It was a Thursday morning in the dead of winter last year. I was teaching English Language Development (ELD) Level 3. Most of my students were in 11th and 12th grade and, throughout the year, we had established a classroom culture that could withstand tackling difficult issues. It was right after the 2016 Presidential Election and my students, most of whom were immigrants, were concerned about their futures in the United States. Like most days, I didn’t plan on going to school to talk about gender; it just sort of happened. I am tuned like a radio frequency to gender issues in the classroom and I had been up until 1 am the night before working on my dissertation, which deals with gender and educational leadership. Regardless of the cause, gender usually pops up somehow.  

In ELD 3, we took a survey and analyzed the data. We focused on predictions about what we saw in the data. The survey queried the habits of teenagers and specifically how often they engaged in certain behaviors. Although the questions compared behaviors of young women and young men, my focus was not on gender that day. My objective was the development of students’ language around making predictions. I did not expect to get into such a heated discussion. 

Here are some of the questions from the survey and the results from my class: 
 

When I opened the results, it was immediately apparent that my students had significant understandings about what it meant to be a teenage boy and a teenage girl. We needed to talk about it. This was always the part of my classroom I loved: when something totally unexpected happened and completely changed our conversations. 

Schools offer a place for young people to learn about who they are in a community. They provide unique opportunties for socialization, and especially for gender socialization. As a teacher, I always feel the need to model certain expectations of diversity, such as being inclusive and respectful of others. Still, I often feel constrained by the larger school culture. I feel this so deeply that my dissertation research focused on how gender played in leadership, rather than in classrooms (which I knew from my years of teaching). What I found was remarkable. Gender is an organizing principle in our schools. In a lot of ways, young people learn what it is to be a man or woman through their experiences in schools. When I think about the mission of AEC, I think about this day in my ELD classroom. Young people learn about gender power relations even if we, as educators and administrators, do not think teach them about it. Through my work at AEC, I work with teachers and administrators to find ways of making their school cultures more inclusive. If we create school cultures that support all our students and help them to reimagine gender roles, then movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up will have a new generation of leaders that eliminate the inequities in society. 

- Lisa