Embedded in the pervasive rhetoric of schooling is the assumption that schools are apolitical sites where identity-less students gather, absorb the same information, and share the same opportunities to succeed. However, extensive research (see Sadker and Sadker, 1994) has demonstrated that female students continue to be ‘shortchanged’ in school (AAUW, 1992). As Fine and MacPherson, 1992, Fordham, 1993, and others (Lesko, 1988; Roman, 1988; Tolmon, 1994) have argued, we must be careful in making any claims that females simply by virtue of their sex experience the same forms of oppression. In reality, young women are subjected to different forms of oppression based not only on their gender but also on their race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the manner in which adolescent girls make sense of their own lives, how they view oppression, and how they elect to counter that oppression is impacted by what Alcoff defines as ‘positionality’ (1986:324). Yet schools tend to define in very monolithic terms what constitutes an appropriately raced and gendered individual, thereby situating some girls as being clearly more deviant (i.e., more at-risk) than other girls (Adams, 1994).
Embedded in the pervasive rhetoric of schooling is the assumption that schools are apolitical sites where identity-less students gather, absorb the same information, and share the same opportunities to succeed. female students continue to be ‘shortchanged’ in school we must be careful in making any claims that females simply by virtue of their sex experience the same forms of oppression , young women are subjected to different forms of oppression based not only on their gender but also on their race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. F the manner in which adolescent girls make sense of their own lives, how they view oppression, and how they elect to counter that oppression is impacted by what Alcoff defines as ‘positionality’ thereby situating some girls as being clearly more deviant