Shards of Glass. Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identity

Description

Shards of Glass looks at the processes through which gender is constituted from a poststructuralist perspective: at the usual ways knowledge is constructed in classrooms, the nature of masculinities and femininities and the children’s experience of sexuality. It challenges us to work with children to allow them as speaking subjects to invent, invert and break old structures and speak/write into existence other ways of being.

In this book Davies explores gender in the context of primary school classrooms, looking for ways to interact with children that disrupts the male/female dualism. She explores with children the possibilities of discovering different ways of being, as well as looking at the ways in which gender relations are resistant to change. The children in this study are from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds and include boys, since the burden of change cannot lie entirely with girls.

Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities was written by Bronwyn Davies and published in Australia by Allen and Unwin in 1993. The second edition was published in the U.S. by Hampton Press in 2003.