GENDER AND EDUCATION - PUBLIC-POLICY AND PEDAGOGIC PRACTICE

This paper serves two purposes. The first is an examination of a public policy, the Queensland Department of Education’s Equal Opportunity Policy for Girls and Boys (1981) and the Implementation Guidelines (1988) for that policy within the context of the pedagogical practices of one secondary school. The second purpose is to answer a criticism often levelled at structural theories of education. This criticism centres around the inability of structural theories to account for the real life experiences of teachers and students. Bernstein’s (1986) theory of Pedagogic Discourse and Fernandes’ (1988) work on Resistance theory are applied to three levels of educational practice; public policy, school practices and the everyday experiences of a group of female students. Through this analysis, movement towards a more satisfactory explanation of the intersection of gender and education is made. © 1991, IEEE. All rights reserved.