Posts tagged theres a guy next to me at starbucks wearing alligator boots in JUNE

lhuddles:

I’m sitting here reading an article about self-efficacy and what teachers can do to help raise students’ self-efficacy beliefs in writing. 

The article mentions gender views on writing—typically, children and students believe that math and technology are male-gendered domains and that writing is a female-gendered domain. Nothing new. 

What’s really interesting to me about all this (although it isn’t surprising in the least) is that when you look at the numbers, writing is still a male-dominated field. Just look at some of the most successful female writers of the past decade—JK Rowling and EL James come to mind; they don’t even have female-oriented names for goodness sake. 

Writing is totally male-dominated, yet children believe that writing is a female-oriented domain. What does that mean for us? We know that when girls are younger (elementary age), they soar past guys in terms of their own beliefs as writers and their own views as themselves as capable, intelligent writers. Yet as girls get older (around 8th and 9th grade), they begin to lose their own self-efficacy beliefs when it comes to writing. What are we doing—as middle school teachers—to change this mindset? Obviously it isn’t working out well for us. 

Just a thought. Back to reading.