Abstract
Girls’ Identities and Experiences of Oppression in Schools: Resilience, Resistance, and Transformation was written with love and devotion and feels like an ode to adolescent girls. The excerpts from qualitative interviews will leave readers feeling compelled to improve the social conditions of adolescent girls and amplify the perspectives of girls of color. This book doesn't shy away from difficult conversations, instead challenging the reader to assess their contributions to the marginalization of adolescent girls.
Using research spanning more than a decade, the authors reframe resilience to include the resistance strategies that girls use to survive, advocate, and move toward liberation in educational settings. Their analyses focus on the real experiences of adolescent girls and educators—a central developmental influence during adolescence. In positionality statements, the authors reveal their own extensive knowledge and experience of the topic. We commend the authors for including positionality information; however, we wished they had included information on their race and social class so that the reader could understand the authors’ relationship to the multiple systems of oppression at the heart of the book.
The book consists of nine chapters, divided into three sections: post-positivist conceptions of resilience (Chapter 1), the experiences of adolescent girls and their educators (Chapters 2–5), and future directions for transforming educational spaces for girls (Chapters 6–9). In the first section of the book, the authors provide a critique of the dominant approaches to researching resilience in adolescents. They propose that these approaches limit discussion on preventing harmful experiences and neglect to praise girls for surviving harmful experiences. The authors integrated participants’ resistance strategies with what we know about resilience in psychology to propose new ways of thinking about resistance in education, highlighting the importance of liberation-focused frameworks.
In the second section of the book, the authors describe how hegemonic masculinity, viewed through the lenses of male entitlement and fragile masculinity, has led education systems to historically prioritize boys, marginalizing and insufficiently supporting girls. They also describe the hypersexualization of and sexual violence toward girls, particularly girls of color.
In the final section, the authors’ offer analytical frameworks that promote justice for students. These chapters are focused on how girls resist oppression, how girl-led activism can change the educational contexts and communities that they are a part of, and how communities and educators can heal and change. The authors offer their visions for education, propose a deep transformation, and rethink of how educational systems work. This section of the book inspires us to imagine transformative schools that promote adolescent girls’ development and prepare them for emerging adulthood.
This book makes an important, significant, and meaningful contribution to the literature on girls and education, and we recommend it enthusiastically. No book, however, is without limitations. For example, we found the sections on intersectionality, race, and ethnicity to be underdeveloped. By including the perspectives of more adolescent girls of color, especially Black, Latina, and Asian girls, the authors could have enhanced and deepened the readers’ understanding of adolescents’ racialized and gendered experiences. Crenshaw's (1991) intersectionality theory, Love's (2019) lens on abolitionist teaching, and Morris’s (2016) insights on Black girls’ experiences in school highlight the importance of including the experiences of girls of color.
Ultimately, this book makes a significant contribution to research on adolescent girls’ educational experiences. The authors pinpoint elements of our education systems that remain stagnant. In doing so, they present clear directions not only for research but also for activism that prioritizes girls’ psychological safety while enabling them to unabashedly pursue their life goals.
