Boys and Literacy (part 7)

 

A social constructionist notion promoted by Pollack (1999) is a “boys code” which governs male behavior through culturally engineered myths of masculinity. Pollack stresses that this social code harms boys and makes intimate relationships taboo- a notion not supported by the work of Smith and Wilhelm, which highly emphasized the social aspects of boys and literacy. The social constructionist position, however, is more useful to educators than the biological constructionist because it leaves room for schools and society to influence behavior. Authors such as Miedzien, Silverstein and Rashbaum take social constructionists’ views even further as they transform the meanings of manhood by using principles of feminism. Their writings have elicited angry responses from the biological constructionist position heralded by Hoff Sommer. In her 2000 book The War Against Boys: how misguided feminism is harming our young men she argues that boys are so oppressed by the feminist ideology typically expressed through schools they have in fact become “victims” and “the second sex”.

 It is no surprise that most traditional English teachers are women. British educator Kit Thomas, exploring the influence of predominantly female veteran English teachers on their apprentices, explains how the socialization of male trainee teachers has been researched in the primary schools but overlooked in secondary schools. Thomas addresses the fact that more women than men teach English in secondary schools, so training takes place in female-dominated English departments. The implication is that the feminization is perpetuated, and that the outcome of this influence is realized in curriculum models of teaching and ultimately the choices of what is read in Literature classes.

Even so, to draw emasculating political agendas from those facts, or in turn to say that the current attention to boys is an attempt to further empower boys over girls, is too much. In any case, while both social and biological constructionists debate the gender wars, real teachers, librarians, and parents are simply searching for strategies to help boys. These strategies include a myriad of resources that list the types of books boys might like to read. Bibliographic resources come in different formats including books, journals, websites, wikis, blogs, and listservs. Books are usually organized by genre, like horror, adventure, science fiction, war, fantasy, and mystery, but there are crossovers such as graphic novels about history. An example is Maus, a current and popular comic book series that explores the sadness and horrors of the Holocaust.