Girls’ relationship to academic success: seminar reflections
On 24th November Cardiff University hosted the first ESRC- and GEAfunded seminar in the Girls in Education 3-16: continuing concerns, new
agendas series. The grantholders for this series are Carrie Paechter
(Goldsmiths), Carolyn Jackson (Lancaster) and Emma Renold (Cardiff).
Our first seminar was dedicated to exploring ‘Girls’ Relationship to
Academic Success’, one of two on the theme of ‘Girls and Academic
Achievement’ (the second is on 22/11/06). Here, we were particularly
interested in what it means for girls to desire, experience and perform
‘success’. Each of the presentations spoke to these themes in compelling
ways:
Girls from 3 to 16: some thoughts from Project 4-21 and related research
(Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University)
The impossibility of girls’ educational ‘success’: entanglements of
gender, ‘race’, class and sexuality in the production and problematisation
of educational femininities
(Louise Archer, Kings College, University of London)
Exploring girls’ relationship to and with achievement: linking
assessment, learning, mind and gender
(Jannette Elwood, Queens University, Belfast)
Flirting and Working? The commensurability of popular desirable hetero
femininity and institutionally acceptable student-hood
(Deborah Youdell, Institute of Education, London)
Valerie opened the session discussing her research with Helen Lucey and June
Melody, published in ‘Growing up Girl’ (Palgrave, 2003). She explored the
intersections of class and achievement over time in relation to ‘what counts as
success’ for working and middle-class girls. She then went on to share her current
research into young girls and video-gaming. A central issue here was to theorize the
ways in which girls are expected to perform and manage traditional femininities
alongside the performance of certain aspects of masculinity. I thought there were
some real parallels here between the masculinisation of some aspects of ‘success’ (e.g
the ‘clever’ knowing pupil) and the masculinisation of video gaming culture (e.g.
killing and violence). The parallels between the ways in which girls were
simultaneously wanting and not wanting to ‘kill’ and the ways in which girls
simultaneously want to achieve and not (be seen to) achieve were also striking. Much
of the discussion focused upon the struggle of inhabiting deeply difficult and
contradictory spaces (social and psychic) and the impossibility of an autonomous
female subject.
Continuing the theme of the impossibility and fragility of success was Louise
Archer’s paper which explored the ‘successful female pupil’ as a ‘desired yet refused’
subject position, even for high-achieving girls already performing ‘educational
success’. Drawing on four different qualitative research studies with Year 10/11
pupils, Louise identified four distinct discourses of girls’ relationship to academic
success:
 ‘Traditional’ academic success (high achieving girls);
 ‘Good enough’ success
 ‘Value added’ success
 ‘Desired-denied’ and ‘potential’ success
Central to Louise’s paper was the ways in which ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality
intersected and “played a central role in the denial of success and the destabilisation
of girls’ ability to inhabit a prolonged and/or ‘authentic’ identity of ‘success’. A key
finding that provoked much discussion was the ways in which ‘success’ needs to be
extracted from a narrow policy discourse, in which academic achievement=success,
and re-theorized to take into account the complex and contradictory subjective
experiences of doing, feeling and owning success. As Louise argued in her paper:
“Success is never consistent, unchallenged or unitary (neither for individual girls, nor
for different groups”. Multiple inequalities abound and permeate each girls’
performance of success, especially those from working-class and minority ethnic
backgrounds. For these girls, the transformation required to not only inhabit but
maintain success is often impossible when they are “always already judged to have
the wrong bodies, behaviours and identities”. Indeed, two strong discourses that I felt
were present throughout the case studies was a discourse of excess (too heterosexual,
too loud, too nice, too quiet) and a discourse of lack (not clever enough, not
(hetero)sexual enough, not confident enough, but also the compulsory losses incurred
on the road to success).
Disrupting further the commensurability of performing an ‘acceptable’ heterofemininity and ‘successful’ academic identity, Deborah Youdell shared analytical
insights from her forthcoming book, “Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves” (2006,
Klewer Academic Publishers) and like the papers above problematised ‘success’ as a
‘positional good’. From a close reading of students’ interaction in a science lesson,
Deborah explored “how the discourses that inform what it is to be a student (good or
otherwise), a learner (ideal or otherwise) and a girl (desirably hetero-feminine or
otherwise)” intersect and create or constrain different gendered learner subject
positions. Her analysis of a micro-social moment (the throwing of an eraser) captured
how dominant romantic hetero-sexual practices (‘flirting’) and dominant
student/learner practices (‘working’) intersect and simultaneously confirm and subvert
‘acceptable’ student performances. Deborah’s paper opened up a discussion on the
propping up and servicing of dominant heterosexual masculinities and male learner
identities, the feminisation of learner identities and the productivity of thinking
theoretically and then translating academic knowledge to practice.
Unfortunately due to severe weather conditions, Jannette Elwood couldn’t make it to
Cardiff. A version of her paper, however, will be available in the forthcoming Sage
Handbook of Gender and Education, edited by Christine Skelton, Becky Francis and
Lisa Smulyan, to be published by Sage in 2007.
Key themes which emerged from the day were:
 The issue of problematising the feminisation of success (not simple girlsuccess stories)
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Success and achievement as an interstitial, ambivalent and uncomfortable
space
Absence of pleasure in girls’ discourses of ‘success’ and achievement
Academic confidence as a masculine preserve?
Discourses of excess, lack and loss in negotiation of ‘success’ and
achievement
Differential impact of success upon girls
Emma Renold, School of Social Sciences, University of Cardiff