A framework for gender justice : evaluating the transformative capacities of three key Australian schooling initiatives

Abstract

Through a feminist agenda that seeks to redress gender inequities through remedies of redistribution and recognition, this paper draws on Fraser's work (1997) to articulate a framework of transformative justice. In moving beyond the competing logics underpinning such remedies, this framework adopts a transformative theory and politics in problematising and seeking to restructure the inequitable gender differentiation of political-economic structures and social patterns of representation, interpretation and communication. This framework of gender justice is presented as useful in evaluating the ideologies and practices of particular schooling initiatives and thus is drawn on to critically assess three initiatives that currently seek to address issues of social/gender equity in education within Australia: The New Basics Project, The Productive Pedagogies Framework and the Success for Boys initiative. In particular, the paper critically explores these initiatives in terms of their capacities for enabling or constraining a transformative redistributive and cultural gender justice.