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Ladies Home Journal Magazine
"Look Who's Not Talking"
Family Love, Family Life, Family Matters

The Washington Times
Boys Encouraged, Girls Silenced in Class

Snippets of Insight

"We assume or hope that classrooms are fair and meaningful places. Some teachers may well be more aware than others of the way gender influences performance and participation. If so, how did they get more aware? Most teachers teach the way they were taught. It takes a lot to change things..."
teachers read more here

"I thought my main role as a parent was: to tell them to be themselves. But I can see that there are many places where they can't 'be themselves'. Classrooms make up a big chunk of a child's experience - I want to know what is going on there."
parents read more here

"I don't think this is about women being 'noisier' - it's about participating rather than being a silent audience member in your own life. Also, men are being pressured to be men in ways that are limiting them. Maybe we can all rest a bit if we can stop performing gender and be more genuine with who we are."
students read more here

SECTIONSBiography

Sister Agnes' hastily drawn map of communication vectors routing 'messages' from 'senders' to 'receivers' and back again in a complex push/pull effect seemed to roar from the high school black board to a curious Allyson Jule, "How do we understand each other? What is being said? And To whom? And Why?"

These questions have propelled Dr. Jule in her life's work as an author and educator. She has focused her studies on the complimentary and often contradictory ways that gender, language practices and religion work alongside each other in the lives of women.

Dr. Jule, who has been teaching since 1987, received her Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Applied Linguistics) in 2002 at the Roehampton University, London, UK. She began her tenure with Glamorgan in the same year. Dr. Jule's first book, Gender, silence, and participation in the language classroom: Sh-shushing the girls published in 2004 (now in its second printing) is a personal account of a ten month study of one Canadian Punjabi Sikh grade-two language classroom. The shocking findings, that the boys spoke more than the girls by a ratio of 9:1 (boys: girls), are supported by the claims of hundreds of researchers from around the world.

The book garnered international headlines and challenges a current trend in education research which paints boys as the new "underclass."

A post-feminist scholar, Dr. Jule continued her exploration of gender in Gender and the Language of Religion (2004). This book is based on research undertaken in 2003-2004 while Dr. Jule was a Scholar in Residence at Regent College, a theological graduate school on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Canada.

In 2006 Dr. Jule co edited her third book with Dr. Bettina Tate Pedersen, Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia, Now in paper back, it looks at the basic question" Can a person be a Christian and a feminist at the same time?" The answer explored here is - yes!

Language and Religious Identity, Women in Discourse (2007) is her edited collection of studies from around the world connecting applied linguistic research with the complexities of gender and religion where religion is emphasized as an identity marker enacted in linguistic ways.

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Comments? Questions? Send email to Allyson Jule.   |   Media contact: Lorraine Brett