I was keen to explore the ways in which these teachers were constructing their own
meanings of gender and how they were looking to their past experiences to think and
rethink their teaching strategies and pedagogies in terms of gender. In the stories and
examples of practice the teachers were sharing with colleagues I could see a view of their
knowledge as being socially and culturally constructed within the local context of
Maltese secondary schools. Their knowledge was situated in their own meanings of
experience (Bruner, 1996). From the discussions carried out in the M.Ed. seminars, I
realised that these teachers knew a great deal about what was working and what was not
working with the girls and boys they were teaching in their science classrooms. I wanted
to make the experiential knowledge and exemplars of practice which the teachers were
sharing with each other in the seminar forum more explicit and visible. Like Elwood
and Klenowski (2002) I believed that postgraduate students construct their meaning of
gender in relation to science from their learning experiences. However in the masters
course they were also being exposed to new ideas about gender and they were actively
making sense of new knowledge presented to them in order to develop their own
pedagogies of teaching and learning science. Their understandings of how they were
responding to gender issues in the science classroom were being shared and this enabled
them to become part of ‘a community of shared practice’ (Elwood & Klenowski, 2002, p.
246)