Has Learning Become Taboo and is Risk-taking Compulsory for Caribbean boys? Researching the Relationship between Masculinities, Education and Risk

Abstract

In recent years, gender dynamics in education in the English-speaking Caribbean have undergone significant shifts. On the one hand, educational access, retention and attainment by girls have improved significantly and should be celebrated. On the other hand, retention, completion and attainment by boys appear to be slipping. To explore this issue we examined the available literature which explores Caribbean masculinities along with preliminary data from our own qualitative research on Caribbean masculinities. As a result of this work new perspectives have emerged that may help to explain boys’ changing educational achievements. In the past, academic excellence was largely, if not entirely, a male domain. However, with education increasingly becoming common ground, boys are left with fewer opportunities to establish their gendered identity through education; and academic achievement meets that need less readily. In contrast, fundamental biological differences mean that physicality has been preserved as a way of asserting masculine difference, and the outdoors remain boys’ territory. In the Caribbean and elsewhere, outdoors physicality seems to have gained pre-eminent importance for developing a boys’ identity. While this retreat to physicality may well benefit boys’ participation in sporting achievements and the trades, there are also important negative consequences. Proving their gender identity through physical dominance is increasingly

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.