Samantha Abbott
College: College of Social Sciences and International Studies
I am a full time secondary school history teacher in a large comprehensive in the South West. As well as this I have additional responsibilities as Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo) across the school. I completed my PGCE in 2010 and it was during this time that I became particularly interested in the influence of gender within my classroom. I embarked upon my Masters in Education on a part-time course where I completed my dissertation titled: Do attitudes towards History change throughout the secondary phase and how, if at all, is gender affecting attitudes? I found that, whilst almost all students claimed that there was a stereotype of what topics boys and girls liked within the history curriculum, they claimed that this stereotype did not apply to them. This opened up wider questions about the social construction of stereotypical behaviour and in particular theories of multiple masculinities. This led me to embark upon the EdD in 2013 in an attempt to broaden my knowledge and explore some of the emerging questions.
