Rosalyn George – författare

With education and social inequalities under scrutiny, this timely book provides an up-to-date summary of research into the key issues, as well as practical strategies for educators, including strategies for staff development, working with children and school policy. The facts have changed significantly, and much received wisdom cannot be relied upon: girls' performance is rising faster than boys and surpasses them in almost all respects up to the age of 18; unequal opportunity faced by those of different race is becoming more fractured along class, gender, ethnic and religious lines; class divisions are increased with the reintroduction of selection and has become a matter of concern for government and school policy makers. This title makes good the lack of literature on inequality, and brings teachers, and those training to be teachers, the latest information.

Academics and professionals working with young women face a series of paradoxes. Over the last 20 years, the lives of young women in the UK and Europe have been transformed. They have gained considerable freedom and independence, but at the very same time, new, less tangible forms of constraint and subordination now play a defining role in the formation of their everyday subjectivities and identities. Young women have come to exemplify the pervasive sensibility of self-responsibility and self-organisation. This new ‘gender regime’ demands both conceptualisation and practical response, drawing on educational research, social and cultural theory, and contemporary feminist thought. Within the overarching theme of pedagogical responses to these trends, through work in schools and within young women’s online and face-to-face communities, this book interrogates the field of sexuality and its visualisation across new and old media in the context of often predictable and endemic ‘moral panics’ about teenage pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted diseases, and internet pornography. In exploring how girls and young women respond to increasing expectations of them as the vanguard of economic, social, and cultural change, contributors to this volume interrogate the ways in which social and educational aspiration interact with young women’s developing and embodied identities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture and Society.