Formations of Masculinity and Higher Education Pedagogies

Abstract

Recent attention to men’s decreasing levels of participation in higher education (HE) has produced overly simplistic analyses that men are the new disadvantaged sex and the “feminization thesis” (Leathwood & Read, 2009, p. 20). Men are often homogenized as a group, posing them in a battle of the sexes and ignoring the complex ways that masculinity intersects with other social differences, including age, class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. Despite the moral panic that has emerged in many countries about men’s HE participation rates compared to women’s, there has been a dearth of research that explores the relationship between formations of masculinity and HE pedagogies. However, some research has drawn attention to the important interconnections between formations of masculinity and other social, generational and cultural differences and inequalities, which profoundly shape men’s dispositions to and experiences of learning and teaching (Archer, 2003; Burke, 2006; HEA, 2008). This paper explores the complex formations of masculinity at play in students’ and academics’ accounts of pedagogical experiences, relations and practices, drawing on a major qualitative research project concerning gender and higher education pedagogies, funded by the UK’s Higher Education Academy. Pedagogies are conceptualised in this paper as constitutive of gendered formations through the discursive practices and regimes of truth at play in particular pedagogic and disciplinary spaces. The article shows that pedagogies do not simply reflect the gendered identities of academics and students but that pedagogies themselves are gendered, intimately bound up with historical and masculinised ways of being and doing within higher education.