Browsing by Author "Pawelczyk, Joanna"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Constructing gender and sexuality in the EFL classroom in Poland: Textbook construction and classroom negotiation?
    (Routledge, 2015) Pawelczyk, Joanna; Pakuła, Łukasz
    Poland, as a young conservative democracy, is witnessing an unprecedented amount of public debate where ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ figure prominently. Both, however, tend to be perceived as foreign imports and thus fiercely contested. Consequently, the role of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) materials as well as teachers as potential mediators of markedly different Anglophone socio-politics is of paramount importance. What is more, the only Polish research examining the portrayal of women in EFL materials is that by Jaworski (1986), who exposed the abundance of sexism in EFL textbooks available in Poland at that time. Regrettably, ‘sexuality’ as a culturally (but not linguistically) important identity category was not addressed or recognised in the broad Polish educational context until 2012 (Świerszcz 2012). This chapter reports on two studies conducted as part of the research project entitled “Investigating Gender and Sexuality in the ESL classroom: Raising publishers', teachers' and students' awareness”. The aim of the first study was to qualitatively scrutinize the discursive and multimodal construction of gender, gender relations, and sexuality in two leading illustrated Primary School EFL textbooks in Poland, along with the accompanying workbooks and teacher’s books. To this end the analytical methods of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989; Lazar 2005, 2014), Multimodal Discourse Analysis (see e.g. Giaschi 2000; Guo 2004; O’Halloran 2004; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006) and the concept of critical heteronormativity (Motschenbacher 2010, 2011) were utilized. The analyses focused on the representation of the social roles of men and women, boys and girls in EFL materials. They also demonstrated different textual manifestations of heteronormativity. ‘Gender critical points’ (Sunderland et al. 2002) – identified in the first study - were drawn on in the second study. We also extended Sunderland et al.’s (2002) concept by introducing the notion of ‘gender-emerging points’, which we believe enriches the analytical apparatus by highlighting the dynamic character of classroom interactions and thus the central role of teachers. Here we used audio-recorded primary school classroom interactions to demonstrate how the identified ‘gender critical points’ are addressed and how ‘gender-emerging points’ surface and/or are made (ir-)relevant in the classroom setting. Thus the analysis focused on gendered ‘talk around the text’ emerging in teacher-student interactions to explore negotiation, challenge and/or rejection and ‘uptake’ of gender roles and discourse. To this end methods and insights from critical linguistic analysis were used along with Sunderland’s (this volume) agenda for future research on gender representation in foreign language textbooks.
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    Gender and Sexuality in English Language Education: Focus on Poland
    (British Council, 2015-10) Pakuła, Łukasz; Pawelczyk, Joanna; Sunderland, Jane
    With a focus on Poland, Łukasz Pakuła, Joanna Pawelczyk and Jane Sunderland empirically explore gender and sexuality in relation to classroom interaction and textbooks in the primary and secondary English language classroom. Based on data from a range of classrooms, the book shows how gender stereotyping in textbooks has not disappeared, that heterosexuality is the only sexuality in evidence and that heteronormativity is salient. Importantly, though, through teacher- and student-talk and classroom interaction generally, these representations can be and are negotiated and challenged. The book also offers practical suggestions for teachers, educators and publishers to make the English language classroom a truly inclusive social space.
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    Investigating Gender and Sexuality in the ESL classroom: Raising publishers', teachers' and students' awareness
    (2013-11) Pakuła, Łukasz Piotr; Pawelczyk, Joanna
    A promotional brochure of a project run by Faculty of English (AMU) and Lancaster University, and funded by the British Council.
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    Issues of power in relation to gender and sexuality in the EFL classroom - An overview
    (Faculty of Educational Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, 2014-07) Pawelczyk, Joanna; Pakuła, Łukasz Piotr; Sunderland, Jane
    Schools in general and classrooms in particular are among society’s primary socializing institutions (Freeman and McElhinny, 1996, p. 261; Adger, 2001). In particular, education, as an institution of Gramsci’s ‘civil society’ (Jones, 2006), can be considered a grassroots space where hegemonic gendered and sexual identities are constructed and regulated. This article looks at the context of the EFL classroom – a discursive space where learners are potentially (re-)constructed in relation to various (gender) roles in society as well as learning the practices, values and rules of a given society at large. In this paper we explore and discuss how the categories of gender and sexuality are represented, (re-)constructed and generally dealt with in this learning environment. We follow Foucault’s (1978, 1979) conceptualization of power as something which “weaves itself discursively through social organizations, meanings, relations and the construction of speakers’ subjectivities or identities” (Baxter, 2003, p. 8) and is enacted and contested in every interaction (see Mullany, 2007). We see power as being produced, reproduced, challenged and resisted in the EFL classroom in connection with the construction of gender and sexuality. The article discusses how views on what/who is ‘powerful’ in the context of the EFL classroom have changed over the years, from the early privileging of textbooks to the currently advocated central role of the teacher in addressing and promoting (or not) traditional and/or progressive discourses of gender and sexuality. Critical pedagogies and queer pedagogies are discussed as offering educators potent insights and tools to deal with heteronormativity and various forms of discrimination in the EFL classroom as well as helpful means for empowering all students by addressing their various identities. It is thus our contention that relationships between gender, sexuality and EFL education are in need of urgent (re)addressing as existing research is outdated, lacks methodological sophistication or is lacking in the Polish context.
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    Issues of power in relation to gender and sexuality in the EFL classroom – An overview
    (Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014) Pawelczyk, Joanna; Pakuła, Łukasz; Sunderland, Jane
    Schools in general and classrooms in particular are among society’s primary socializing institutions (Freeman & McElhinny, 1996, p. 261; Adger, 2001). In particular, education, as an institution of Gramsci’s ‘civil society’ (Jones, 2006), can be considered a grassroots space where hegemonic gendered and sexual identities are constructed and regulated. This article looks at the context of the EFL classroom – a discursive space where learners are potentially (re‐)constructed in relation to various (gender) roles in society as well as learning the practices, values and rules of a given society at large. In this paper we explore and discuss how the categories of gender and sexuality are represented, (re‐)constructed and generally dealt with in this learning environment. We follow Foucault’s (1978, 1979) conceptualization of power as something which “weaves itself discursively through social organizations, meanings, relations and the construction of speakers’ subjectivities or identities” (Baxter, 2003, p. 8) and is enacted and contested in every interaction (see Mullany, 2007). We see power as being produced, reproduced, challenged and resisted in the EFL classroom in connection with the construction of gender and sexuality. The article discusses how views on what/who is ‘powerful’ in the context of the EFL classroom have changed over the years, from the early privileging of textbooks to the currently advocated central role of the teacher in addressing and promoting (or not) traditional and/or progressive discourses of gender and sexuality. Critical pedagogies and queer pedagogies are discussed as offering educators potent insights and tools to deal with heteronormativity and various forms of discrimination in the EFL classroom as well as helpful means for empowering all students by addressing their various identities. It is thus our contention that relationships between gender, sexuality and EFL education are in need of urgent (re)addressing as existing research is outdated, lacks methodological sophistication or is lacking in the Polish context.
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    The discursive construction of gendered identity: AAE
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2002) Pawelczyk, Joanna
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    Unpacking the complexity of gender integration in the U.S. military using discourse analysis: The case of servicewomen’s talk around "having to prove themselves"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Pawelczyk, Joanna
    A quasi-idiomatic expression ‘women have to prove themselves’ reflects various performance pressures and heightened visibility of women functioning in gendered professional spaces as advocated by tokenism theory. It is an example of how discriminatory practice – according to which competent and qualified women entering the culturally masculine professions are explicitly and implicitly expected to work harder for any recognition – gets discoursed in language and becomes a “rhetorically powerful form of talk” (Kitzinger 2000: 124). This paper explores the question: what is it that U.S. servicewomen functioning in the culturally hypermasculine space need to do to prove themselves? To this end, qualitative semi-structured interviews with women veterans of the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are qualitatively scrutinized with the methods of discourse analysis and conversation analysis to 1) identify practices that U.S. servicewomen engage in to symbolically (re-)claim their place and status in the military, i.e., to prove they belong; 2) find out how the talk around proving emerged in the course of the conversation and how it was further interactionally sustained and/or dealt with in talk-in-interaction. The findings of the micro-level analysis – interpreted through the lenses of tokenism and the category of the ‘honorary man’ – reveal women’s complex and nuanced struggle to fit and find acceptance in the military culture of hypermasculinity. They also re-engage with the ideas of tokenism by demonstrating that various acts of proving, reflecting women’s token status, may concurrently and paradoxically be a means to earn honorary man status.