s and 80s and 90s, but it's still very much relevant today.
00:22:30
Speaker
It's still basically what happens in our classrooms.
00:22:33
Speaker
We talk about interaction, engagement, and expectations.
00:22:38
Speaker
And then often I have them do something which I think has been really, really beneficial, which I have them go around their school and I have them create a gender geography of their school.
00:22:51
Speaker
And they have to tell a story about the building that they work in and what kind of messages it sends kids about gender.
00:22:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:00
Speaker
And that is a pretty powerful, that is a pretty powerful conversation.
00:23:05
Speaker
I've had faculties who I've sent out, you need to go out to your football stadium, your football field.
00:23:11
Speaker
Tell me what goes on there, especially on Friday nights.
00:23:16
Speaker
Right.
00:23:16
Speaker
And tell me the gender story that happens out there and the good, the bad, and the ugly of that.
00:23:22
Speaker
And maybe how it's even changed over the years.
00:23:25
Speaker
And by building that, we also understand that the environment is not there just by happenstance.
00:23:31
Speaker
We create the environment in which the students walk into every day.
00:23:36
Speaker
And there's all kinds of gender signifiers all over the learning environment, in classrooms, in hallways, everywhere.
00:23:45
Speaker
And that becomes a moment of great revelation for them to talk about what just simply what, you know, how the kids, where the kids have to spend their day for eight hours a day.
00:23:55
Speaker
So, and that's really where the work begins and they begin to, you know, raise significant questions about their school environment.
Biases in Classroom Dynamics
00:24:03
Speaker
Maybe to dive a little deeper into that, because I'm kind of fascinated perhaps by what schools have come up with or what are some common themes there, because as with anything, right, deliberately constructed or not, it's constructed and it's communicating messages.
00:24:17
Speaker
And I always come back, my brain loops back around to Ira Sokol said,
00:24:23
Speaker
the context is the content.
00:24:25
Speaker
So we're teaching these lessons about gender and, you know, the proper roles that students are supposed to play, you know, those gendered silos, even if our intent is not to communicate them deliberately.
00:24:37
Speaker
Are there common areas or common themes that you've seen across schools that where these issues come up more prominently?
00:24:44
Speaker
Or are there common issues that seem to be the focus of the work then that schools embark on?
00:24:49
Speaker
So one of the things I really work on when I work with elementary schools, and also I work with early childhood centers as well on this issue, is we talk about how they construct their classrooms.
00:25:03
Speaker
And that is, as you know, elementary school teachers don't get in the way of an elementary school teacher putting their class together for the first two or three days when they get back to school.
00:25:15
Speaker
You know, it's an eight o'clock in the morning till 10 o'clock at night activity.
00:25:19
Speaker
There's lots of coffee involved.
00:25:21
Speaker
And as a principal, I would just stick my head in and just say, good luck, you know, and walk out and stay out of the way.
00:25:28
Speaker
Right.
00:25:28
Speaker
So but what I found, which was, again, going back to this, you know, my work in cognitive neuroscience also, which relates to it,
00:25:39
Speaker
is that I would find typically, and I would take pictures of classrooms and show them to the teachers and we would talk about it.
00:25:45
Speaker
But typically speaking, elementary school teachers will construct 80 to 90% of their classroom around language arts lessons and language arts learning.
00:25:56
Speaker
That has to do with the fact that 90% of elementary school teachers in this country are women.
00:26:03
Speaker
And generationally speaking, they are women who have opted out of particularly math-related or science-related fields.
00:26:10
Speaker
They've gone into education for all the right reasons, but they also come into that classroom with enormous anxiety and literally stereotype threat around math learning and science learning, math in particular.
00:26:25
Speaker
So what they do is they construct this space, which is 80 to 90% literacy studies.
00:26:31
Speaker
Some of it is like aphorisms that fill the walls, a little bit of history.
00:26:39
Speaker
And then there's always the ubiquitous number line.
00:26:43
Speaker
that wraps around the top of the classroom, right?
00:26:45
Speaker
And they're like, okay, did math, we're done, okay?
00:26:49
Speaker
And when we get down to it, what I say to them is, what would you say typically is the balance of expectations for learning in this classroom?
00:26:59
Speaker
And they'll say something like, well, we need to do about 50% literacy studies, about 40 to 45% math studies, some science, some history.
00:27:08
Speaker
And I'll say, does your classroom represent mathematics?
00:27:12
Speaker
How does it represent that sense of mathematics is an important and relevant subject that you need to be learning in your school?
00:27:19
Speaker
And you're talking to an English teacher here, right, Nick?
00:27:21
Speaker
I mean, I'm a veteran of the English classroom.
00:27:25
Speaker
And at the same time, I understand by constructing their classrooms that way, what is the message they're sending to their female students?
00:27:34
Speaker
What is, you know, as they begin to relate literally on a neural basis with their teachers, what is the message that's being come across to girls in the classroom?
00:27:46
Speaker
And what's the message that's coming across to boys about the expectation for math learning in this classroom?
00:27:53
Speaker
And then we go through the process of deconstructing the classrooms and thinking about creative ways to represent math.
00:28:00
Speaker
And really, again, we go back to stories.
00:28:03
Speaker
We go back to teachers telling very significant stories about their own experiences growing up, their own math anxiety, what that's meant to them.
00:28:12
Speaker
And that is a very fruitful conversation about something that is concrete for them.
00:28:19
Speaker
It's not ideological.
00:28:21
Speaker
It's real language around why we need to think about gender inside of our schools and inside of our biases.
Cognitive Neuroscience and Education
00:28:32
Speaker
And you mentioned a couple of times throughout the course of the conversation, your background in cognitive neuroscience.
00:28:37
Speaker
And I hesitate to call it a new neuroscience because it's been around for ages.
00:28:43
Speaker
But in the book, you talk about your work with Mary Helen Immordino Yang.
00:28:49
Speaker
whose work has been relevatory for me anyway in that regard too.
00:28:53
Speaker
But I think that's a fascinating addition to books of this kind, because I think the issue of gender kind of is wrapped up in the sociologist toolkit, or it's something that might be more aligned to the humanities.
00:29:05
Speaker
So when I was reading through your book, it was an interesting balance of your experience and
00:29:10
Speaker
and telling the story of these students as they related to the concepts you were talking about.
00:29:15
Speaker
But then there was always a section that relates it back to, hey, here's Gardner.
00:29:18
Speaker
Hey, here's Yang.
00:29:19
Speaker
Hey, here's these
00:29:20
Speaker
you know, here's this foundational neuroscience that informs us what the brain, you know, is doing along the way as well.
00:29:28
Speaker
So what is your experience in the field of neuroscience?
00:29:30
Speaker
You just said you're an English teacher here.
00:29:32
Speaker
How do you get roped into, you know, MRI scans and everything else?
00:29:37
Speaker
What does that add and how does it improve our conversation either right around the gender equation in schools or just generally about learning and schooling?
00:29:46
Speaker
We can tackle both parts of that.
00:29:47
Speaker
Sure.
00:29:47
Speaker
Sure.
00:29:48
Speaker
I was really blessed in 2007, 2008 to be able to take a sabbatical year and get it funded and to be able to work with Mary Helen down at USC.
00:30:01
Speaker
Half of her professorship is held at the education school.
00:30:05
Speaker
Half of it is held at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, where she was recruited by Antonio Damasio to work there and do research there.
00:30:16
Speaker
So she's very much invested in partnering with educators and going beyond just typically what we get from academics often, which is directives.
00:30:30
Speaker
Academics are like, you should be doing this.
00:30:32
Speaker
And there's no sense that educators have any wealth of knowledge or experience that might be helpful to understanding this.
00:30:39
Speaker
And Mary Helen's the opposite.
00:30:40
Speaker
Mary Helen actually seeks out partnership.
00:30:43
Speaker
And so when I came to her,
00:30:45
Speaker
I really came with the enthusiasm of realizing this is the bridge we need to cross, right?
00:30:51
Speaker
This is the place we're going to start to really understand what goes on in the classroom in a very different way.
00:30:57
Speaker
And I really learned at her feet.
00:30:59
Speaker
You know, I really learned from her and she was, she really was patient with me and,
00:31:07
Speaker
walk me through all the statistics and the work that she was doing.
00:31:11
Speaker
At the time, she was working on some very deep research on two boys who had had functional hemispherectomies, where one boy had had the right half of his brain removed for certain reasons, and the other boy had had the other half of his brain removed.
00:31:27
Speaker
So
00:31:28
Speaker
You know, one had had it because he had cancer on one side of his brain and the other had it because he had very debilitating mal epilepsy, and he had seizures, mal seizures.
00:31:40
Speaker
And so she, you know, this is where the money's made, right?
00:31:46
Speaker
Unfortunately, when you have kids like this, they're really so, they create wealth of knowledge about these issues from a cognitive standpoint.
00:31:57
Speaker
So she was doing studies on it.
00:31:58
Speaker
I was able to be involved in that.
00:32:01
Speaker
And also she invited me to write on it for MindBranding Education, which I did.
00:32:07
Speaker
I wrote about how do you take her research and translate it into the classroom.
00:32:11
Speaker
And she wanted that, right?
00:32:13
Speaker
She invited me into that conversation.
00:32:16
Speaker
So I was able to take what I had learned and really turn it into constructive activist thinking inside the classroom.
00:32:24
Speaker
And, you know, when you start doing the deep dive into this material, you know, you can't see the classroom the same again.
00:32:32
Speaker
You walk into these spaces and I hate to put it, it's very matrixy.
00:32:37
Speaker
You start to see the code falling, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is going on and this is going on and you're seeing all this stuff that you never saw before.
00:32:49
Speaker
It really opens your lenses.
00:32:52
Speaker
But at the time, by the time we were done, I was, I had just taken all this thinking I had done about gender and the thinking I had done about cognitive neuroscience and they just came together so naturally.
00:33:05
Speaker
They just made so much sense to me, particularly in regard to areas like mirror neurons and the way that we don't really think individually.
00:33:16
Speaker
That's one of the fallacies, right?
00:33:19
Speaker
That you and I are kind of individual, independent entities.
00:33:24
Speaker
This is very Cartesian, right?
00:33:26
Speaker
We're both independent entities, right?
00:33:29
Speaker
And we have all these thoughts and ideas and they generate from our own minds and everything like that.
00:33:35
Speaker
And in fact, our neural networks extend into our relationship with individuals, families, communities, schools.
00:33:44
Speaker
Schools are cognitive ecosystems.
00:33:47
Speaker
That's really what they are.
00:33:50
Speaker
And once we recognize how much influence teachers have over children from a cognitive standpoint, then we really need to take a step back, right?
00:34:02
Speaker
Then we need to see how our own biases and our own implicit understandings of things have such a world shaping event on students every day, every single day.
00:34:16
Speaker
It's a bit scary, but it's also, it's liberating on another level, right?
00:34:22
Speaker
It can be very liberating.
00:34:24
Speaker
I think there's a lot of power in that, in that new cognitive neuroscience.
00:34:28
Speaker
And I, I say new again, not maybe to refer to it necessarily in, in time and chronology, but kind of there's different schools say the, the one that maybe like of, of hashtag cog sci maybe is more like a brains in jars kind of approach that looks at, again, those individual students in relation to the content.
00:34:47
Speaker
And then,
00:34:48
Speaker
really focuses on teacher inputs and outputs for the purpose of improving test scores or something.
00:34:53
Speaker
Whereas the work that you had done there and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and other researchers as well are looking at that in that full context of schooling, not necessarily just the inputs and outputs of individual teachers, but how the environment, give us a cognitive neuroscience language to describe that interaction, not just a critical pedagogy one.
00:35:14
Speaker
Give us something in cognitive neuroscience to help us with this language of gender around schools.
00:35:20
Speaker
And again, not just a sociological one.
00:35:23
Speaker
I do think it helps legitimize, for better or worse, I really do think it helps legitimize these pursuits when you can demonstrate
00:35:32
Speaker
from a hard scientific perspective, the lens it has.
00:35:34
Speaker
And it's just not, you know, not that the humanities are always like this, but it's just not conjecture, right?
00:35:39
Speaker
It's just not critical theory.
00:35:41
Speaker
It's not just these ideas.
Redefining Gender Discussions
00:35:42
Speaker
It's actually, here's the hard stuff to back it up.
00:35:45
Speaker
One last thing I think that might be a relevant framing, and this has been a really great conversation, Nick.
00:35:53
Speaker
It's been really deep.
00:35:54
Speaker
And I think we'll all benefit more when we start seeing the word gender in a very different way.
00:36:01
Speaker
And my hope is that we don't just see gender either as defined by feminism, which it often is.
00:36:08
Speaker
We start talking about gender and people think that we're immediately talking about feminism, which
00:36:13
Speaker
I think feminism did a lot to liberate us, actually, from notions of what gender meant.
00:36:18
Speaker
But at the same time, it's been kind of, you know, it's been put in that parking lot and it can't get out.
00:36:25
Speaker
And the other one is that when we talk about gender, the only thing we're talking about is LGBTQIA community.
00:36:31
Speaker
And that I think is also very problematic because, again, I think it ghettoizes those kids and those people going through that experience when we're all part of the gender conversation.
00:36:43
Speaker
We all have our gender stories.
00:36:45
Speaker
We all have ways of framing the world in a very primary way.
00:36:50
Speaker
from the way we see gender and how it's been constructed for us.
00:36:53
Speaker
It behooves all of us to think about this, no matter what our orientation or our thinking about things.
00:37:00
Speaker
And I hope, my hope for the book is that we can really open up this conversation and get beyond the legislation and the current conversation that we're finding all over this country to a more sophisticated conversation.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker
And I think the book does an excellent job of that.
00:37:17
Speaker
So the book is The Gender Equation in Schools.
00:37:19
Speaker
The author, Jason Ablin, thanks for joining me today to talk about it.
00:37:23
Speaker
It's been a pleasure.
00:37:28
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
00:37:31
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:37:35
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:37:43
Speaker
Thank you.