Shocking word students using towards female teachers
An “unsurprising” survey has revealed the disturbing comments teachers are being forced to deal with in the classroom from male students.
An “unsurprising” survey has revealed the disturbing comments teachers are being forced to deal with in the classroom.
Dr Samantha Schulz, a senior sociologist of education at the University of Adelaide, put the anonymous survey forward in the Teachers of Adelaide Facebook group.
The group holds teachers across primary and high school, from co-ed to single sex, private and public schools. More than 130 people responded with more than 80 per cent of those being women.
Researchers found male students were saying things like “make me a sandwich”, “women lie about rape”, “the pay gap doesn’t exist” and one even revealed a student had called women “rapeable”.
Other teachers reported that students would invade their personal space or rush them down the stairs and, if called out, said they’re just being friendly.
“But I know these behaviours are intended to be intimidating and to make me uneasy. I ï¬nd it disconcerting that by the age of 14 or 15 they know how to use their presence to menace […] if they are behaving like this with me, what are they like with young women their own age or the women in their families,” one teacher responded.
Some even revealed they are contemplating leaving the profession as a result of this national crisis.
Dr Schulz said this is impacting primary school environments but has become rife in high schools in South Australia, adding she wasn’t surprised by these responses from teachers as it had kept coming up in other projects she was working on with teachers.
“There’s quite a lot of hyper sexualised, aggressive, misogynistic language that is finding its way into the everyday lexicon of young people,” Dr Schluz told news.com.au.
“Quite disturbing things describing female teachers or girls in terms of whether they are ‘rapeable’ and reducing girls and women to objects.
“That kind of language has been somewhat normalised particularly as a result of young people’s engagements with divisive attitudes that are rife and unregulated online.”
Dr Schulz emphasised that boys and young men aren’t the problem and that they need “nourishing and responsive learning environments wherever they go to school. They also need counterparts to the information they see online about women.
“It’s quite clear to see the influence of the likes of Andrew Tate because there’s common patterns that surfaces the idea that men and boys are victims of feminist gains, that the gender binary is a natural order, and that expressions of what we might call hyper masculinity need to be performed in order to restore that natural order,” she said.
“That comes up time and again, and that is really specific to the kind of messaging that he is putting out.”
She said there are three things that need to be done in order to help combat this gross behaviour in the classroom — a unified system of reporting to floodlight the scope of the issue, normalise gender equity education and digital literacy education.
She reiterated that boys and young men shouldn’t be blamed but need nourishing learning environments to combat this as well as counterpoints to what they are seeing online.
“I don’t want to add more pressure to teachers’ workload and they need to be valued and supported. This implicates initial teacher education, but it also implicates policymakers, because we need schooling to be a space where this kind of education has a time where teachers have a support in order to engage in this kind of knowledge production within the context of schools. It can’t just be another thing on the teachers plate,” she said.
She said that parents and caregivers can help teachers by keeping conversations open and not blaming educators, as they are already under a lot of pressure.
“I think education is absolutely pivotal. Education is a core cultural experience for virtually all young people,” she said.
“And by the time they’ve left school, when they’re 18 years of age, we’ve already got 18 years of gendered messaging that shapes young people’s interaction on tendencies as they move into adulthood and that then shapes the world that they go on to co create.
“So schooling has to be part of the solution. And we do have the solutions.”
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