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Learning to Make a Difference:
Gender, New Technologies, and In/Equity


MARY BRYSON
University of British Columbia Ê

SUZANNE DE CASTELL
Simon Fraser University



Taking a lead from Textor et al's (1985) innovative project of "anticipatory anthropology," this article describes a project on gender, equity and new information technologies that is in its infancy. The authors offer a preliminary, "anticipatory" analysis of this project's prospects and pitfalls. In search of a "community of research practice" having an explicit commitment to what we resort to calling "radical practice" in education/educational research, we invite others, using e-mail as a medium for a discourse community so focused, into an ongoing conversation concerned with marginalization, alterity, gender and identity as "tool-user," radical pedagogies and socio-culturally situated research practice/s. It is envisaged here that the formation of a larger "community of alterity in practices" could substantially enlarge opportunities for critique, support and dialogue while there is yet some material difference which might be made to the work by these means. This anticipatory account of the Gentech Project is, accordingly, one conceptual space from which such a conversation might begin.

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Introductory Framework

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Ê In 1985, Robert Textor and a group of colleagues published an article in Anthropology and Education Quarterly entitled "Anticipatory Anthropology and the Telemicroelectronic Revolution" in which they forecast a wide range of changes ensuing from the implementation of new information technologies (NIT's). Their rationale for a "futures oriented" approach to data collection and reporting was to anticipate, and therefore proactively to create, optimal conditions for the widespread implementation of NIT's. The authors ended their article by forecasting that by 1995. it will be routine "for an anthropologist to build an anticipatory stance into his or her research" (p. 2. As with predictions about subjects other than death and taxes, this anticipatory element in the organization of research practices is probably far from commonplace. Nonetheless, and particularly for counter-paradigmatic research, it strikes us as conceptually and practically indispensable. Ê

We have embarked recently on a three year federally funded project examining gender identity construction and representation, equity issues, and uses of new technologies in school-based and non-school-based contexts. Given that its focus is on reconfiguring traditional relations between girls/women and 'new technologies," this research, necessarily interventionist, intends "deliberately to interfere with the production of normalcy in school(ed) subjects" (Bryson & de Castell, 1993b). To construct a queer pedagogy of "deviance by design" our efforts are directed in large part at remediating (Cole & Griffin, 1986) representations and performances of gender identity in the construction of agentive narratives about and within more equitable and engaged relations between girls/women and NIT's. This work represents, then, a kind of "radical pedagogy," which aims to change existing conditions in schools and to document contexts of cultural activity "on the margins," stories of a kind seldom included in "official stories" about what constitutes good "educational research" and how it can and should be carried out.

Ê Taking up Textor's recommendation to include an explicit "anticipatory" stance as an important element of new technology research, we were forced to ask ourselves what in all honesty we could imagine the path and outcome of such an admittedly "radical" research program might be or become. And we had early on to admit that very probably any sanguine observer would be justified in predicting from the outset that "Learning to Make a Difference" is a project doomed to fail. Let's consider why: School contexts are, after all, (a) highly resistant to change, and (b) locales where scripts for the enactment of appropriate gender identities are "always already" entrenched in an exquisitely fine-tuned dance of heterogenesis. In the terms offered by Lave and Wenger (1991), devising an architecture for transforming conventional constraints on the possibilities for "legitimate peripheral participation in the community of practice" known as "school" seems, even in the most favorable scenario, like a species of science fiction. Ê


Ways of Telling...

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Confronting a losing battle, tie strategist endeavors to redefine the time, place and conditions of the engagement Accordingly, under the sign of "strategy" we here invert the usual order of things in narrative time, "reporting" on our research before (largely) it has happened. Next we resituate the "place" of research from the privacy of our university offices to the public domain of this journal (and its electronic frontiers), and by this means, we alter the conditions of research practice by extending substantially the community within which the practices of this research can be carried out. Ê

This article, then, abandons the usual chronological presentation of a research project, in which researchers engage in data collection activities, decide what actually happened, and only then recount the story, perhaps glowing over the production of successful outcomes and, less often, mourning the failure of anticipated change. Here, instead, we outline a project that is in its infancy, and we invite others--especially those who are trying to determine how to put emancipatory theories about gender and technology from the domain of discourse to work in the "everyday world"-into an ongoing conversation concerned with marginalization, "alterity," gender and identity as "tool-user," radical pedagogies and socio-culturally situated research practice's. We hope we may increase the odds for the success of this kind of project by blurring the public/private divide that so often prevents and retards dialogues "until it's all over," the research completed, the funds exhausted. It is envisaged that the formation of a larger "community of alterity in practice" could substantially enlarge opportunities for critique, support and dialogue while there is yet some material difference which might be made to the work by these means. We want to envisage and to invent a virtual community in which marginality with respect to sociocultural norms would be the starting point, a lifting off place, for the formation of equitable educational praxis embodying "protopolitical" (Penley & Ross, 1991) commitments to improving oppressive conditions for girls/women, people of color, first nations people, the disabled, lesbians and gays, amongst others. Ê

That being said. we propose to outline a rough sort of blueprint for researching the production of "queered" relations to NIT's by girls/women, and, from that basis, to invite others interested or invested in similar projects to join in a discussion of work in progress. This paper comes in response to an invitation by Michael Cole to initiate a practice-based discussion of questions and problems too often marginalized in mainstream academic discussions. To that end. and in collaboration with Michael Cole and LCHC, we have available to us an e-mail forum for what might become an ongoing discussion of radical pedagogies and transformative praxis from a sociocultural theory/research standpoint We invite your (il)legitimate participation in the instantiation, in pedagogical praxis, of deviance by design. Ê


Gender/Technology/Research: A Preview

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I was in the second year of my first university-based tenure-track job, and newly in charge of a medium-scale research project ($150,000+) looking at how female elementary school teachers modified (or didn't) their practices in relation to the implementation of new technologies. A large group of teachers, students, and faculty had convened at the University for hardware and software demonstrations by representatives of the "major vendors" (including IBM, Apple, and Commodore/ Amiga). Despite my senior institutional status as "principal investigator," I noticed from "the word go" that the reps invariably directed all of their attention to the male participants. "So what's new?," I mused frothing in a very familiar silent anger. A white male IBM rep began his presentation by recounting a story about a so-called "old native woman" and the marvel of her composing a grocery list using a word processor. I found the story patronizing. racist' and completely unsuitable for the context. At the end of the day, in one-to-one chat, I told him that I found the story "problematic," and that it had really interfered with my ability to judge his product. The rep was, well...completely livid. He told me in no uncertain terms that I "had no business sharing my opinion with him," and that he had 4'never heard such garbage." The next day, I was called into a formal meeting with representatives of the governmental funding agency that had provided the research grant. I was in big trouble. I was a "public relations disaster." The agency was "considering taking the grant away." Never in my professional life had I heard of a grant explicitly being withdrawn for reasons of PR value. Stunned, I stammered an explanation for my conduct pointing to the University's non-discrimination policy, and my obligation to "educate." Finally I found myself crying-big salty and very embarrassing tears. It proved a persuasive gender display. I was given a second chance-but for what?

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Technologically Inept?


The above experience manifests many of the major elements of women's prototypical relations to new technologies. Women live, paradoxically, in a state of intimate connection with technologies of re/production and yet are represented as perennially inadequate groping towards and never reaching competence-technophobic and Luddite. Consider the representation of gender and relations to tools inscribed in a recent set of Hallmark "birth announcement" cards (see Fig 1 next page). The girl-child wears only panties as she dances with four objects floating disconnectedly overhead. The inscription reads: "She walks. She talks. She juggles four objects at a time. .0K' maybe she can't do it just yet, but give her a couple of weeks." Her stance is precarious and she is already presented as an object for sexual consumption. Although she strives for competence, both satisfaction and agency are endlessly deferred. The boy-child, however, is fully clothed, and seated squarely on the ground. He is directly connected with his tools. The inscription reads: "A baby boy! So proud to be announcing... it's a bouncing baby boy!" There is no ambivalence here, and no imperiled competence. As Cynthia Cockburn (1985), Carolyn Marvin (1988), Ursula Franklin (1992), and other feminist sociologists of science have argued, conceptions of gender identity and notions of technological competence are con-constructed and inter-dependent. boys and men are typically represented as embodying an unproblematic and agentic relation to tools. Male power is achieved by virtue of access to technological competence. Femininity eschews tool-use, and yet is enacted by the skilled use of domestic technologies--sewing machines, washing machines, vacuums. These tools are no less complex than cellular phones or computers, and yet, paradoxically, to be able to use them is to embody a gendered identity as technologically inept. Ê


Whose "home" is it, Anyway ...?


I like to build things--fences, flower boxes, furniture, and the like. My favorite shops are hardware stores, and this has been the case for as long as I can remember. I love to stroll down the aisles, admiring different styles of sanders, grades of wood, kinds of saws, etc. Any female aficionado of hardware stores will be intimately acquainted with the myriad ways in which female customers are excluded from these preserves of male technological posturing--the advertising posters, sales reps, television advertisements, all construct the archetypal customer, the do-it-yourselfer, as male, entirely at home in the "Home of the Handyman." A recent phone call to the advertising manager for Home Hardware, Bill Tiffin, revealed that although fully half of the customers are female, no one has considered changing the slogan so as to make it gender inclusive. As Mr. Tiffin put it, "If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll see it doesn't refer to men or women or anything like that." At my favorite hardware store in Vancouver, the Home Depot, a poster beckons within: "Let our Experts Show you How." Six faces displayed covering the domains of "electrical"," "plumbing," and so on. The single representation of female expertise is in the area of "decorating." Ê


A Conceptual Framework

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Above all, a feminist assessment of technology must recognize technology as an equity issue. The challenge to feminists is to transform society in 'order to make technology equitable and transform technology in order to make society equitable. A feminist technology should, indeed, be something else again. (Bush 1983. p. 168) Ê

Ê Unpacking the complex relations between gender, in/equity, and tools, means analyzing critically conceptualizations of "gender" in contemporary discussions of "equity." In work presented elsewhere (Bryson & de Castell, 1995) we argued that the relations between gender and new technologies can productively be understood by means of a "discourse analysis" of representative texts from this domain (see Figure 2 next page). Uncomfortably rubbing ideological shoulders together beneath the terminological umbrella of "gender equity" are: (1) a positivistic" conception of gender as equivalent with biological sex, (2) a constructivist conception of gender as socially produced and, (3) a critical theory of gender as the ideological product of a repressively patriarchal hegemony, and (4) a "postmodern" conception of gender as a non-cohesive, open-textured "pastiche" of characteristics, aptitudes and dispositions whose ongoing construction and reconstruction it is a central task of feminist praxis to enable and encourage. We argue (in greater detail in Bryson & de Castell, 1995) that within the range of accounts provided of equity and technologies are very differently ordered sets of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and sexual difference, the purposes of schooling, and about the scope-and the limits-of technologies in the classroom. It is, therefore, quite important to see how educational technology initiatives promoted in the name of "gender equity" can be working materially at cross purposes with, if not directly in opposition to one another. Ê


Learning to Make a Difference


If, for instance, it is held that technology is "always already" gendered, and that its gender is masculine (Rothschild, 1983; Benston, 1985), practical strategies for effecting "gender equity" will involve adjustments directed at a re-genderment of the relation of female students and technology: whether that be a resocialization of girls and women (the modernist, positivist view) in terms of their attitudes towards that technology, a pluralist reorganization of pedagogy and curriculum for girls and women in accordance with "women's ways" (the constructivist paradigm), or repudiation of that technology as pre-gendered (and raced and classed) arid therefore inherently undermining goals of women's empowerment (the critical account). Here each approach to technology and gender leaves the gender of technology intact, and operates in different ways on the regenderment of women.

Postmodern theorizing offers a significantly different set of possibilities, for on this account, "gender" is de-gendered altogether, as dichotomies are exploded, practices are disrupted, roles and rules reversed, positions and directions inverted, arid accordingly, technologies assume novel forms arid functions with/in reconfigured sets of social relations and practices. in place of a mythologized "gender identity" there is a fluid and changing set of "gender effects" (Butler, 1990) based upon a politics of location; a politics which, moreover, refuses to ignore the always intersecting differences of ethnicity, class, and material conditions, in its acknowledgment of the realities of gendered positionality, Postmodernism offers, too, a correspondingly novel blueprint for change: construing the skills hitherto the usual preserve of males as themselves only apparently gendered, but in fact merely contingent effects of the privileged positionality of males in institutionally produced relations to technology. Postmodern pedagogies then, would recognize the tactical insufficiencies of contending approaches to intention, based as they are on preservationist strategies equating technology with masculinity. A pedagogy of salvage and recycling might accordingly appropriate traditional skills, simultaneously abandoning traditional (gendered) meanings, functions and uses of those skills in a species of mimicry of (thus far usually masculine) competencies which, because of its self-conscious playing with positions, thence its parodying of the fixity of position, is at last capable of truly disrupting hegemonic relations between learners and technology. Ê


How to Make a Difference? -

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The women say they have a concern for strategy and ....... Their favorite weapons are portable ... The women say that, with the world full of noise, they see themselves as already in possession of the industrial complexes. They are in the factories aerodromes radio stations. They have control of communications. They have taken possession of aeronautical electronic ballistic data-processing factories. They are in the foundries tall furnaces navy yards arsenals refineries distilleries. They have taken possession of pumps presses levers rolling-mills winches pulleys turbines pneumatic drills arcs blow-lamps. They say that they envisage themselves acting with strength and happiness. They say that they hear themselves shout and sing. Let the sun shine/ the world is ours. (Les Guerilleres Wittig, 1969, p. 94) Ê Ê Ê

Gender and technology research has thus far, paradigmatically focused on girls'/women's under-representation and under-achievement in science- and technology-related domains, typically presupposing and/or advancing a deficit model (of "girls/women" and/or "technology") to explicate why girls/women fail to thrive in such contexts. By deliberate contrast, our own research on gender, educational equity, and uses of new information technologies (NIT's) in school-based and non-school-based environments seeks to identify contexts and practices in which (a) inclusion is an explicit organizational goal, and (b) relations between girls/women and NIT's are, by design, orchestrated toward maximizing the likelihood of optimal outcomes. The unique contribution of this research, then, is its explicit sociocultural focus (Allen, 1992; Wertsch, 1991) on organizing principles, practices, and relations contributing to competence, rather than focusing research efforts on explaining failure. Ê

As against most available accounts of women's relations to NIT's, recent anti-determinist feminist methodologies have stared to produce a "new look" in accounts of uses of NIT's by girls/women working within non-school-based, or community-based, organizations; accounts that foreground an uncommonly positive relationship between social context, identity issues, design practices, ethical considerations, and uses of related technologies (see Acker & Oakley, 1993; Bryson & de Castell, 1994, 1995; Darnarin, 1991, 1993; Elkjaer, 1992; Franklin, 1992; or Penley & Ross, 1991). These accounts stand in marked contrast with prototypical representations and empirical or historical observations of dysfunctional, deficit-based, pathological, or generally oppressive relationships between girls/women and NIT's in institutional contexts- girls/women as unwitting dupe of patriarchal machinery, as de-skilled (Apple & Jungck, 1990) by NIT's, as technologically inept and timid, as victim of male-identified technologies, and so on. To date, however, within the domain of educational uses of NIT' s, it is significant that few emancipatory or transformative accounts have been generated-this despite the fact that extant problems of gender-based inequities are both significant and ongoing (Becker, 1986; Bryson, 1993; Collis, Kass, & Kieran, 1989; Griffin & Cole, 1987; Sutton, 1991). Ê

The design of the partnerships/study outlined here; then, is premised on the necessarily interrelated goals of (a) generating alternative, ethical, and emancipatory accounts of relationships between girls/women and NIT's (Benston, 1985), and (b) creating active and dynamic links between non-school-based "communities of practice" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and school-based contexts of educational theorizing and practice. Ê

Since our focus is on social contexts, or "communities of practice," our aim is not to participate in the production of accounts of female "heroines" who have managed, in spite of it all, to succeed (in traditional terms), but to identify and describe sociocultural environments conducive to the equitable distribution of opportunities for the development of competence. By taking a sociocultural approach (see Allen, 1992; Griffin & Cole, 198?; Hacker, 1989; or Pea, 1991), we hope this project may contribute to a better understanding of collective, (scaffolded, relational, interactive) rather than individual, attainments, As we have argued elsewhere (Bryson, 1993; Bryson & de Castell, 1993a), from several different fronts, the rapidly expanding fields of "gender equity" and "new educational technologies" are ones which, though fraught with perils and a great deal of "hype," must be the site of productive and reflexive theorizing and practice, or "praxis," if there are truly to be significantly new possibilities offered by these new tools. Studying environments designed specifically to produce equitable outcomes in relation to girls/women's uses of NIT's will, we anticipate, provide invaluable working models of gender equity in practice, models which may be useful to other practitioners working towards inclusion in this currently most highly valued educational domain. What follows next are extended excerpts from a research proposal which has been funded for the next three years. While being conscious of the stylistic abruptness of this next section, we have nevertheless elected to reproduce (in part) the original proposal, because what we can do and how we can do it became, from the outset, significantly shaped and constrained by this highly specific genre of professional discourse. This discourse matters greatly in shaping how our initial theoretical understandings can be legitimately "operationalized" into research practice/s. Ê


Learning to Make a Difference

(Excerpts)
Ê Methodology Ê

Research Plan. The project described here involves two distinct, but interrelated, research strands. The first strand consists of case studies of social relations, everyday practices, and patterns of access and usage of NIT's by girls/women in both a school-based (SB) and various non-school-based (NSB) research sites. The second strand, envisaged as an "action research" intervention project, consists of the implementation and evaluation in the SB site of a curriculum which (a) restructures and re-tools the school-based environment to more closely resemble NSB sites in which women are achieving high levels of expertise with NIT's, (b) provides opportunities for the development of technological skills, and (c) cultivates collaborative, "apprentice," relationships between members of the NSB organizations and both teachers and students in a secondary school. Ê

Methodological Approach/Procedures. The primary methodologies utilized here are qualitative in nature, and include specific "case study," and related collaborative "ethnomethodological" approaches to data collection and analysis (de Castell & Haig-Brown, 1993; Heath, 1983; Goodson & Mangan, 1991; Guba & UncoIn, 1981; Lather, 1991; Oakley, 1981; Smith, 1987; and Weller, 1988). That is to say, both SB and NSB research sites are viewed here as constituting microcosms (units of analysis for case studies) of ongoing attempts to explicate and implement equitable policies and practices with respect to encouraging "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) by girls/women in uses of NIT's in various communities of practice. A subset of NSB participants and SB teachers and students in the research sites are the direct focus of data-collection activities, making use, primarily, of case study methods. These methods include: survey measures, multiple singly-administered and group-administered structured and unstructured inter-views, document collection and analysis, and direct observations. In addition, comparative analysis of transcribed "instructional" and "non-instructional" discourse in SB and NSB settings are being conducted which focus on microgenetic (wertsch,'1991) change. Ê

Research Sites. In this project, the school-based site (secured during the partnership development process) is a secondary school (located in the B. C. Lower Mainland area) where gender equity with respect to NIT's has already been established as a "community of practice" priority. The school is a "typical-tech" school serving a primarily working and middle class, racially and ethnica1Iy diverse population. The four non-school-based sites (secured during the partnership development process) are organizations: (a) initiated and ongoingly administered by Canadian women working with NIT's, (b)whose mandate focuses on women's participation in technological innovation and/or the production of media, and (c) whose objectives are to (1) provide support (i.e., technical training, access to networks, and the like) for women working with NITâs and (2) recognize, promote, and celebrate the contributions of Canadian women working with NIT's. NSB site A is a womenâs film production studio; NSB site B is a multimedia, video and television production centre; NSB site C is a resource center for girls/women in science and technology; NSB site D is a resource center for women in trades and technologies. Ê


Year I Goal: SB and NSB workplace profiles: Ecological "base-line" data collection.

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NSB sites: Organization-based documents are being collected pertaining to: (a) initial intents in establishing the organization, (b) site policies re. equity, and (c) previous/current networks, programs development activities. Structured and follow-up interviews are being conducted with individuals and small groups. Workplace uses of NIT's are being observed using video-based, and other ethnographic methods. Ê

SB site: District-based and school-based documents are being collected pertaining to: (a) district and school policies re. educational equity, and (b) district and school curricula re. technology education. All of the Grade 9 students and all of the Grade 11 students registered in courses in either Technology Education or Media Arts are completing a questionnaire (adapted from Collis, Kiss, & Kieran, 1989) which focuses on the following three areas: (1) students' conceptions of the field (media arts or technology education), (2) their understanding of/knowledge about/skill in relation to technologies in the field, and (3) their own personal interests/perceived opportunities in relation to NIT's. Interviews will be conducted with a sample of teachers, administrators, building project staff, and students (protocol adapted from Bryson, 1993 and Gaskell, McLaren, Oberg, & Eyre, 1992). Follow-up individual and small group interviews will be conducted with: (a) all of the teachers directly involved in media arts and technology education, and (b) all of the female students from two classes selected from these teachers' courses. Interviews will also be conducted with female students in "pods" of two or more participants, self-selected for particular instances of classroom-based work. Our intent here is to identify an educationally "functional" unit of analysis, rather thin relying entirely on individually-based data. Teacher and female student participants in the SB site will be linked to the NSB sites via e-mail Ê


Year 2 Goal: Building networks and supports

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During the summer term, within the context of a university-based inservice/implementation course, teachers from the SB site and the researchers will collaboratively create a four week curricular unit for Grade 10 and Grade 12 students focusing on women's participation in technological innovation in either video/film production or applied sciences, with a significant component of "hands on" NIT skill development. Teachers in media arts and in technology education will be provided with resource materials from Vancouver Women in Film and Video (VWIFV). Studio 'D'/NFB, and the Banff Center- New Media Research (on women's participation in the production of video/film); and in the second case, from the Women Inventors Project, Women in Trades, Technology and Operations (W.I.T.T.), the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST), and the Project for Women in Engineering (on women's participation in technological innovation). Ê

Year 2 of the project consists in the implementation of the above described curricular intervention, and observations of the process and products of its classroom implementation. A sub-set of Grade 10 female students in the school will collaboratively produce multimedia compositions (Pea, 1991) characterizing uses of NITâs by Grade 12 female students within their own school context. Observations in the SB site will consist in, for each class selected, twelve 60 minute classroom observations in media arts and technology education respectively. These sessions will be videotaped transcriptions made for subsequent (discourse) analysis. Of the twelve sessions observed/class, eight will involve the target curriculum and four will involve the regular curriculum. Follow-up interviews will be conducted with SB and NSB case study participants. Teachers will, in addition. be interviewed about their adaptation, use and evaluation of the curriculum component, e-mail correspondence and portfolios of student products will be collected as part of ongoing research activities. Ê

Year 3 Goal: Bridging communities of practice: Apprenticeships and workplace in/sights

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In the SB site, Grade 11 female students (a sub-set will have been involved with the project from its inception) will draw on both SB technological skill-development (delivered through the target curriculum and supported/scaffolded by NSB participants/mentors) and their experience as "ethnographers of learning" (Heath, 1983) (developed in their Year 2 video-ethnography), to produce a multimedia investigative report on one of the NSB communities of practice, in order to produce profiles of workplaces that involve and support women in the creation/production/use of NIT's. This work would constitute an alternative career exploration program within the curricular context of the technology education program and/or career-preparation/work experience courses, and would be supervised by collaborating teachers with assistance (advice, technical expertise, access to resources) from NSB partners and the university-based research team. Collaborating SB teachers will, contemporaneously. produce in-service resource materials intended for (a) conference presentations and (b) district-wide inservice workshops, detailing their roles in the development of gender-equitable educational practices and contexts in relation to NIT's, from the conception of the project in year one, to its subsequent execution in restructuring their own classroom practice.

Ê Summary of resultant data-base: The forgoing procedures will generate a data-base consisting of four kinds of information, from both SB and NSB sites, as follows: (1) documentary analyses identifying and relating organizational policy re. girls/women and NIT's, subsequent curricular/instructional/organizational design foci, and ongoing (a) evaluation and projects/programs, as these relate to the specific goal of technological accessibility, equalizing access and taking "difference" explicitly into account; (2) questionnaire data from every individual teacher and student involved in the SB site (about conceptions, competencies and opportunities perceived in relation to uses of NIT's) as well as from each participant from the NSB sites; (3) in-depth interview data about gender-differentiated relations to technology, and how a school/organization committed to gender equitable practices is perceived by students, teachers, and NSB participants to (re)configure these relations; and (4) implementation data based on (a) in-person observation, (b) comparative discourse analysis of audio and transcribed technological skills instructional sessions in both SB and NSB sites, and (c) compilation and analysis over the three year period of participating and non-participating students' (Male/Female) course selections and reported career goals, levels and kinds of mail correspondence, actual usage of NIT's, portfolios of students' work, and videographic evidence of interaction styles/patterns, across both regular and target curriculum subject matters. The goal of data analysis activities will be to construct profiles of both NSB and SB sites with respect to key components in the articulation of gender-equitable practices and contexts in relation to supporting, recognizing, and refashioning productive uses of NIT's by girls/women. Ê


Our Research Partners

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New Media Research, The Banff Centre for the Arts (NMR), Partner. NMR focuses on video, multimedia, e-mail,/telecommunications, virtual environments, MixNet digital audio, and industry training. In 1995/1996, NMR presents "The Architecture of Work: Architect or Bee," which will provide a diverse array of workplace applications of NIT's. The primary role of the NMR component of the Banff Centre is to provide resources and access to expertise for the e-mail strand of the project Ê

Richmond School District (RSD), Partner. The primary role of the Richmond School District is to provide access to expertise and facilities in relation to the development, implementation, and administration of inclusive high-tech secondary schools. Ê

Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST), Partner. SCWIST (which originated, in 1981, on the front porch of the late Margaret Lowe Benston) is an information and resource centre which houses a comprehensive archive of research papers and curriculum materials in the domains of science/technology and gender equity. In addition, SCWIST has set up a speakers' bureau of women in science/technology, and sponsored related networks, projects, programs and conferences. The primary role of SCWIST is to provide resources and access to networks for the school-based research. Ê

Studio D, The National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Partner. Studio D is a women's film-making unit within the NFB, whose primary objectives are to support women of diverse backgrounds in the production and distribution of films that address women's experiences. Ê

Forsman and Associates, Partner. Forsman and Associates is a private sector educational consulting firm, the aim of which is to create and implement mentoring models of equitable curricula that link female secondary students with female "experts" who work within high-tech corporate environments. Drawing on their "Knowledge Architecture" model, in particular, developed collaboratively with John Willinsky, Director, Centre for Curriculum and Instruction, University of British Columbia, Forsman and Associates' researchers/staff are contributing expertise, staff time, and access to the school-based site and NSB mentors in order to facilitate the development of technological competencies by both teachers and students in the school-based research site. Ê


Anticipating Outcomes...

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Anthropologist Paul Rabinow wrote that: "We know that one of the most common tactics of an elite group is to refuse to discus label as vulgar or unintere5tingssues that are uncomfortable for them" (1986, p. 253). With this caveat in mind, we begin by relating one of our first, composed after our first school-based partner proved less than willing to engage with the task at-hand.

"All I can tell you is, you get to know after as many years as I've spent in this job. A certain taste...A certain smell...I don't know what it is about you people...I can't put my finger on it...Something just isn't quite right." Those were the words spoken by the superintendent of a large British Columbia school district in a red-faced, angrily-delivered monologue about our unsuitability as researchers. Our new-found unsuitability, that is to say, despite the fact that (1) we had already been granted permission to conduct research on gender, educational equity, and uses new technologies in a school in his district, (2) had been awarded a large research grant, and (3) had been meeting with the district research committee for several months leading up to this, our final, and most inauspicious meeting. And how unexpected this all was... unexpected and yet so familiar. During the first meeting, the superintendent had asked us point blank, "So are you here to court us?" "Absolutely." We had countered with studied firmness, not really knowing, inside, what to say. The sheer implausibility of it all. Two dikes wearing matching Gap pants, Do Martins and jackets "courting" the superintendent and his henchman, the Director of Instruction. After our first meeting they were jubilant practically gushing about how well we had done... that we were in a league with IBM and a select few others who had been able to withstand their intense scrutiny and tough questioning. They "loved" our research proposal and were ready to sign on the dotted line. We had to shake all of their respective hands. We had to accept (one copy each) all of their respective business cards. We were in.

Ê Or so we had thought. Our strategy had been quite clever-we imagined at the time. We proposed to study "what works" in relation to girls and new technologies by taking our cue from communities of practice where gender was being articulated with greater agency and equity than was typically the case in school contexts. We had plenty of funding, and we were set to go. But the superintendent couldn't put his finger on it, so were out Ê Ê


"Give us the Tools and We'll Finish the Job"

Ê
Technological competence is simply the most prominent arena for the creation, and enforcement of female deficit, but is by no means the only one. In groundbreaking work on the psychological and physical violence experienced by her research subjects, a group of immigrant women enrolled in an adult basic literacy course, Kathleen Rockilill (1987)laid bare the way in which literacy comes to be for these adult female students, both "threat and desire"-however much these women may long for an education, their desires must be tempered by a clear recognition of the seriousness of the threat such education creates for their male partners, and therefore, physically, materially, for them. What many women have to accept and find a way to live with, is the everyday fact that the prohibition of female competence will be, one way or another, inscribed on their own bodies. Jennifer Horsinan's (1990) study of 23 Nova Scotian women enrolled in adult basic education literacy courses documents the vast array of threats and punishments that undermined these women's competence in the first place, and which continues to hold them hostage, as they dare to hope for "something in mind besides the everyday." Young women who challenge the gender order in the computer lab are met with jeers intimidation and undermining, and physical abuse, which successions of educational researchers have somehow, mirobile dictu, managed to transform into a specifically female "trouble": "computer-anxiety."

But for too many generations of girls and women, what has been ill-understood is that learning, learning to use a computer, for example, is often the least of the difficulties with which they must contend. If all the activity called for were a mere mastery of technical skills, how different would be the stories we could tell today! Ê

Far more critical to understanding such learning situations appears to be the recognition that social relations frame epistemology, they do not derive from it That said, the "learning task" in situations where high status knowledges are the medium of exchange, demands first and foremost an acquiescence to a highly stratified, hierarchical and punitively enforced set of social relations, enforced as much by classroom teachers, female students and by parents both male and female as by the particular male students who bodily enact these prohibitions, these forms of violence and these punishments. As many women students will attest, the price of competence is just too high, and the risks of success far too great, to permit oneself to "master" gender-anomalous learning tasks (see Haug, 1987 and this not with standing a host of new policies, programs, initiatives addressing female "phobias" of new and varied kinds. Where does this all get us? Ê

Will we be permitted, will it be possible for us to actually look at how and why women and girls are actively being Prevented from developing competence? Can we really say that there has been for too many years now an active war being waged on women? And can we then take into our own hands the very weaponry that has been deployed against us, and teach each other, guerrilla-fashion, its uses? None else will do this for us, (Chafetz, 1990) and its high time we acknowledged that brutal fact and explicitly acknowledged that this is because to develop competence at all, but most especially to develop competence in relation to high-status technologies, is to violate the unwritten law of gender. Ê

Educational research and writing has so far largely constructed difference, or "alterity" as, at best, the object of study. In pursuit of an explicitly radical praxis-a repositioning from a hegemonic center to a far-less-well understood location "outside the frame" (de 1-auretis, 1987) we are setting out in this research project to consider the inversions effected when "other-ness" occupies a subject-position in educational accounts and accounting practices. Disciplinary practices which deny the significance of embodied identity for speaking subjects in educational research secure the centrality of hegemonic voices. This normative subject-positioning becomes visible, we maintain, only to the extent that it can be challenged by "others" researching and writing AS others, and not "about" them. Its no longer enough (if it ever was) to "make room" for the participation within traditional structures and practice--of education's traditional "Others." The difference which makes a difference here is the difference in practice between "diversity management" the inclusion of marginal subject-positions (Mohanty, 1990) and radical in/version of the creation of new centers. And so in this project we have asked ourselves at every point, "What might educational research and scholarship colonized by 'marginalized' subjects look like? What would it look like, a research program formulated from the standpoint of female competence as normative, as 'standard' (Williams, 1976)? What key concepts would change, and how? What practices? What questions would disappear, and what new ones appear?" And how do we tell the story this work? Ê


An Ethics Of Narration?

Ê
This is not a dream of a common language, but a powerful infidel heteroglossia It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the Super-savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.... It is about being in the belly of the monster and looking for another story to tell... This is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction (Haraway, 1991, pp. 181-184) Ê

Ê "0 my Delectable One, relate me the tale which you promised me and quote striking examples of the excellences and shortcomings, the cunning and stupidity..." So begins one request for narration made to Sheherezade cited in a 9th century manuscript fragment from the 1001 Arabian Nights. This kind of request, to relate a promised tale replete with excellences and shortcomings. cunning and stupidity, seems precisely the rhetorical frame for academically respectable research-narratives. But let us look more closely at narratives of this kind, that is to say, preservationist narratives, and consider the purposes for which they are told. Let us consider this species of narrative practice as a strategy of deferral. This is the Sheherezade model, a story whose purpose is to defer attention away from the plight of the storyteller in order to buy time, in this-instructive-case, for the rest of the women of the city, imperiled by the decision of the Sultan to murder each morning his new "wife" of the night before. Ê

As the story goes: The virtuous Sheherezade explained her strategic use of story-telling to her father, the Vizier, as follows: Ê

Father, I have a design to stop the course of the barbarity which the Sultan exercises upon the families of this city. I know the risk I run; but that does not frighten me. If I perish, my death will be glorious; and if I succeed, I shall do the women of my country an important piece of service. Ê

To appease, to entertain, preservationist narratives require no displacement, no disruption, no shifting of boundaries. These are maximally coherent accounts, narratives of trials overcome, of temptations resisted, or of falls and redemptions, whose predictable fixed characters and strictly linear representation of time and event structures offer no threat to their hearers, but only pleasure, only entertainment, only the gratification of hearing just what one wants to hear, and of being, in the end, quite untouched by the telling. Ê

Academically legitimate representations of "marginality," as these have been produced, made most widely available, and taken up by other scholars, are situated almost entirely at the "sheherezade" end of the narrative continuum: they tell stories of "good news," stories of borders crossed and evermore crossable, identities transcended, dialogues initiated and yet-to-come, stories told and listened to, consciousnesses enlarged and even more greatly to be enlarged as we "progress" into an ever-more 'inclusive' educational ......... But these are not the accounts of the marginalized-immigrants, queers, students of color, the differently abled, these good news stories rendered in the voices of the benevolent "normal"-the white anti-racist educator for whom promises of "conversation across differences" is not-mirabile dictu-just a bare-faced lie,. .. compassionate, unidentified/able storytellers whose tales require of their readers only consumption, they issue no challenges, threaten no instabilities, create no conflicts, no confrontations.

Ê We can tell already, after just six months at this project, that despite our best intentions, we are finding ourselves at the "de Sade" end of the "Sheherezade/de Sade Continuum." We have found thus far that: Ê

(1) From the very start, this research has proven to be a bit like ambulance-chasing: no sooner do we identify an organization that is proactive in pursing gender equity in relation to technology, than it is going out of business, having its funding cut, undergoing reorganization, losing its previous administration. ...This work is too much like catching snowflakes-nothing, almost nothing we can hold on to. Ê

(2) In the school context, following hard on the heels of the proclamation (whether heartily or reluctantly enunciated) of "equity" as a central "community value," we have in every case encountered a virtually unanimous refusal to collaborate in any way with the project, even to the extent of refusing workshops, information, seminars, even just to fill in a questionnaire to explain WHY this work holds no interest' with the exception of fewer than a handful of individual teachers, who nevertheless give voice to fear that they will find themselves on a "feminist bandwagon," that they will be actively harassed by colleagues for whom any gender equity initiative is anathema. Ê

(3) Students themselves, and girls as much as boys. emphatically resist perceptions that gender equity is an issue at all, whether in relation to technology or any other concern, and, much like their teachers, most of them refuse participation in any project they see as "feminist." Ê

Finally (4) everyone, from students and teachers to school administrators and academicians, respond to this kind of work with requests for more on "the positive side," reminding us that while there's still much to be done, we've "cornea long way Baby," and couldn't we please talk more about that What gets overlooked here is that this is precisely what we set out expressly to do. And the fact is that so far, even under the best of conditions, we're not finding what we're looking for. So where, we ask in turn, are these happy tales to come from? We find our own project-the transcripts videotapes and fieldnotes and interviews-ominously mirroring Judith Whyte's (1986, Girls into Science and Technology: The Story of a Project) ill-fated and soul-destroying research, and we are left, as she was, documenting that failure, and thereby unwillingly enacting a species of research we call, ironically, "queer ethnography" in which the researcher documents in carefully maintained fieldnotes the process of being kicked "from pillar to post," an ethnographic account modeled on a classical "misadventure novel of everyday life" (after Bakhtin, 1981). Ê

What we seek, instead, is a kind of powerful telling, a species of written account which, just like the Sadeian text forces the reader to participate in the monstrous condition or practice described. Surely there must be a way of telling that requires listeners to acknowledge what is everywhere confronting research aimed at altering ingrained structures of educational inequality-the incredible destructiveness of the institutional enforcement of gender-normativity in educational contexts. Ê

Under such circumstances as we have described, and with such desires as we have acknowledged, we want to invite discussion of how research aimed at the transformation of participatory structures might be possible. Ê

Notes Ê

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Mary Bryson, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mail, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6R 1Z4.

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