Girls,girls, girls: Gender composition and female school choice

Gender segregation in employment may be explained by women's reluctance to choose technical occupations. However, the foundations for career choices are laid much earlier. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and science and are more likely to choose these subjects if they are in single-sex classes. One possible explanation is that coeducational settings reinforce gender stereotypes. In this paper, we identify the causal impact of the gender composition in coeducational classes on the choice of school type for female students. Using natural variation in the gender composition of adjacent cohorts within schools, we show that girls are less likely to choose a traditionally female dominated school type and more likely to choose a male dominated school type at the age of 14 if they were exposed to a higher share of girls in previous grades.     

Coherence,contradiction, and the development of school science identities

This study demonstrates the potential for collaborative research among participants in local settings to effect positive change in urban settings characterized by diversity. It describes an interpretive case study of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse eighth grade science classroom in an urban magnet school in order to explore why some of the students did not achieve at high levels and identify with school science although they were both interested in and knowledgeable about science. The results of this study indicated that structural issues such as the school's selection process, the discourses perpetuated by teachers, administrators, and peers regarding “who belongs” at the school, and negative stereotype threat posed obstacles for students by highlighting rather than mitigating the inequalities in students' educational backgrounds. We explore how a methodology based on the use of cogenerative dialogues provided some guidance to teachers wishing to alter structures in their classrooms to be more conducive to all of their students developing identities associated with school science. Based on the data analysis, we also argue that a perspective on classrooms as communities of practice in which learning is socially situated rather than as forums for competitive displays, and a view of students as valued contributors rather than as recipients of knowledge, could address some of the obstacles. Recommendations include a reduced emphasis on standardized tasks and hierarchies, soliciting unique student contributions, and encouraging learning through peripheral participation, thereby enabling students to earn social capital in the classroom. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 1209–1228, 2010     

Fractured academic identities: dyslexia,secondary education,self-esteem and school experiences

ABSTRACT

Identity construction for individuals with dyslexia is significantly moulded by their transition to and experiences within secondary education. This is an interview-based study with 20 participants living in England. Support-related school experiences, relationships with teachers, societal perceptions about the importance of literacy and academic achievement and the reactions of others around them are the core focus. The findings are theorised using symbolic interactionism, and this paper aims to extend Goffman’s notion of ‘spoiled identity’ into a more specialised term for children with Special Educational Needs, resulting in the alternative term ‘fractured academic identity’, the elements of which are developed throughout this paper from the experiences of learners with dyslexia. The findings revolve around identity development as result of academic experiences, and are mainly aimed at teachers, to inform their knowledge around identity issues and to also inform their practice.     

High school students’ literacy practices and identities,and the figured world of school

Conventional wisdom holds that American teenagers do not read or write – that they are a media‐driven group who prefer movies, television and playing video games. Ethnographic data gathered in the High School Literacy Project, a study of four North Carolina high schools, showed a far different picture of teenage literacy. This paper reports on partial findings of the larger study and argues that students use their literacy practices to form their identities within, and sometimes in opposition to, the figured worlds of school, work and family. Many students look to school to provide formal literacy experiences, but find their reading and writing passions at odds with the demands of the school curriculum.     

Religion and primary school choice in Ireland: school institutional identities and student profile

Ireland’s demographic profile has changed significantly in the past 20 years, being now characterised by increasing cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. However, primary schooling in Ireland has remained highly denominational, mostly Roman Catholic, in nature, with a small number of minority faith schools and multi-denominational schools. This paper describes the nature of the Irish primary educational system and addresses the implications of its institutional structure and school institutional identity for school choice. In so doing, it draws on the national Growing Up in Ireland study, and documents the role of socio-cultural and religious factors in the choice of primary school.     

Private Girls and Public Worlds: Producing femininities in the primary school

This article draws upon data gathered from a research project entitled 'Children's Relationship Cultures in Years 5 and 6'. The project aims to explore the ways in which primary school age children understand emotional, caring and family relationships. This paper will focus upon the role of friendship in the cultures of girls, aged 9-10, in a primary school classroom. An ethnographic approach is adopted to illustrate the variety of interactions in which friendship is spoken, displayed and enacted within pupil cultures. Analysis of these exchanges suggests that notions of friendship and patterns of friendship are constitutive of sexual-gender identities. The paper argues that being friends/breaking friends is a technique utilised for the regulation and negotiation of femininities and the production of differentiated sex-gender hierarchies. The paper will focus upon the activities of the 'diary group'--a self-styled network of eight girls who met in the school playground to discuss issues that interested and excited them. Recurrent themes in diary group discussions are identified as: puberty/periods; erotic attachments; and imagined futures. The paper suggests that the diary group can be seen as a site for identity production and asks the question: what kind of identities are being produced when these girls meet and talk? Finally, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which members of the diary group create a 'private' space within the public domain of the school and, through talk, produce themselves as feminine subjects.     

Girls negotiating sexuality and violence in the primary school

Girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence and harassment is a recurrent theme in much of the literature on schooling in sub‐Saharan Africa. Within this research, girls are often framed as passive victims of violence. By drawing on a case study, this paper focuses on 12 to 13‐year‐old South African school girls as they mediate and participate in heterosexual cultures that are simultaneously privileging and damaging. Set against the wider social context where violent gender relations are key to the building blocks of patriarchy, the paper examines how heterosexuality underscores the formation of femininity as girls engage with and participate with each other and boys in informal school relations. To this end, Butler's concept of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ is deployed to examine how girls navigate the wall of male power, where the ‘real’ expression of femininity is embedded within heterosexuality. The paper explores girls’ investment in heterosexual cultures in the school playground and on ‘dress‐up Friday’ to examine how gender power inequalities and violent relations manifest. In expanding the analysis of heterosexuality to primary school contexts, the paper broadens the focus of school‐based gender and sexualities research in sub‐Saharan Africa to address a neglected area of younger girls’ femininity and their active agency. The paper argues for the importance of addressing primary school girls, femininity and the power of heterosexuality through which relations of inequalities operate.     

Single‐sex Education for Girls: heterosexuality,gendered subjectivity and school choice

Single‐sex education for girls constitutes a focal point around which issues of gender, choice and educational decision‐making coalesce. My concern is not to enter the debate about the merits of single‐sex education for girls per se, but to examine the relationship between discourses of femininity and discourses around single‐sex schooling to see how they interact in the choice of single‐sex schools by girls and their parents. In this paper, I explore the ways in which aspects of feminist poststructuralist theory can be used to offer a more dynamic and complex account of the processes of school choice than that assumed by neo‐liberal theorists. The theory I develop is illuminated by interviews with three girls and their parents, from different social‐class backgrounds, at the point at which they were making decisions about which secondary school to apply for. A focus such as this enables me to do two things: firstly, to develop a more adequate understanding of the relationship between gender and educational decision‐making; and secondly, to critique the underlying theory of instrumental rationality, and its relationship to school choice, which has underwritten the marketisation of education in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

Negotiating multiple identities between school and the outside world: a critical discourse analysis

This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of segments of transcribed interviews and student-related public documents finds a mismatch between a social justice curriculum at school and its transfer into students' accounts of outside school lived realities. The article concludes that a productive social justice pedagogy must use its key principles of (con)textual interrogation to engage students in reflexive practice about their positioning within and against discourses of social justice in their student and civic lives. An impending national curriculum must decide whether or not it negotiates the discursive divide any better.     

Primary and secondary school teachers in France: changes in identities and professionalization

Teacher professionalization is a recent field of study in France that has developed in connection with the creation of the Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maîtres (IUFMs) and other changes that have brought primary and secondary teachers into closer relation. In order to help the reader understand the traditional divisions between these two groups and recent trends towards unification, we first present historical differences in their development as separate corps, their training and their modes of unionization. We then proceed to analyse the political turning point of 1989, date of the creation of the IUFMs which introduced a similar curriculum for teachers of each degree on the basis of officially specified fundamental skills, as well as leading to the reconstitution of teachers' unions. Finally, we examine the effects of recent moves toward professionalization on the rationalization of teachers' knowledge and skills, the relationship between training and professional activity and teachers' socialization.     

The creation of learner identities as part of social inclusion: gender,ethnicity and social space

This paper reports on a project designed to increase parents' and carers' involvement in learning in a multiply deprived inner city community. The project was part of a broader evaluation of a social inclusion partnership funded under the Single Regeneration Budget. The analysis shows how learner identities are created and cannot just be assumed. Drawing on a community development model, a community worker was able to engage with women through routine encounters in their own social space. The project involved a partnership with schools. Other research has suggested that many school/parent partnerships are based on models of resourceful middle-class femininity. This study found that community education worked through engagement with the social realities of women's lives to foster learning identities. Participants were encouraged to gain accreditation based on developing their own knowledge and skills, and to develop learner identities, which allowed them to access other learning. The paper concludes with the importance of working within the ‘habitus’, and that the association of cultural and social capital with education, which policy makers assume, is not universal.     

Expressing social gender identities in the first year of school

Tests and spot observations were undertaken in first year classes in four primary schools to study children’s knowledge of and employment of social representations of gender. The use of these resources in children’s expression of social gender identities was re-assessed at the end of the first year in two classes. Analysis of spot observations identified distinct masculine and feminine styles in patterns of association, the masculine style emphasising gender exclusivity. Children also used group size to express social gender identities. Analyses showed that at the beginning of the school year girls interact in smaller groups, but by the end of the year they associate in groups as large as those of boys. Despite differences in group behaviour test data revealed that girls and boys share a similar knowledge of the interrelationship between the gender marking of social category membership and material culture.     

Writing stories,rewriting identities: using journalism education and mobile technologies to empower marginalized high school students

This study examines the impact that producing a print newspaper using cell phones had on marginalized students in a high school journalism classroom. Analysis of data from participant observation, artifact analysis and student interviews revealed that a) students negotiated cell phone use for educational purposes, despite school bans on such devices, and b) students manifested emerging, transformative identities that positively influenced their roles in five key areas: as a conception of self, in other academic classes, among peers, with family, and in the community. Our findings point to the significance of media-based journalism production in allowing marginalized students to embrace professional identities by participating in a meaningful community of practice. This research highlights the academic, social and civic benefits of such initiatives, and calls attention to the range of opportunities and challenges that pertain to using mobile devices as learning tools in these contexts.     

体育生活方式与学校体育健康教育

利用文献资料对体育生活方式理论提出的时代必然性,学校《体育与健康》教育与体育生活方式的关系进行了分析.揭示了学校体育与健康教育应以培养学生的体育生活方式为主要目标,改变传统的体育教育教学观念和课程结构,以“健康第一”指导思想为主线,创造、构建多元的校园体育文化氛围,为社会培养全面合格的人才服务.     

Miners,diggers, ferals and show‐men: school–community projects that affirm and unsettle identities and place?

Many contemporary sociologists suggest that a feature of modern life is that the practices and identities associated with ‘place’ are eroded. The local no longer matters in everyday life as it once did. Some national governments are persuaded of the possibility of an urban dystopia of Orwellian dimensions, and have found a response in theories and rhetorics of social capital, citizenship and communitarianism. They have instituted strategies to address an imaginary of harmonious local communities. In this paper I examine one such government intervention and show how four schools in Tasmania, Australia, took up the invitation to strengthen ties with their local communities. The projects reveal that the local still exists and matters, but they also hint at other possibilities. I argue that by working with a ‘place‐based’ curriculum to assist young people in building local networks and engaging productively with their local neighbourhoods, schools might provide important resources for identity‐building and learning.     

Evaluating school psychological reports,part I: A procedure for systematic feedback

This paper provides a rationale for obtaining systematic evaluative feedback concerning the perceived usefulness of school psychological reports and their impact on the development of individual educational plans for referred students. Research data and authoritative opinion are used to support the need for school psychologists to obtain feedback about their reports on a case-by-case basis, rather than to obtain global perceptions of the meaningfulness and usefulness of reports in general. A working copy of a brief evaluation form that can be attached to the report and forwarded to the referral agent is included for the benefit of interested readers.     

Girls in primary school science classrooms: theorising beyond dominant discourses of gender

The paper explores the ways girls appropriate gender through actions, gesture and talk to achieve things in primary school science classrooms. It draws on socio-cultural approaches to show that when everyday classroom practices are viewed from multiple planes of analysis, historical, institutional and in the micro dynamics of classroom interaction, gender comes into view in a variety of ways and not only via dominant discourses. Focused observations and interviews were carried out in Year 3 primary school science classrooms in four schools in the UK and the USA (children aged 7 and 8 years). The paper suggests how teachers can work with gender to open up new spaces in primary science classrooms for girls. This remains a priority irrespective of the contemporary anxieties around boys’ achievement if girls are to grow up feeling that science is a legitimate arena in which to participate.     

Differential Achievement of Girls and Boys at GCSE: some observations from the perspective of one school

This article focuses on the differential achievements of girb and boys at GCSE over the four years 1991‐94, in the context of one Suffolk comprehensive school, and attempts to analyse, through questionnaire and interview with students, teachers and parents, some of the factors contributing to such differences. Male attitudes and a paramount concern with image emerge as key factors in affecting how boys respond to the academic and authority structure of the school. Teachers attitudes to masculinity and femininity in turn influence classroom interactions between teacher and learner: students perceived more positive teacher attention and support focused on girls, with teachers prepared to be more lenient and tolerant with girls than with boys. In homework and coursework, girls appear to be more committed and better organised, and to have a more realistic grasp of what is required for success at GCSE. In conclusion, an attempt is made to identify a number of issues which schools might consider in attempting to reduce male underachievement.     

课程和教学改革与学校建筑风格的发展

学校建筑风格的发展是教育改革与发展的重要组成部分。20世纪70年代以后,受到现代教育理论与后工业化建筑理论和实践的影响,学校建筑风格向着开放化、多样化和可组合化方向发展,越来越适宜学生的学习和生活,更为人性化。