Poofy Dresses and Big Guns: A post-structuralist analysis of gendered positioning through talk amongst friends

This article uses data collected from a class of eight to nine year olds to show the specific ways children are defining their gendered positions within the context of their same sex friendship groups. Children's subjectivities are described as both actively formed and also positioned within the surrounding (gendered) discourses. This article will show specific ways that structure and agency is played out through talk amongst friends. Importantly, analysis of the talk indicates that children are able to both align themselves as well as challenge dominant gendered discourses. The article argues that informal talk amongst friends is an important space for children to make sense of masculinities and femininities and to develop their identities, particularly in the context of school.     

Friendship and Fandom: Ethnicity,power and gendering readings of the popular

This paper explores the relationships between knowledge of popular culture and power negotiations among young children's friendship groups and derives from a research project on the identity formations of 'mixed race' children. The paper begins with a consideration of existing work on music, ethnicity and cultural identities and how this is implicated in formations of 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1991, Imagined Communities , Verso). Next, I look at the ways in which this work has been gendered with particular reference to the female music 'fan'. Throughout I use data from my research to show how the children engaged in friendship/power relationships that challenge much of this material. The paper centralises the way readings are used by friends in processes that are implicated in en/gendering identities and identifications - how likes and dislikes are mobilised differently among children who are becoming 'boys' and 'girls' who are friends, through use of the love/loathe discourses. The allegiance work is saturated with and constitutive of relations of power/knowledge which are both painful and pleasurable for children who are differently positioned within networks of learning and cultural expertise.     

Exclusion,Inclusion and Moral Ordering in Two Girls’ Friendship Groups

This article makes use of informal interview talk data gathered during a longitudinal study of adolescent girls’ friendship groups. Two group‐produced narratives involving categorisation, moral ordering, inclusion and exclusion are examined with the aim of discerning patterns of girls’ friendship networks. Through a detailed examination of the girls’ talk about themselves, their friends, their enemies, the minor breaking‐ups and making‐ups, the declarations of loyalty, the aspersions cast and the motives attributed, it is possible to discern a significant moral and social order which underlies girls’ friendships. This article represents an attempt to view friendship between girls, not in terms of a pre‐determined model of pervasive, yet invisible patriarchal constraints, but in terms of lived moments of interaction between and with girls who are actually getting on with the business of being friends with each other as they are collaboratively describing events in their friendship networks.     

Friendship and Task Management in Children's Peer Tutoring

The role of friendship in mediating children's learning is poorly understood, and conflicting claims exist about the manner in which friendship may influence both the process and outcome of learning. Evidence from studies on peer tutoring suggests that children acting as tutors have difficulty co‐ordinating the physical, informational and social demands of a tutoring task, due to their limited cognitive resources. Eight‐ to nine‐year‐old boys and girls were allocated to friend or non‐friend pairs in one‐to‐one tutoring dyads for the purposes of examining the impact of friendship on the process and outcome of tutoring. Although tutoring dyads of friends might be expected to focus their resources on informational components of the task, because their pre‐established relationship would minimise the burden of managing the social demands of the task, the opposite was found. Child tutors who were friends allocated additional resources to the social management aspect of the task, including monitoring tutee progress, but allocated no additional resources to imparting information about the task necessary for improving learning. Far from reducing task demands upon the tutor, friendship appears to impose greater burdens on children's limited resources, consequential upon the need to re‐negotiate their new social relationship arising from unfamiliar and unequal roles into which tutoring has thrust them.     

What Kind of a Girl Does Science? The Construction of School Science Identities

A view of science as a culturally‐mediated way of thinking and knowing suggests that learning can be defined as engagement with scientific practices. How students engage in school science is influenced by whether and how students view themselves and whether or not they are the kind of person who engages in science. It is therefore crucial to understand students' identities and how they do or do not overlap with school science identities. In this paper, we describe four middle school African American girls' engagement with science. They were selected in the 7th grade because they expressed a fondness for science in school or because they had science‐related hobbies outside of school. The data were collected from the following sources: interviews of students, their parents and their teachers; observations in science classes; journal writing; and focus groups. These girls' stories provide us with a better understanding of the variety of ways girls choose to engage in science and how this engagement is shaped by their views of what kind of girl they are. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 441–458, 2000.     

Video diary: a method for exploring learning dispositions

This paper presents an innovative method for qualitative research in education. The video dairy technique was developed and used alongside other qualitative methods to map the socio‐cultural landscape of primary‐school children's learning dispositions prior to their transfer to secondary school. The larger project comprised a case study of a group of children transferring from one Year 6 classroom to their local comprehensive secondary school, with particular reference to their learning of mathematics. Theoretically framed by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological tools, the study explored the impact of three fields—school, family and peer group—upon children's learning dispositions and trajectories at this school interface. The alternative perspectives afforded by the diary entries highlighted the inter‐relatedness of the three fields of interest, often in ways that had not been anticipated or considered. I will explain practical aspects of the process and consider some of the challenges that might be experienced by researchers using video diary techniques.     

Dumb Dorky Girls and Wimpy Boys: Gendered Themes in Diary Cartoon Novels

In this paper, we focus on gendered themes promulgated in three books written in diary cartoon form. Although written for different audiences, each of these books constructs gender norms in similar ways. They promote heteronormative gender roles for boys and girls by endorsing traditional femininities and hegemonic masculinities through the following themes: popularity, mean girls/bullying, self-concept and self-esteem, friendship, and adult naïveté. First, we discuss the ways in which gender is implicated in children’s literature. Then, we describe and analyze the diary cartoon books, contrasting and comparing those with girl protagonists and that with a boy protagonist. Finally, we explore the gendered implications in the books’ themes, concluding that girls and boys are represented in different manners that reinforce gender essentialism and heteronormativity.     

Gender Meanings in Grade Eight Students' Talk about Classroom Writing

This study examined the ways in which gender influences students' choices in their classroom writing. Data sources included the students' writing, small group conversations, classroom observations, and interviews with teachers. For the most part, students attempted to maintain a widely recognized gender order in their talk about girls' and boys' writing. The students' writing choices were constrained or extended by the range of discourses available to construct their gender and literate identities. The boys generally positioned themselves within powerful hegemonic masculine discourses. Some boys, however, wrote about relationships between male friends within competitive environments. Taking up the more powerful masculine discourses, some girls wrote about personal experiences playing team sports. Students made one boy aware that he had positioned himself as incompetent within the social order when he wrote about a gay character.     

‘Sticks and stones': masculinities and conflict spaces

Drawing upon a post-structural ethnography of boys’ constructions of gendered and sexual identities in one South African high school, this paper empirically seeks to theorise how 20 Grade 8 boys, identified as The Jokers, The Achievers, The Outcasts and The Average Ou's, simultaneously seek out spaces in male peer culture to cultivate, police and challenge hegemonic notions of masculinity. The paper illustrates the construction and positioning of masculinities across spaces of conflict, more particularly, the personal and social resources reproduced by boys in the pursuit of ‘desirable’ masculinities across experiences of interpersonal conflict, punishment, friendship and play. Given the nature of these identity struggles in school boy peer culture, this paper highlights the need for fostering and maintaining peer conversational spaces where boys and girls are challenged to actively deconstruct prevailing gendered identities and work towards more expansive definitions of self.     

Boys Bonding: Same-sex friendship,the unconscious and heterosexual discourse

This article aims to explore some of the ways in which the cultural meanings and practices of gender, sexuality and relationships intersect with and are reworked in the same-sex friendships of children aged nine to eleven. Using material from an ethnographic study, it focuses on two boys, Ben and Karl, who identified themselves as best friends. The article argues that, while the boys clearly knew, positioned themselves in and deployed heterosexual discourse, their relationship to this was complex. In particular, they appeared to use it to distance themselves from the feminine and to build their friendship as a pleasurable, intimate and exciting space. The article uses psychoanalytic arguments to explore this material, tentatively suggesting that the boys' access to the cultural practice of 'best friendship' mobilised identifications that both reinforced conventional versions of heterosexual masculinity and questioned these. In particular, the article suggests that the boys' friendship may have involved 'over-inclusive' gender identifications - ones that indicate the existence of boyhood masculinities that are more capacious and flexible than those hegemonic in teenage and adolescent cultures.     

Conflict and Friendship Relations in Middle Childhood: Behavior in a Closed-Field Situation

Disagreements between school-aged children were examined as a function of friendship status. 66 same-sex dyads were selected, including equal numbers of "best friends" and nonfriends, who were then observed while playing a board game (a closed-field situation). Conflicts occurred more frequently among friends than among nonfriends and lasted longer. Friends did not talk more during their conflicts than nonfriends, but assertions were used selectively according to friendship and sex: With friends, girls used assertions accompanied by rationales more frequently than boys whereas boys used assertions without rationales more frequently than girls. These sex differences were not evident during conflicts between nonfriends. Results are discussed in relation to the social constraints intrinsic to closed-field competitive conditions as these apply to friendship relations in middle childhood.     

Differently Literate: Gender identity and the construction of the developing reader

ABSTRACT This paper argues that three specific areas of influence contribute to shaping the attitudes and expectations of adolescent reading in Britain: that of the family, that of the friendship group and that of the peer group in school. I examine pupils' perceptions of themselves as readers, and the ways in which their early reading experiences have been differentiated in relation to their gender. I provide evidence that reading is constructed within both domestic and school settings as an interest more appropriate for adolescent girls than it is for boys, and examine ways in which their reading experience has been influenced by other members of the family and the wider community. Finally I identify the role of the school curriculum in promoting particular versions of literacy that have more appeal for girls than boys in the survey.     

Emotion Talk in Preschool Same-Sex Friendship Groups: Fluidity over Time and Context

Recent research suggests that through the medium of "emotion talk," American, middle-class parents socialize daughters to express emotion more and to focus on sadness and socialize sons to express emotion less and to focus on anger. However, little is known about peer emotion socialization. The present study utilizes a notion of "emotion talk" expanded from previous studies and follows its use among preschool peers using a longitudinal design. Two friendships groups in a mixed-age preschool classroom of 3-and 4-year-old children at a university-based children's center were identified and videotaped in different contexts at different time points in the academic year. The boys' friendship group evolved norms over time against the expression of scaredness simultaneously with norms downgrading girl characteristics. Both the boys' and girls' friendship groups showed contextual fluidity in the expression of emotion and emotion talk that argue against an essentialist model of emotion socialization and development. This study's findings of contextual fluidity in emotion talk suggest policy implications for the promotion of gender equity. Mixed-age classrooms that provide children with a range of opportunities to engage in activities that cross gender boundaries may minimize gender polarization and maximize gender equity.     

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.     

Making ‘us’ visible: Using membership categorisation analysis to explore young people's accomplishment of collective identity-in-interaction in relation to digital technology

This article examines young people's sense of self and collective identity in relation to their use of specific digital tools available at their school. We use membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explore how a group of young people produce a collective identity-in-interaction as captured in concrete relational speech acts. Fine-grained MCA analysis of group interview talk reveals participant students operating as a collectivity to accomplish a sense of shared identity in relation to the iPad. This focus on the ways in which young people's identities are intertwined with digital technology distinguishes this article from the technicist and operational perspectives that dominate the field of educational technology research and demonstrates MCA's potential for illuminating the relationship that young people have with technology. The article contributes to a growing body of research that engages with more nuanced ways of understanding contemporary, technology-mediated learning as a process of producing not only knowledge and skills, but also selfhood—both private and shared.     

Whose Knowledge? Whose Opportunities? The Demise of the Critical Academy?

This paper explores the emotional and social dynamic of girl's friendship groups in the primary phase of schooling. Previous research by one of the authors suggests that some primary head teachers viewed the particular groupings of girls as providing mutually supportive contexts for group members. Through discussion, interviews and observations of girls and their teachers in years 2, 4 and 6 of three inner city primary schools we aim to provide an insight into the organization of the groups, the rules which govern group membership, and the role groups play in defining the quality and nature of the girls relationships and their social networks at school. We further explore the impact that such social networks have for learning and the role the girls' teachers play in this process.     

'Learning to Cooperate': A study of how primary teachers and children construct classroom cultures

This paper reports on the findings of a study, the 'Constructing Classroom Cultures' project, funded by a small Australian Research Council grant at the University of Melbourne. Located in three primary school classrooms in Melbourne, Victoria, this study investigated how teachers and grade 3-4 students develop shared values and understandings concerning formal and informal codes of behaviour. Drawing on classroom observations, individual interviews with teachers and focus group interviews with children, this paper discusses the ways that teachers and children together build classroom cultures. Practices that work to produce supportive classroom environments as well as problem areas are identified. Examining classroom cultures at the micro-political level offers scope for considering how power relations can contribute positively to educational processes. Additionally, the ways in which informal interactions between teacher and students and among students call into play collaboration, compliance and resistance are opened up for examination. These case studies aim to contribute to understanding how productive classroom cultures are constructed in day-to-day interactions, a significant area of concern for teachers and teacher education students.     

The excluded citizenship identity: Palestinian/Arab Israeli young people negotiating their political identities

This paper explores the ways in which Arab/Palestinian high school students in Israel negotiate their civic and national identities. The paper draws upon qualitative data that included semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with 20 students in an Arab Muslim high school. It focuses on the ways in which they make sense of the notion of citizenship and negotiate their position as Arab/Palestinian Muslim citizens in a Jewish state. The paper attempts to go beyond common conceptualisations of political identities of the Arab/Palestinian minority in Israel. It suggests that Arab/Palestinian students are aware of the politics of citizenship in Israel and draw upon different discourses of citizenship and meanings of inclusion in defining their belongings.     

"I Didn't Expect That I Would Get Tons of Friends More Each Day": Children's experiences of friendship during the transition to school

This article presents some of the findings from a study that explores the complex nature of the transition to school, and looks specifically at 23 children's experiences of friendship and the way in which this impacted on their early experiences of school. Observations of the children, and interviews with the children, their families and their teachers, revealed that not only did friends play a vital role in facilitating the children's transition to formal schooling, they also assisted directly in facilitating the children's learning. Conversely, a lack of friends was related to a more difficult transition, the repercussions of which often extended for some time. The article suggests that parents/caregivers and teachers may wish to take a proactive role in providing opportunities for children to make friends during their transition to school.