Gender and Genre

Kalmer (1994) Gender and Genre in Early Writing

Kalmer's study was a case study that followed a white middle class boy and girl's writing through grades K, 1 and 2 in a middle class neighborhood school in Australia. Only the girl was followed through grade 2.

Kalmer collected data by being a participant observer in the children's classrooms once or twice a week. She collected samples of their written texts, observational notes, video of their writing behavior, audio of interviews with the children and informal discussions.

When analyzing the data, she found 3 genres and broke them down even further: (personal story-observation, recount, diary, personal letter; childhood literacy-narrative, I Am, Joke book, guess who, fable, poem;labeling genres).

Out of these, observation accounted for the majority of both the male and female's writing, so Kalmer broke down this genre even further to analyze the schematic structure. (orientation, event, description and comment).
She analyzed 10 observation genre texts from each child further by analyzing their grammar choices.

Results:

• Found that the two children wrote primarily in the observation genre about their personal experiences.
• Gender differences did occur within the observation genre--they matched gender stereotypes--for example the "active male--wrote about events--the passive female--wrote more descriptions. female, expressed emotions in comment, boy-complained. The boy wrote about aggressive acts while the girl wrote about passive acts that occurred at home. Male was the actor more often in his texts, than the female was in her texts.
• Found free choice writing in classrooms problematic-teachers did not guide genre choices and therefore the children stayed stuck in the personal experience genre and even regressed to drawing and labeling pictures because they did not know what to write about.

My Thoughts:
Makes me think about the writing done by students in my own classroom. I guess I have noticed gender differences on the surface--such as how boys write about superheros more so than girls and how girls tend to write about things they like and love more often...but I have never thought much beyond that type of surface level difference. I am not convinced that I should be alarmed if females are writing more descriptions than events. The author says that teachers need to "make an active effort to discourage gender stereotypes." This article has not necessarily convinced me that I should be alarmed about sterotypes in my kindergarten student's writing, but has made me think more about it and I will definitely be on the look out for gender stereotypes in my student's writing.
I think the part where the author noted that not exposing the students to other genres, the teachers not modeling their own writing through minilessions, and helping the students brainstorm ideas for writing is where I see the bigger problem. The students did not attempt other types of writing beyond personal experience more often because they were not exposed to nonfiction, and narratives as choices that they could make in their writing time. I do not exactly see the idea of "free choice" as being the problem. I see the lack of exposure as the problem. You can still give students a choice of what to write, yet introduce different genres and encourage students to try other genres.
I think that there are many ways teachers can and do discourage gender stereotypes such as through their choices in literature that they expose their students to and through the content that they write about when modeling writing during writing minilessons.