University of Tasmania
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Dis/Locating gendered readings : moving towards a critical pedagogy of estrangement

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posted on 2023-05-26, 18:21 authored by Hiller, C
This thesis `Dis/Locating Gendered Readings: Moving Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Estrangement' investigates the interaction of students, teachers and narrative texts in a Grade 9 English classroom and explores processes of gendered subject production through pedagogical practices. The main focus is student and teacher responses to three narrative texts Peter (Walker, 1991), Looking for Alibrandi (Marchetta, 1992) and Dougy (Moloney, 1993) and resulting gendered differences in discursive positioning. The main aim is to identify the dominant discourses of both students and teachers with the view to interrogating them for the implications for current literary pedagogy and gendered positioning. The research is ethnographic focusing in particular on the discourses taken up by students and teachers in response to narrative texts. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives ‚ÄövÑvÆ pedagogy, feminist theory and discourse analysis ‚ÄövÑvÆ this thesis argues that classrooms are sites of multiple and competing discourses: the discourses already available to the students, the pedagogical discourses of the teachers, and the discursive positionings made available by narrative texts used as part of the pedagogy. The dominant discursive positions available to students are identified using a grounded theory approach and elaborated through discourse analysis of classroom transcripts of talk. The pedagogical discourses used by the teachers are also identified and analysed in consultation with the teachers involved as part of the emancipatory intention. This thesis offers a critical discussion of these dominant pedagogical discourses in relation to reading and textual analysis with the view to elaborating an alternative pedagogy which offers a more productive field for feminist classroom textual practices. The discourses taken up by the students situate them in different ways which reflect wider discursive positionings, both within the classroom discussion of narrative texts and more widely. This thesis investigates the consequences of the differences produced by current pedagogical practices and the potential for pedagogical change. It argues that current pedagogies of literary teaching reproduce binary structuring of gendered subjectivities, which situate students differently and unequally. It moves towards the elaboration of an emancipatory pedagogy which makes transparent essentialist categories and opens emancipatory spaces for both teachers and students.

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Copyright 1998 the Author

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