Interrupting Discourses Around Gender Through Collective Memory Work and Collaborative Curriculum Research in Middle School

Many schools in recent years have implemented curricular projects to 'deal with' homophobia and sexism as problems that affect adolescent students and make schools unsafe. The ways in which we, as teachers and researchers, confront such problems, however, depends upon how we view their power within schools. When viewed as discursive elements of a generally heteronormative school environment, gender and sexuality norms become more complicated and subtle, as they are a part of systems of language, actions, and expectations that can be difficult to problematize with students and teachers. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist theory related to normativity and discourse analysis, our research looks at two middle-school projects aimed at interrupting heteronormative thinking by including students in the process of analyzing and re-creating school discourse. In one project, a whole class looks at gender identity formation through analyzing collective memory works collaboratively with the teacher. In the second project, a smaller group of girls works to re-think ways that the science/math curriculum could be more responsive to girls, in the end also analyzing the work that comes out of the collaboration. Together, the projects raise important questions about the effectiveness of such curricular projects, the power of school language around 'adolescence', and the potential for addressing gender normativity on the level of discourse, especially in the face of such powerful ideas of gender/sexuality in the middle grades.     

Schooling sexualities and gendered bodies. Experiences of LGBT students in Icelandic upper secondary schools

In this paper, we study how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people (LGBT) students in Icelandic upper secondary schools interpret their experience of heteronormative environment and how they respond to it. The aim is to explore how sexualities and gendered bodies are constructed through ‘schooling’. The article draws on interview data with seven LGBT students who attended five different upper secondary schools. We also use visual data collected during fieldwork at one upper secondary school and exemplify the results with a poster and a digitalised short-film, produced by the students, to substantiate what participants told us in the interviews. All of the students experienced heteronormative discourse and lack of respect and indicated that they did not feel fully accepted in school. Upon entering the classroom, the visibility of LGBTs and discussion about different performances of gender and sexuality seem to disappear, whether in terms of textbooks, course content, teaching practices and school environment. Furthermore, LGBTs and those who do not conform to the hegemonic performances of gender are often constructed as deviations from the norm, strange, and even depicted as the abjected other. This applies in particular to the informal school, which embraces the traditions, culture and social interactions among students and teachers. This othering occurs, despite relatively positive attitudes towards LGBT people in Icelandic society in general. The results signify a gap between policy and practice as regards the positioning of LBGT students, which affects their schooling and well-being.     

Constructing and Contesting Discourses of Heteronormativity: An Ethnographic Study of Youth in a Francophone High School in Canada

This article explores the possibilities and impossibilities of establishing queer discursive spaces within a minority-language high school. Data examined here are from a three-year study of language and identity in a Francophone high school in Ontario, Canada. As two members of the larger research team, we draw on our close observations of teenage students as they interacted with their peers at school events and in corridors and classrooms. The article analyses the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity-which privilege heterosexuality-were reproduced as well as contested in students' interactions within three domains: the general student population, a friendship network of five socially marginalised female students, and the lives of two gay male students. The analysis indicates that the heteronormative discourses produced and reproduced by the students had a silencing effect on gay male students but, paradoxically, created space for some straight female students to "play-act" lesbianism as a counter-hegemonic discourse. The findings highlight the irony of this school's motto-"Unity in diversity"-in relation to young women and queer youth in particular.     

Teenagers’ web questions compared with a sexuality curriculum: an exploration

Background: Teenagers need information about their changing bodies. Many young people do not receive adequate or accurate puberty/sexuality education from their parents or school, so many teenagers are going online to have their sexuality questions answered.

Purpose: This research examines teenagers’ web questions on sexuality, and an example of the puberty and sexuality education content that some may learn in school. It looks for evidence of heteronormative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality, using a theoretical framework based on the Four Discourses of Sexuality Education.

Sample: This includes the web questions (n = 200) of an evenly gendered sample of 13–15‐year-old students (n = 180) from four English-speaking nations, namely UK, USA, Canada and Australia, selected from a reputable puberty/sexuality education site, and, for comparison, an example of an age-representative public school Health and Physical Education (HPE) puberty/sexuality education curriculum.

Method: A gendered and narrative-thematic Content Analysis was undertaken, using the Four Discourses theoretical framework, on the students’ sexuality web questions, and also on the school HPE curriculum.

Results: The discourse of Victimisation was evident in nearly half of all students’ web questions, and over a third of the HPE curriculum. The discourse of Individual Morality was present in a quarter of both students’ questions and the curriculum, while the discourse of Desire was evidenced in a fifth of students’ questions and almost a third of curriculum content. Somewhat surprisingly, the discourse of Violence was present in 9% of exclusively female students’ web questions, and in 12% of the curriculum.

Conclusion: It is recommended that the sampled HPE curriculum, and similar curricula in these sampled students’ countries, need explicitly to address gender differences in students’ metacognition and conceptualisations of puberty and sexuality. This may enable students to embrace their entitlement to sexual subjectivity, in education and across the lifespan, thus helping to ensure students’ healthy, positive and purposeful life outcomes.     

‘It should be teamwork’: a critical investigation of school practices and parent advocacy in special education

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) suggests that parents are critical members of the special education system. Through conducting interviews with parents, observing individualised education plan (IEP) meetings, and analysing the discourse between the parent and the professional, this critical qualitative research investigates the parent–school relationship when parents are fighting for more inclusive placements for their children. This study uncovers the bureaucratic processes schools utilise, which do not allow for equitable parent participation in IEP processes including: medical and deficit discourse, professionalised discourse, policy interpretations, and meeting practices. We then describe strategies that parent-advocates use in order to obtain adequate services for their children including: networking, bringing an advocate, and education. We conclude with recommendations for schools and parents which promote enhanced parent–school collaboration throughout IEP planning, with an end goal towards improving educational opportunities for students with disabilities.     

Advancing home–school relations through parent support?

The present study explores a local initiative to develop parent support services through the school system. In focus are the discourse on home–school relations and parent support and the interplay between discourse and practical occurrences. Official documents, interviews and notes from municipal meetings and informal conversations were obtained from a local authority during 2009–2013. The results show that the education system is discursively positioned as an important player for the administration and organisation of parent support. All the same, opposing arguments are given precedence in decisions concerning what home–school relations should entail. The study explicates that parent support, when connected to compulsory education, is preferably conceptualised as part of and contingent on the forms and characteristics of home–school relations. Furthermore, it makes evident that the term school is recurrently used as a synonym of teachers. This has implications for both home–school relations and parent support.     

School mathematics registers in a context of low academic expectations

We investigate the different school mathematical discourses that are made available for students who all share an unfavourable social and economical position and experiences of low achievement in primary school, and who have been streamed into three different ability groups at the very beginning of secondary school. Our investigation is built on the premise that schools distribute different forms of knowledge to different social groups and thus provide different opportunities to develop consciousness. We look at teacher–student interactions as expressions of social structure at the micro-level and as constituents of social structure on the macrolevel. Employing analytic tools from social semiotics, we carried out a register analysis of the school mathematical discourse in each stream. We found systematic differences and linked them to the work of Dowling (1998) on the construction of ability and its implications for social hierarchies. As a result, the upper of the three streams was freed from a discourse of low expectations, while such a discourse was reinforced for the lower stream. Finally, we will discuss our findings in relation to the contemporary debate about the role of mathematics education in social stratification.     

Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school

Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children's school‐based cultures. Using a feminist post‐structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school‐based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.     

Professional development for scaling pedagogical innovation in the context of game-based learning: teacher identity as cornerstone in “shifting” practice

A dominant discourse on “scaling-up” small-scale innovations based on a limited number of successful classroom trials pervades the educational literature. We view this discourse as insensitive to the professional work of teachers and the human side of school change. Our research investigated how teacher professional development could be conceived and conducted to support take up of digital game-based learning in the context of a 3-week social studies unit on governance and citizenship. Students played a mobile game in their own time. In the classroom, teachers enacted dialogic pedagogy to facilitate students’ meaning-making of their gameplay experience. Our findings indicate that teacher identity, constituted by their interwoven knowing–doing–being–valuing is central to any effort to scale pedagogical and technological innovation. We modified our original model for the appropriation of innovation uptake by teachers to one that places teacher identity as the centrepiece of the model and cornerstone in “shifting” teacher practice.     

The sound of music: Constructing science as sociocultural practices through oral and written discourse

In this article, we examine the oral and written discourse processes in a high school physics class and how these discourse processes are related to sociocultural practices in scientific communities. Our theoretical framework is based on sociological and anthropological studies of scientific communities and ethnographies of classroom life. We review the use of discourse analysis as a methodological orientation in science education and provide a logic‐of‐inquiry framing how we used discourse analysis in our ethnographic research. Our ethnographic analysis showed that, through students' participation in creating scientific papers on the physics of sound, their appropriation of scientific discourse was related to the framing activities of the teachers and the social practices established over time in the classroom. Our textual analysis of the student papers focused on how they used evidence to make claims. We explore the lessons learned from participating in the classroom of these students. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 883–915, 1999     

Coming out as a lesbian,gay or bisexual teacher: negotiating private and professional worlds

This paper examines the ‘coming out’ decisions at work of four lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) teachers in England. It argues that such decisions are complicated by heteronormative discursive practices within schools that render LGB sexualities silent while simultaneously demanding that they are spoken. This double bind for LGB teachers as well as the professional and personal implications of choosing to come out or not to come out within the workplace is examined. The paper demonstrates that three choices dominate participants' experiences of coming out at work: to speak to no one at work about the private world, to come out to colleagues and to come out to colleagues and students. The paper posits, however, that the narrative devices deployed within coming out (at work) stories are limited by linguistic techniques that constrain the telling of sexual selves to the binary categories of straight or gay/lesbian. The possibilities for teachers whose lives and experiences interrupted the dominant heteronormative discourse are also examined.     

When Science is Strangely Alluring: Interrogating the masculinist and heteronormative nature of primary school science

Starting from the literature that interrogates the gendered nature of science and school science, this article considers the ways in which primary school science is masculinist and heteronormative. The author takes up Jane Miller's (1991) notion of the seductiveness of grand narratives (in this case school science) to envision the largely implicit ways in which school science may attract or repel certain students and teachers. Using this framework, the author 'reads' examples from the realms of pedagogy, curriculum and policy in primary school science, and concludes by examining some of the reasons why it is important to critically probe how these heterogendered boundaries are produced and reproduced with/in school science.     

‘No Outsiders’: Moving beyond a discourse of tolerance to challenge heteronormativity in primary schools

In this paper we describe a UK‐based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28‐month ESRC‐funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop action research projects that address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in their own schools and classrooms. In this paper we will examine how the original principles on which the project design was based have manifested themselves throughout the course of the project, drawing upon examples of classroom practice and reflective discussions among project team members. We will explore how designing intentionally for collective participation has produced spaces for people to do and think in ways that have not only gone beyond what we imagined but have also challenged and sometimes contradicted our own ways of thinking.     

How prosody marks shifts in footing in classroom discourse

Prosody refers to features of speech such as intonation, volume and pace. In this paper, we examine teacher–student dialogue in an English lesson at a secondary school in England, using Conversation Analysis notation to mark features of prosody. We also make connections with Goffman's theoretical concept of footing. We show that, within an episode of teacher-led plenary discourse, prosody may be used to signal shifts in footing between different kinds of pedagogic activity. We identify: (i) teacher-led IRF (Initiation–Response–Feedback) discussion; (ii) the teacher's modelling of exploratory talk; (iii) a shift to instruction-giving. If teachers are able to model the enquiring tone of exploratory talk, they may in turn encourage more thoughtful contributions from students.     

Swedish progressive school politics and the disciplinary regime of the school, 1946–1962: a genealogical perspective

This article examines the vision of the Swedish comprehensive school reform between 1946–1962 as it pertains to the ever-troubling questions of discipline and order in school. Inspired primarily by the work of Michel Foucault and his genealogical perspective, the article problematises the notion that character formation and school discipline during this period underwent a radical democratic transformation, and that this was the successful result of a progressive political agenda. This account of school discipline is shown to be problematic since it conceals a complex and even ironic historical process, where a disciplinarian discourse in school lingered and even widened and deepened disciplinary practice during the period.     

FARGEKARAKTERISERING OG FARGEPREFERANSE II. LITT OM PREFERANSE FOR FARGAR HOS OSLO‐BARN I ALDEREN 10—13 ÅR

This study explores the memories of starting school that remain in a person's mind throughout the decades. The data were collected from elderly/retired people in Finland. The participants were recruited through two magazines and were asked to write a story on their memories about starting school. Eight stories about starting school in 1937–1957 were received and were analyzed using discourse analysis. The results showed that memories about starting school included memories of leaving home and saying goodbye, signs of the schoolchild, feelings of uncertainty in new situations and realizing differences. The Second World War also had an impact on the memories. The results indicated that both positive and negative memories related to starting school remained after decades.     

The responsible parent and networks of support: A case study of school engagement in a challenging environment

Research, policy and practice on education in recent years has focused attention on the mediating role that parents play in children's schooling. Parents have been constructed as responsible agents; as consumers, investors and partners in the performance-oriented educational project. Much of the literature has looked at parent–school relations from the vantage point of parents, particularly parents in disadvantaged areas. Less has been written on how parent–school relations look from a school's perspective. In this article we draw on data from a case study English school in a socio-economically deprived area and explore the nature of the construct ‘responsible parent’ from the perspectives of teaching staff. We utilise data from semi-structured interviews with teaching staff in one case study school located on the outskirts of an English city. Through the data we outline teachers’ conceptions of parents and an emerging network of engagement incorporating parents as part of a broader social and education project in schools. We argue that a dominant construct, the responsible parent, has resonances with the ways that teachers conceptualise parents. At the same time, the case study school inhabits a dual institutional space: it is captured within a neo-liberal discourse on the responsible parent as a key conduit for an outcomes-oriented education project and also goes beyond the narrow confines of formal educational structures in offering ‘challenging’ parents social and emotional support in connecting with their children and their schooling.