‘After’ Gender: An Other Genre

I wish to add what I hope is a different perspective on the issue of the Ministry of Education’s planned experiment to convert some co-ed to single-sex schools. On the same day that Dr. Raymond Hackett’s Schooling and Gendermania appeared in the Express (16/03/10), I presented a lunchtime seminar at the UWI School of Education entitled “After Gender towards a human genre in mathematics education (research).” From the feedback received from the small audience it was well received. Given the concerns raised since by Prof. Spence in Co-ed or single-sex schools (18/03/10, 25/03/10), Dr. David Subran (23/03/10) and Kevin Baldeosingh (28/03/10), citizens, educators, and public intellectuals I have great respect and admiration for, and other interested stakeholders (eg. Sara Chookolingo, Edmund Gall (knowtnt.com)) I have decided to share some of the main ideas of that presentation. At times I restrict my examples to mathematics education, my disciplinary home, but invite you to draw parallels if and where appropriate.

I opened the presentation with several stories one of which involved an autobiographical fragment from one of my former B.Ed students, a teacher in Trinidad, who wrote, “For the past thirty years or so I have been engaged in the discipline of numbers. My first introduction was to arithmetic and the first resources I interacted with were a copybook, a pencil and a ruler. The ruler was not for measuring…By the time I had gotten accustomed to doing mathematics I had learnt to associate it with dread.” Another more recent story involved my three year old cousin Janie who having started pre-school recently was angry and sad at home after school one day. Her mother, also a teacher, investigated and learnt that her child’s unhappy mood stemmed from at least two sources. The first, a pedagogical decision by a teacher to have students make, over a hundred times, the numerals 1 and 0, justifying her decision when questioned in terms of preparation for SEA (an event at least 7 years in the future). Janie relayed her dissatisfaction with this saying “Is just too many square mummy…I get tired.” The second source of her unhappiness and sour mood stemmed from the fact that her best friend had not come to school that day. Sometimes the presence of good company can make even tiresome, tedious work, even among professional mathematicians, more tolerable.

Next I moved to an examination of some international newspaper headlines, the currency of our globalized “attention economy,” concerning mathematics and gender which included, for example, “Failing at fairness: How schools cheat girls” a 2009 piece by Wachira Kigotho out of Sub-Saharan Africa and “Girls make boys worse at English, says new study” also published in 2009, by Jessica Shepherd in the UK. I noted that gender problems are similarly framed but differentially oriented around the globe. For example, in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, the ‘gender’ problem in education is currently dominated by discussions of the “crises of masculinity”—(under)achievement, abuse, apathy, and anomie—and the concomitant consequences which include concerns with the social, political and economic uncertainties wrought by the marginalization of men, namely, increases in ‘domestic’ violence, and the political and the economic instability that has accompanied male militarization and militantism – discourses which have taken a not unexpected and important, ethnic and socioeconomic turns in exploring the complex intersectionalities among these (and other) variables with gender. Indeed in the Caribbean some researchers wonder whether or not the Caribbean male is endangered. This type of research, in my opinion, enacts/constructs “masculinity as pathology” – a disease to be feared and cured.

In North America and the UK however, gender research in education seems to be continuously framed as a power-struggle and zero-sum game between the sexes. There seems to be at times a push to ‘prove’ that females, as a population, are mathematically inferior to males, despite research which refutes this claim. There appears to be an equal push however to ‘prove’ that boys are underachieving in the arts and literature portion of the curriculum. This practice of continuing to attribute such gendered descriptions to subject areas (math/science/technology as masculine, the arts/humanities/ literature as feminine) is extremely limiting and intensely problematic. The practice seems to act to reinforce/reinscribe a perception and stereotype of biologically based sex-differences in ability that can be located in individual bodies which must be categorized as belonging to one or another sex. Such stereotypes can, for both sexes and learners of all abilities and at all stages of development, affect test-performance negatively. Furthermore, given that many recent research reports have concluded that at present there remain greater disparities within gender or between students of different SES groups one wonders, who benefits, who is disadvantaged and how by creating and continuing to maintain this extremely narrow focus on dichotomized ‘gender’ (read sex) differences?
At this point I outlined my argument based on two premises and implications. The first being that gender (like mathematics, education, and culture) is transphenomenal and therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach to its study. In addition there is a coloniality of gender which requires a decolonial attitude. The second part of the argument was based on Jamaican, Stanford Professor emeritus, Sylvia Wynter’s “After Man” project, which I framed as a decolonizing transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying Gender in Education in T&T & the Caribbean. However, this requires an initial (and perhaps temporary) reframing of Gender problems as problems in Genre if any progress is to be made in changing the script which based on Hackett, Spence, Subran, Chookolingo, and Baldeosingh’s articles is unfolding as expected and is likely to be replaced by the next crisis in education or political revelation. I develop these more fully in due course.

Education, Transphenomenality and Complexity

A transphenomenon is a form (structure) or happening (phenomenon) that emerges and can only be understood by simultaneously considering (other relevant) forms and happenings across multiple levels of organization (see accompanying graphic © Steven Khan). An example is obesity where research evidence from across domains implicates genetic, biological, personal, social and cultural factors in the visible phenomenon. Education is transphenomenal with a big T. Some educational transphenomena include knowing (consciousness, comprehension, etc.), learning (memory, intelligence, creativity etc.), teaching (errors, pedagogy, burnout, etc.), leadership, management (policy making) and ethics/wisdom/holiness. In addition phenomena like violence, indiscipline, corruption, motivation, and performance are also transphenomenal. This is just another way of saying that education is a Complex phenomenon (with a Big C) and complexity thinking is a transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying this type of system.

There are many ways to talk about complex systems. The easiest way perhaps is to contrast them with simple systems and complicated systems. Both simple and complicated systems are fully deterministic, another way is to say they are well-defined. Simple systems have few parts (a pendulum) while complicated systems have many parts, (think of a watch). However in both cases once the initial conditions are known and the mechanism can be described any future position can be determined to a given degree of accuracy, i.e. they are predictable once certain criteria are met. Such systems are in theory, fully knowable.

Another feature of such systems is that they can be dismantled into their components and, if put back together correctly, work in exactly the same way. Complex systems however have many parts but they also possess properties which are emergent. These are properties that emerge as a result of the interactions of the many parts/agents through iterative (feedback) processes and which could not have been predicted with absolute certainty beforehand based on our current understanding of these systems. For example, it has recently been proposed that gravity is an emergent phenomena from quantum information. Emergent properties are properties of the system as a whole and of no individual agent/part. Such systems show evolutionary dynamics, sensitivity to initial conditions (the butterfly effect) are resistant to some types of change (the bureaucratic effect) and long-term prediction is not possible. Such systems can be taken apart, but there are no guarantees that if the parts are re-assembled the whole will function as before since the initial conditions that seeded the original system are usually unknown. Ecosystems demonstrate this idea beautifully – they are easily dismantled, the complex networks of relationships that sustain it destroyed, but they cannot be as easily put back together. Complex systems cannot be built like a factory but must be allowed to grow and adapt.

Complexity thinking has, for at least two decades, been an integral part of the scientific, business and economic landscapes. The type of thinking that it entails, thinking transphenomenally, has only recently begun to enter into and impact educational discourses. Evidence of the importance of this type of thinking for re-thinking education in the 21st century is the fact that the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference’s theme this year is “Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World” and the annual Complexity Science and Educational Research (CSER) conference will be hosted for the first time outside of North America, in China, a country that is not only revolutionizing its approach to business and industry, but also to education, later this year. Both of these meetings recognize the potential and take serious the implications for practice and policy that follow from a discursive reframing of the language of education transphenomenally.

Transphenomena require more than a mere interdisciplinary approach to their study. They often insist upon an emergent eclecticism or transdisciplinary approach as for example that advocated for and enacted in the scholarship of Jamaican born Cultural Studies theorist, Stuart Hall, who writes, “[w]e do live in a period when many of the existing paradigms established and developed within the traditional intellectual disciplines either no longer in themselves adequately correspond to the problems that we have to resolve, or require supplementing from other disciplines with which they have not historically been directly been connected.” Indeed many new domains of inquiry are being created by creatively fusing approaches drawn from or inspired by medical, psychological, sociological, artistic, performative, anthropological, biological, ecological and spiritual/theological discourses. Among complexivists multiple passageways have been and are being created between the cultures of science and the humanities.

Mathematics is Transphenomenal
Adopting this transphenomenal attitude, I defined (formal) mathematics as “a biologically constrained human activity, a deeply affective legacy of human culture that is socially mediated, enacting material, performative and discursive regimes of understanding and which is historically evolved/evolving in earth’s unique environment. This conception is far removed from neat and tidy perfect Platonic and Formalist philosophies of mathematics and mathematics education which are often, unfortunately, and unwittingly reinforced by shallow media reporting. Mathematics and mathematics education, like other complex transphenonema, are messy and difficult disciplines. I also outlined some of the current transdisciplinary approaches to studying the learning of mathematics such as embodied perspectives, neuro/psycho-analytic/affective/phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, critical mathematics, ethnomathematics, mathemaesthethics and biosemiotics, some of which I have discussed previously in the Express while working at the School of Education.

Drawing from some of this literature I presented evidence that attempted to trouble too ‘simple’ understandings of mathematics, gender and differential accomplishment. For example David Halpern and his colleagues state clearly in their review of the literature that “there is no single factor by itself that has been shown to determine sex differences in science and math. Early experience, biological constraints, educational policy, and cultural contexts each have effects, and these effects add and interact in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways.” For example, Entwistle has suggested that, “different degrees of freedom in early childhood, such as the unsupervised freedom and larger play ranges of boys versus the supervised house play of girls may provide more opportunities for boys to learn and develop spatial skills than their female counterparts” providing a social dimension to understanding a factor that perhaps contributes to differences in spatial and geometric reasoning tasks and which troubles simplistic essentialist gender readings such as that of Michael Gurian reported by Baldeosingh that “male toddlers explore more than their female counterparts.” As a mathematics educator, this finding in particular worries me given the increasingly claustrophobic restrictions on freedom of movement imposed upon children from an ever earlier age in T&T mainly due to (unnecessary in most cases) extra lessons, increased time in front of screens, and health and safety (kidnapping, accidents, and violent crime) concerns.

At a cultural level and consistent with findings from gender researchers, “countries with smaller female disadvantage in mathematics achievement tend to be countries where 1) women are less associated with home and children, 2) there is greater educational gender equality, 3) there is little gender inequality in the labor force, and 4) women have a higher status in general.” At the genetic level, Penner suggests that “while genes play an important role in sex-determination there does not seem to be conclusive evidence of sex-linked recessive genes linked to mathematical ability.” Finally as Suzanne Damarin argues, “the powers of rationality and mathematical thinking are so bound up with the cultural definition of masculinity, and "that the discursive production of femininity [is] antithetical to masculine rationality to such an extent that femininity is equated to poor performance, even when the girl or woman is performing well.” This small sampling from the research literature suggests that improving math performance among the
sexes is not simple, indeed the situation is quite complex.

According to Halpern and colleagues progress on understanding sex differences in mathematics has not moved very far. They note that “despite more than a century of effort and empirical investigation, (into sex differences in mathematics achievement) in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions.” This is telling if not damning of the research paradigms in education that have dominated education discourse in the 20th century. It is quite likely that we’ve been using the wrong sort of frameworks and looking in the wrong places.

Shifting levels to sociological and cultural researchers sheds some light on why this might be so. Amy Parks in a 2009 paper writes that “educational measurement (re)produces regimes of ‘truth’ through pre-selecting what is measured, how it is measured and what filters are used in reporting scores (eg. race, gender, SES) and what are not used (eg. marital status, sibling order, teacher’s level of education etc.).” Parks echoes earlier feminist critiques of the gendered nature of mathematics (and mathematics education) such as Lyn Shulman who more than a decade ago noted that “the categories we choose to use, frame “what constitutes not only an answer but even the questions we can ask.” thereby already limiting ourselves only to that which we can name and classify and thereby mark as acceptable or unacceptable, normal or deviant. In my own research in Trinidad at a prestigious all girls’ high school, I found that relatively minor things can affect students’ engagement with mathematics as they transitioned to secondary school. For example, students described being limited by their move to the usage of pens in secondary school and the inability to erase mistakes, errors becoming permanently marked in their notebooks, a mark of personal intellectual failing rather than learning. They also discussed the difficulty of presenting their working and thinking in the, to them, “too small boxes” on the SEA exam form. I guess Janie will learn this too eventually.

Gender is Transphenomenal & Colonized
Gender too is transphenomenal, it is not as simple as some have made it a matter of male versus female or of sexual preference, rather one must look at the phenomenon across levels for an understanding of gender. Beginning at the embodied level, Professor Mark Blumberg, a behavioral and cognitive developmental neuroscience (Iowa) explains, “…sexual identity [is like] a meandering, unfolding path that begins early in embryonic development and continues after birth…the vagaries of development can produce alternative paths and short cuts that effectively break down our standard conceptions of male and female…although male and female human newborns are traveling on different paths to sexual identity, they must still make the journey. The destination is not fixed and it does not exist anywhere within the child. Even the path does not exist. It is rolled out…as the child interacts with its world through developmental time.” The recent case with South African runner Caster Semenya also highlights the general oversimplification of sex and gender into two dichotomous categories with one usually constructed in a superior position to the other. Arne Ljungqvist, chair of the IOC medical commission has stated emphatically that "there is no scientifically sound lab-based technique that can differentiate between man and woman”.

In education, researchers Glasser and Smith argue that the terms gender and ‘sex’ have not been carefully distinguished in research reports and are often conflated, used interchangeably or indiscriminately and that this lack of conceptual clarity has proven a hindrance in understanding how students’ educational experiences are influenced by gender. They note that “without careful exposition of how terms are being used, the common-ground assumption of a shared common understanding can lead to confusion or terminological conflation which ultimately rests upon dichotomous sex categories.” Moving outside of these categories, Julie Greenberg, in Definitional Dilemmas, notes that, “sex is still presumed to be binary and easily determinable by an analysis of biological factors. Despite anthropological and medical studies to the contrary, society presumes an unambiguous sex paradigm in which all individuals can be classified neatly as male or female.”

Based on their articles it appears that my esteemed colleagues and friends appear to be bound within this paradigm at present and while I acknowledge the value of the work they are doing in keeping this important conversation going and demanding more open and transparent dialogue and rational debate, I fear their presentations thus far offer no way out of the impasses in education in which we find ourselves in T&T. Finally, our own Professor Patricia Mohammed has repeatedly made calls for a transdisciplinary approach to understanding gender arguing that, “[t]he study of understanding of gender should not be limited by the boundaries of the contemporary intellectual imagination. In the same way that our gendered identities are at some level fluid and malleable, so too should the thought processes that allow us to explore the many dimensions of our gender and sexual identities.” Next I address briefly the idea that gender is as much a colonized concept as other categories of difference such as race.

In The Coloniality of Gender, Maria Lugones demonstrates how the concept of dichotomized sex categories based on taken as ‘normal’ and ‘universal’ European ideas of sexual dimorphism served Eurocentered global capitalist exploitation during the colonialist era and that the categories that we use to organize our world and in our case our schooling are neither natural nor neutral. Drawing on Oyéronké Oyewùmí, author of The Invention of Women, she argues that “gender was not an organizing principle of Yoruba society prior to colonization by the West”, rather, “the usual gloss of the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin as “female/woman” and “male/man” respectively, is a mistranslation” an imposition of a colonist’s categories upon a colonized peoples. She goes on make trace the political implications of the narrowing of the concept of gender and the introduction of the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ through which “females were categorized and reduced to “women” [thus] ma[king] them ineligible for leadership roles…” Indeed, she notes that, “it was unthinkable for the colonized government to recognize female leaders among the peoples they colonized” and in this way “State power was transformed to male-gender power by the exclusion of women from state structures.”

Selwyn Ryan (04/04/10) claims that “women in power are still a novelty” but Lugones demonstrates that this was not always the case. Drawing upon the scholarship of Paula Gunn Allen on Native American (Indian) tribal cultures she argues that gender roles were not as sharply delineated in some tribes as they have come to be in the modern West. Tribal gender roles were often determined “on the basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. The Yuma had a tradition of gender designation based on dreams; a female who dreamed of weapons became a male for all practical purposes.” In addition she notes that, “Cherokee women had had the power to wage war, to decide the fate of captives, to speak to the men’s council, they had the right to inclusion in public policy decisions, the right to choose whom and whether to marry, the right to bear arms. The Women’s Council was politically and spiritually powerful. Cherokee women lost all these powers and rights, as the Cherokee were removed and patriarchal arrangements were introduced.” In addition, many tribes, including the Susquehanna, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Navajo were gynecratic and recognized homosexuals and “third genders” or ‘berdache’ positively. Unfortunately little can perhaps be said of the gender organization of our own decimated indigenous populations that has not already been coloured by the vivid colonial sexual imagination.

In Trinidad and Tobago the gender and genre of our colonial heritage in education is entangled with the relics of religious sensibilities. Kwok-Pui-Lan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology is perhaps one of the more important works I have recently come across as a scholar and (questioning) Catholic in beginning the important work of engaging the complex intersectionalities that make up this difficult and painful heritage. Her discussion renders it impossible to turn a blind eye or deaf ear to the complicity of the Church, men and women, colonized and colonizer, abuser and abused, teachers and students, in the suffering, enslavement, and sickness of spirit theft that continues to unfold in education in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and elsewhere. In our context, that the current discussions about education and gender have been dominated thus far by anamales (anatomical males), including myself, is not without concern. That the arguments have NOT, until this point, called into question the very categories and basis for such classification and separation, have not looked beyond the constraints of a very narrow and limited disciplinary framework suggests a commitment to a questionable epistemology and a reproduction of the coloniality of power including its gendered dimensions. Coverage of competing and refutational views to the “official knowledge” regarding education and gender are usually not vigorously pursued, promoted or reported on in a timely fashion by the media, in particular in a closeted, heteronormative, homophobic and neo-colonial society such as ours. What is really needed a framework that offers a productive way and means to transform relationships of colonized gender domination in and out of education/school.

After Gender towards a Human Genre
At this point in the presentation I turned to the wonderfully frustrating intellectual thought of the Caribbean’s own Sylvia Wynter whom I framed as a transdisciplinary scholar. Wynter’s oeuvre is a carefully fashioned theoretical bricolage which draws upon, and strategically deploys a wealth of concepts drawn from across the landscapes of human inquiry, in seeking to effect a rupture and displacement among the complex configurations and accretive articulations of institutional associations within which she sees a dominant bio-cidal episteme, cultural logic or order of consciousness, that engendered and accompanied the rise of Western Humanism, rationalized colonial expansion, and undergirded the rise of the modern world. The overrepresentation of this episteme that she calls man, as the only ‘true’ logic or way of being human, enacts a pandemic genre which negatively marks ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ as ‘defect’, deficit’ or ‘deviance’. In her own words, she states, “Man” is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human…Its “Other” is therefore not woman…Rather because Man conceives of itself through its Origin narrative…of Evolution…its “Other” and “Others” are necessarily those categories of human who are projected…as having been bio-evolutionary dysselected – i.e…[all] who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man’s self-conception and its related understanding of what it is to be human.” The classes of humans who have been bio-evolutionaryily dysselected, constructed as disposable humans, ‘waste’ or ‘other’-than-human, chattel, include the ancestors and contemporaries of every Caribbean citizen.

Wynter’s challenge is to attempt to simultaneously re-imagine Humanism outside and beside the apparatuses employed by man to move towards an “autopoiesis of the human” i.e. following Fanon “to redefine what it is to be human.” Her ultimate concern is with human freedom and its trans-formative potential, rather than the freedom of man. This is the foundation of her ‘after man’ proposal in which she wonders, “How then shall we reimagine freedom as emancipation from our present ethno-class or Western bourgeois conception of freedom? And therefore, in human rather than as now, Man’s terms?...beyond those of Man’s oppositional sub-versions – that of Marxism’s proletariat, that of feminism’s woman (gender rights), and that of our multiple multiculturalisms and/or centric cultural nationalisms (minority rights), to that of gay liberation (homosexual rights), but also a conception of freedom able to draw them all together in a synthesis.” Wynter’s words resonate with that of my former B.Ed student, the primary teacher mentioned earlier, who also wrote in her autobiography, “I am particularly interested in freedom…I am very interested in the freedom that comes from knowledge and the knowledge that comes from enquiry rather than mere absorption…I am also interested in enquiry that seeks to find pathways to peace and self-fulfillment rather than enquiry to unearth some injustice to seek revenge. I am interested in helping students to partake of the beauty that is available to all human beings and to create beauty for others through mathematics…I think I have achieved my ultimate goal and that is a language to describe the freedom that I so dearly want and want others to strive for…The education system does not teach us how not to bury the rich gifts of humanity – love, art, collective learning, aesthetics, diversity, easy of knowing and the self transforming responsibility to the other, the fruits of which every human being has the potential to reap.”

To think “after man” is to think transphenomenally and to ask what (or who) is already besides, already existent, and thus more than potential but not yet afforded recognition or full value as being, and to begin to wonder how and why this might have come to be so. As I have argued elsewhere, what we need in the Caribbean is to develop our kumbla consciousness and to pursue intervulnerability as an aim for education.

In discussing the resistance to her discussions of gender by feminists, Wynter elaborates a position that draws attention to the instituting of ‘kind’ or genre, the discursive making and marking of difference. She says, “[a]lthough I use the term “race,”…“race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.”…there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” Indeed the root of gender, like genre is the same as genus, and genesis, and means ‘kin,’ ‘origin,’ or ‘type.’ Wynter’s etymological reminder, her proposal that “gender” is a function of “genre” advances calls that have been made for a feminist degendering movement. Working from this position then what might it mean to conceive and perform research in mathematics education “after gender” i.e. in another, more human genre that does not essentialize, reify or neglect or overlook biological sex-differences? How shallow now does the Ministry’s experiment in gender re-socialization seem now – entrenched as it is firmly within the genre of Man?

Within the current Gender-genre, for example note a conspicuous absence of studies of ‘men’ doing femininities in and through mathematics or ‘women’ in mathematics doing any form of masculinity that is not negatively scribed. In the realm of the political too much has been focused on Mrs. Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s gender, though the headline on Mary King’s article (15/03/10) which declares “Change but no Change”, could be applied transphenomenally to much in Trinidad including the possible result of the Ministry’s gender experiment if the only thing that is changed is the sex-gender composition of the schools and not the genre of education that is at present authoritative, inhuman, aconsequential, and unholy. As I have written recently (04/04/10), the inconclusive research literature, which rests upon a too simple understanding of sex as gender, suggests that if the genre in schools remains the same then ‘girls’ are likely to increase the level of their performance at a much faster rate than ‘boys’. This will likely amplify the academic panic of the current discourses in Caribbean education which have constructed all forms of non-normative masculinities as pathologies in need of cure or rehabilitation. Politically as well as in education we need genre change.

A Closing Hope
I’ve often been asked, why, despite finishing at the top end of my undergraduate mathematics (and botany) cohort I have not pursued mathematics in any meaningful way at the graduate level. The short answer is that while I retain an interest and love for Mathematics as a discipline, my experiences, and, in particular the experiences of many of my colleagues and former students, was often not pleasant. I really was not inspired by the end of my B.Sc. to go follow that (Eulerian) path again. Speaking to many other mathematically gifted men, I hear similar stories. It is not about gender in the main, but the destructive inhuman genre of mathematics education in some university departments, or by some faculty members, a genre that is often repeated sometimes in teacher education, staffrooms, and very often in daily classroom practice by people of all genders.

Unlike expensive foreign consultants, my advice, at present, is free. I do not think it is a ‘wrong’ move to separate ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ at the secondary level – I do think we need to rethink what we think a boy and a girl is and whether this is a justifiable basis for this decision. I do think it is not going to be ‘right’ for every case. Certainly the Ministry’s continued dependence on a top-down closed-mouth approach is an inappropriate way to go about the process of educational improvement. I am not alone in this assessment. If I had to do this, following the free advice offered by Professors Spence and King over the years, I would seek to create a research grant/innovation /experimentation system open to all schools to submit proposals for their own reform/ improvement initiatives that could range from curricular innovations, social experiments to infrastructural transformations. The schools would be responsible for accounting and reporting back both to the Ministry and the public on the success of their efforts within a fixed time frame (probably 3-5 years depending on the type of project). This is an integral part of what is meant by creating schools as learning communities and building a sustainable knowledge society/economy. Such things do not happen overnight, but a culture of innovation, risk and responsibility has to be seeded and nurtured over time. Many individuals at UWI, UTT, USC, DERE and other educational research institutions as well as teachers in schools, retired, and in private practice would be able to add valuable expertise to this process. Some of these schools would likely figure out that separating students by sex would probably be a change that would have a reasonable chance of success, i.e. of increasing achievement (not the sole aim of education mind you) for the majority of students. However other contextually relevant innovations would probably emerge from this crowd-sourcing approach. (A caveat – sometimes the crowd can be very stupid). It would not though be a top-down imposed solution that few are invested in, rather like the transphenomenal complex systems that schools and learning are, such strategies would belong to the whole school community and to no one individual.

In ending my turn, it is my hope that other interested and affected parties will get into this important conversation. Indeed, while (mathematics) education and gender studies have developed alongside each other in the academy, until fairly recently and with relatively few exceptions, they have remained mutually indifferent, perhaps even estranged, to one another’s work. Going forward this has to change.
The challenges of the present demand that we read learn to across disciplinary boundaries and learn to read differently if we are to progress together. Wilson Harris describes societies that are unable to do this as block societies, he writes, “we have seen violence erupt out of block societies…If we have cultures which are locked into certain functions, which read the world in only one way, then fanaticism grows out of that, terror grows out of that…” and notes that “lots of people may be able to read and write competently, but if they are locked within block functions, either they submit or they rebel (perhaps in T&T they revel?) violently, they burn property, they do terrible things, they protest against the society without a grain of understanding that they carry within themselves the very seeds of disaster against which they protest. Unless they can understand that, complex, inner revision, complex, outer dialogue is lost.”

We cannot afford to continue to lock our children, as Janie has already begun to learn, as children in SEA, CXC and CAPE learn, into block societies to fulfill block functions. It is my hope that in approaching mathematics, gender and education transphenomenally and adopting transdisciplinary approaches to their study that we might embrace the literate imagination of what Harris calls the ‘Infinite Rehearsal’ or ‘the Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination’ in which we might discover the reality that “to convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not impossible task.”