Towards new approaches to reviewing literature in gender education

Policy making and practice for gender equity in schools is undergoing substantial change as the focus has shifted in recent years from girls to boys. It has been argued that social policy makers need evidence from a variety of sources to make informed decisions about social policy and program implementation. There should be ways of characterising, comparing and contrasting differing perspectives from the public, the media, research and practitioners so that their similarities and differences can be laid open for inspection and therefore provide broad, deep and useful information to policy makers and practitioners. New approaches to reviewing and synthesising literature have both been claimed to have the potential to provide more useful information to social policy makers about ‘what works’ than traditional methods of reviewing literature. One is an ‘argument catalogue’ developed by the Canadian Network for Knowledge Utilisation. This paper outlines an attempt to synthesise literature from a variety of sources, including views from parent bodies, teacher unions, practitioners, the media, government departments, and research and theoretical perspectives on gender in schools. The paper offers the findings from utilising this approach as one possible way of dealing with the complexities facing research on policy and practice in this highly contested field.