Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Gender specific piano pedagogy

Yes, but unlike the gym workout, piano is a solo experience. Women may (or may not) feel uncomfortable working out with men, but that's because working out in a public gym is .... well ... public. The analogy with boys versus girls solo study of piano is not quite apt.

Ultimately, it's an empirical question. But unless you can run a controlled small-group test, you'll never know whether the more inclusive marketing (with boys as a clear subtext) would have worked better than trumpeting "BOYS" in the title.

Sounds like a good research paper topic!

But not by me!

I am not "hearing" gender-specific differences in "learning styles", as much as in motivation or interest. Something along the traditional "pink dolls" for girls and " motorcycles and toyguns" for boys.
Do you actually write different music or do you package it in comics/ titles/themes that are more likely to appeal to boys? if the former, do you go beyond the -traditional- adagios for girls and allegro/fortissimo staccatos for boys?

You also mention extensive research: what are the actual data emanating from the research that led to your conclusions that boys and girls actually "learn" piano differently?

There are a few factors to consider when we think about the Curves analogy. First, Curves' primary targets are adult women, who have, arguably, grown up with more cultural stereotyping. I am much more likely to sign my shy, body-image conscious mother up for a Curves membership than a daughter whom I would want to grow up to be able to interact with men and women confidently[+]. Second, the studies on physiological differences between men and women are better grounded and understood than research on how the brain works. There are on-going research about how children learn (esp. on classroom learning), but the field is still young, and there are still lots of debates among researchers[*].



[*] For anyone interested:
* Here is a survey-style article: The evidence suggests otherwise: The truth about boys and girls S Mead - 2006 - Education Sector
* Here is a recently published book: Boys, Girls and the Myths of Literacies and Learning. Roberta F. Hammett and Kathy Sanford (Eds.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press, 2008, 252 pages. Here is a review for the book by B. Kelly in the The Alberta Journal of Educational Research.

[+] Incidentally, I had joined Curves for a few months myself. It was not for me. I realize it is a very successful franchise, but to me, its attitude felt condescending, not unlike the Pink Tools for Women. I had since then returned to a co-ed gym.

Interesting points to consider.

The curves analogy was simply meant to illustrate that there are times when a gender-specific service or product is okay (or at times in fact needed).

I think it's fine to address boys in the title. When I choose music for my students, I have a large body of music that both genders play. And then I have a few pieces that I find the boys like more, and a few that the girls like more.

I wouldn't likely give a boy much Gretchaninoff for the grade three level (I think it's opus 100), or Leslie Fly: Snow White.

I wouldn't likely give a girl much Leslie Fly: the Queen's Beasts or Robin Hood, or Inspector Gadget.

I'm mildly surprised that this question needs to be asked in the 21st century...

Of course there are fundamental biological difference between males and females, and invariably they will lead to behavioural differences.

What we don't want to happen is to allow these differences to lead to an inequality of opportunity for girls. Or, worse, to _exploit_ those differences to so that women are pushed into menial and submissive roles in society. Since we've been doing exactly that for, oh..., 6000-or-so years, and since we (in the West, at least) aren't really doing it any more, it seems to me we're moving in the right direction.

The tricky question -- the question that there seems to be no clear answer to -- is whether reinforcing gender stereotypes is a cause or a symptom of gender inequality. There's been a lot of hot air blasted out by both sides of the debate, and I'm not sure we're any nearer a convincing answer than we were in the 60s. I certainly don't pretend to know the answer.

More on topic...

The issue of gender-specific pedagogy is pretty prominent in mainstream education -- it's certainly not limited to learning the piano. We've had a suspicion that our entire primary education strategy works better for girls than for boys for a long time. You've only got to look at educational achievements at age 11 (or thereabouts) to see the evidence for that.

But, again, what we don't know is if they problem is biological or sociological. If it's mostly biological, then perhaps the right thing to do is to modify educational practice to suit the different genders better. But if it is mostly sociological -- if boys and girls _learn_ different responses to the educational environment we offer (from their peers or their parents) -- then perhaps what we should be changing is something else.

For all that, it's unfair to expect folks writing piano method books to tackle deep and complex sociological issues single-handedly.



Remind me again why this is bad

It's hardly limited to the middle classes, anyway. In the western world, pretty much every parent assumes that that children will have, and should have, these opportunities. This seems to me to be unquestionably a good thing.

And then you fill half a page discussing how they aren't really bad at all! Why can we not celebrate gender differences while also striving for equal opportunities for individuals?

I never said we couldn't.

The problem is how to be accepting of gender differences while not allowing them to lead to inequality. As I society, I don't think we can be sure yet that we have yet developed a way to do that.

That's why, I think, we often encounter what often seem (to me, anyway) to be be wacky restrictions -- not allowing little boys to play cowboys, etc. I grew up in a culture where little boys played cowboys and little girls played with dolls, and a woman's place was in the home. There's no particular reason for thinking that the cowboys and the dolls lead to women being poorly regarded as professionals but, at the same time, there's not a huge reason for thinking that this _isn't_ the case, either.

That's why, I think, we tend to be overcautious in this area. Nobody much wants to see a return to the fixed gender stereotyping of the 50s -- Heaven forbid -- but we aren't yet sure how to prevent that happening while still accomodating the fundamental differences between men and women.

Kevin,

Have you noticed the male/female ratio in universities these days. I don't think we have to worry seriously that western society as a whole is steering girls into submissive dead-end lives via overt role programming. Actually, I worry more that society is increasingly limiting its boys' opportunities as our schools increasingly emphasize the virtues of cooperation, diligence, sitting still, and turning in reams of process homework in order to accumulate the teacher kudos that are the entry ticket into selective universities. But that's another story.

Gender issues aside, I think it should be noted that the fact that TDOW created a product, and saw this process from beginning to end, deserves positive recognition.

I certainly haven't been able to yet create a product from beginning to end (although I'd like to) - but the steps this takes, from the idea, to the drafting, to the pricing of production, to the distribution - setting all this stuff up is no easy task, and takes a good deal of commitment.

Anyone who creates a product, and puts themselves out there on the line like that, is taking a risk, stepping out of the box

Its really easy to criticize this type of thing, but everyone forgets the effort and dedication this takes.

I commend them for taking the chance, and seeing the task through to the end!

In what discipline? It's pretty hard work to recruit women for maths, engineering, and physical sciences. You can sell computing to prospective women students if you call it something non-threatening like 'IT'. But one whiff of an equation and suddenly you've got a roomful of men. There's reasonable parity in medicine and law (in the UK, anyway). But that's been the case for at least 20 years (again, in my experience).

I think we've increased women's participation in higher education in the last 20 years by expanding higher education provision to include more liberal arts and 'soft' sciences. I'm not suggesting for a moment that this is a bad thing. But this 'subject segregation' does worry me a little. Many of the liberal arts courses I've looked at don't seem to demand a huge amount of intellectual rigour (OK, of course I'm generalising), so I wonder if we're offering something to women students that is as of much value to them as the subjects that men favour?



Actually that concerns me also, as I said in a previous post. And many other educationalists in the UK. But the issues here are complex and hard to disentangle.

In the US, even the higher tech disciplines have shown a big trend toward gender parity. Sure, physics, engineering, math and economics tend to be majority male, but even there the ratios have been changing. And these changes seem endogenous -- driven by student choices -- rather than by external pressures from the top.

If you say "soft" humanities disciplines like history are not rigorous, don't say it too loudly around my historian colleagues.

I'm pretty far OT .... sorry. My fault.

That may be partially true. My impression is that the ratio in math is moving closer to parity (http://www.springerlink.com/content/h48474524196u04v/ though this seems to be from 2002, so a little outdated). In computer science, however, there isn't as clear a trend as one might have liked (http://archive.cra.org/info/taulbee/women.html).

At least as much mine

And before I get shot down in flames by historians, I'm not suggesting for a moment that humanities and liberal arts cannot be intellectually rigourous. Of course they can be, and often are. 'Greats' is still highly-regarded

No UK university that I know of has expanded its maths or engineering provision in the last ten years or so. But liberal arts provision has hugely expanded, and in a very short time.

I'm not convinced that these new courses are properly planned or developed, and I know from experience that they are often oversubscribed.

In the UK, at least, you couldn't run courses on engineering, medicine, law, or teaching along those lines, because the respective professional bodies would simply not recognize them, and this would blast graduates carreer prospects. But you can offer badly planned, oversubscribed liberal arts courses because, on the whole, there are no unified standards bodies for those subjects.

None of this is meant to suggest that the problem is endemic in the subjects themselves.

This is now O/T from where we started from, but I don't think the problem of the gender gap in those areas is because today's young women finds computing and equations "threatening" (at least, no more so than the guys), The ratio is not bad in higher math, biology, or chemistry, and they all involve equations.

At least in the US, there has been a lot of efforts in recruiting women in historically male-dominant areas such as engineering and computer science. Many attempts were well-meaning, well-intended, but ended up being not well-received. They come across as condescending, and they somehow lack the "street-creds" needed to convince the target audience. So to bring it back to the original thesis, this is one of the reasons why I think it's challenging to prepare gender-specific teaching materials.

With the new fees structure, public attitude will soon change from "University entitlement for all!" to "Do you REALLY need a 3-year course?" :-) The lable "Degree" has enormously devalued anyway, as have many other academic qualifications.

Hey, if you folks in the UK want to understand the trajectory of your higher education system, perhaps you need to read this book reviewed in the Times Higher Ed supplement:

Times Higher Ed review

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Everybody finds equations threatening. I find equations threatening and my PhD thesis contained little else. The mathmetician Roger Penrose says that textbooks sales reduce 50% for each equation (of course, that's slightly tongue-in-cheek).

I'm not suggesting for a moment that female students find math _more_ threatening than male students do. But I do wonder if there is something in their early educational experience that makes boys more willing to suck this stuff up than it does girls?

Or maybe it's that well-meaning parents are more willing to endure the pain of hammering math into their sons' heads than their daughters'?

I don't know really. What I do know is that, in the most highly-regarded UK universtities, math, computer science and physical sciences remain almost exclusively male, while most other subjects are about equal.

I wonder if 'piano book for boys' is in any way comparable to 'differential calculus for girls' ?