Equality and Power in Schools

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Based on a study of 12 schools over a two-year period, this book explores issues of equality and power both in the classroom and in the staffroom. Through classroom observation, interviews with pupils and staff, focus groups and questionnaires, the authors examine classroom practice, grouping and streaming, peer group relations and attitudes to power relationships both between pupils and teachers, and amongst teachers themselves. They also look particularly at the different experiences of pupils in single sex and co-educational schools.
The authors' findings offer an insight into the way schools operate in terms of social class, gender, religion and ethnicity, and raise fundamental questions about the use and abuse of power in schools and how this affects the lives of pupils and staff.
This book will be of interest to those studying education, sociology, gender studies and women's studies, and to policy makers and teachers in senior management roles.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Section 1 Setting the Scene
• 1 The Equality Debates
• 2 The Design of the Study and a Profile of the Schools
• Section 2 Issues of Redistribution
• 3 The Class Act: A One Act Play in Four Stages
• 4 The Grouping Process: Selecting Out, Selecting In
• Section 3 Issues of Recognition and Multivalent Identities
• 5 Girls' Schools: Dilegence, Surveillance and Resistance
• 6 Boys' Schools: Peer Regulation and Sporting Prowess
• 7 The Complex Cultures of Co-educational Schools: Diversity, Silence and Hegemony
• 8 The Diversity Deficit: Minorities and the Recognition of Difference
• Section 4 Discipline and Power
• 9 Regimes of Power and Resistance
• 10 Vertical and Hoizontal Power: Teachers' Experiences
• 11 Inequality and the 3 Rs - Redistribution, Recognition and Representation