‘Mucking around in class’, ‘giving crap’ and ‘acting cool’: Adolescent boys enacting masculinities at school, Canadian Journal of Education, 2001, 25(2), 102-112. (original) (raw)
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Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 2000
Semi-structured interviews with adolescent boys attending a Catholic coeducational high school in Perth, Western Australia, were analyzed using a Foucauldian approach to establish how these boys relate to one another and respond to their experiences of schooling. Their rejection of academic achievement and their peer group relations are tied to acting out problematic forms of "cool" masculinity. The ability of some boys to identify the social dynamics and the consequences of their behaviour for themselves and others suggests entry points and thresholds for school programs in masculinity education. Des entrevues semi-dirigées auprès d'adolescents fréquentant une école secondaire mixte catholique à Perth, Westerm Australia, ont été analysées à l'aide d'une approche foucauldienne afin de déterminer le type de relations qu'entretiennent ces garçons entre eux et leurs réactions aux expériences scolaires. Leur rejet de la réussite scolaire et leurs relations avec leurs pairs sont reliés à des comportements problématiques de masculinité jugés « chics ». La capacité de certains garçons d'identifier la dynamique sociale et les conséquences de leur comportement sur euxmêmes et autrui permet d'envisager des points d'entrée pour des programmes scolaires portant sur la masculinité. Research with a group of adolescent boys in a Catholic coeducational high school in Perth, Western Australia, shows how boys fashion particular versions of masculinity for themselves through specific social practices such as "mucking around" in class, "giving crap," and acting "cool." Cool masculinity in these boys' lives at school is significant and requires comment. The cool pose has been discussed in the context of African American Black hypermasculinity (see Majors, 1989), but its appropriation and implications for the self-fashioning practices of White middle-class youth have not been equally explored. In fact, Epstein (1998) argues that further research is required to explore the role various masculinities play in how boys negotiate their schooling and the effect on their educational attainment: This research would fall into a number of areas, but would need, in the first instance, to focus on understanding how different versions of masculinity are put in
A call for a level playing field: A study of masculinity 1999-2000
2004
The impetus of this study was a concern for the education and general welfare of boys. The interest in boys’ education has grown notably over the past ten years. This interest is evident in media reports, popular psychology texts, education reports and scholarly writing. Academic research on boys’ experience of education is less prolific although it does include studies conducted by Australian and international researchers. Central to this commentary on boys’ education is the concept of masculinity. Here there is a strong claim that boys’ academic performance and behaviour is influenced by the way they construct and live out masculine expressions. This research study is situated in a Catholic secondary school for boys (referred to as the College) and seeks to illumine the school experiences of students at the school. As school Counsellor I noted that some boys were displaying a lack of motivation for learning, resisted independent thinking and seemed to be opposed to authority. Thes...
A Tangle of Trouble: boys, masculinity and schooling--future directions
Educational Review, 2003
This article takes up the growing concern regarding boys and schooling which is receiving international attention. Critical of the contemporary discourses of 'panic' that do not address the complexities and diversity of the lives of boys in schools, the authors draw on both the critical scholarship in masculinities, as well as their own experience. In addition to highlighting the heteronormative privilege which many boys have historically been granted, the article makes visible the counter-hegemonic masculine performances of a group of young men in school in order to offer alternative possibilities of masculine practice. Finally, the authors suggest that the debate about boys in schooling may benefit from a focus on the social gendered performances of boys rather than on the claim that girls are receiving too much attention or on educational deficiencies.
Reasserting masculinity in Australian schools
Women's Studies International Forum, 1996
Synopsis-This paper draws on empirical studies and on the literature on masculinity to explore the ways in which many men and boys respond when feminist teachers undertake the work of feminist reform in schools. It shows how such work poses challenges to certain masculinities and identifies the different strategies that boys and men adopt in order to reassert their "superiority" and control. It seeks to understand male responses to feminism in schools through a feminist reading of the masculinity literature and concludes by looking at the implications of those responses for feminist pedagogy.
This study examines the factors influencing underachieving boys on a high-performing high school campus. Unlike the “laddishness” often seen in studies of underachievement among boys, the boys in this study were quiet, unobtrusive, and compliant within the classroom. Using qualitative interviews and observation conducted over a one-year period, the study showed the formation of student identities in response to the hegemonic masculinity of the “golden boy” portrayed by the popular boys on campus, which included high academic performance. The boys constructed an alternate masculinity, the Beta Boy, designed to demonstrate superior intellect through eschewing in-class work and homework but performing particularly well on tests.
Masculinities and other hopeless causes in an all-boys catholic school
"We get our fixed - or malleable - notions of sexuality and gender from a variety of sources: family expectations, a hypersexualizing media gaze, and through the dictates of those great monoliths, Faith and Obedience within a/the Church. However, gender is also being formed in the well-worn halls and the ordered environment of classrooms: schools are the great throughways where gender gets most articulated - bartered for and with - during adolescence. This book documents a year-long autoethnographic study in an all-boys Catholic secondary school. It elucidates how schooling helps form both assumptions and practices about what it means to become a man, and examines how these discourses are reshaped by young men in their daily lives. In the process the book explicates how students come to make sense of and exercise their own identities amidst the discourses of the school around, through, and by religion and gender and, necessarily, sexuality."
2001
Abstract: This thesis investigates the construction of masculinity of 10-11 year old boys at school. It is a comparative ethnographic study set in three junior schools differentiated by the social characteristics of their intake. The two main sources of data come from participant observation and interviews with children. The thesis draws on social constructionist and feminist-inspired theories and argues that the boys construct, negotiate and perform a range of different masculinities which are contingent on the meanings and practices found within each school. It is argued that there is a hierarchy of masculinities, of which one can be identified as dominant within each setting. Whilst, in each school, some masculinities are subordinated, the study found that not all boys aspire to, or compete with, the dominant form of masculinity and the version of the 'idealised' boy this presents. Some boys appear content to pursue their own forms of masculine identity. The boys' pee...
Doing Boy" in Male Peer Groups: A Discursive Approach Into Adolescent Masculinity
2014
Gender- and identity-based literature acknowledges gender as performative, and gender identities as emerging through both discursive and materialistic actions. Within this framework, masculinity is viewed as constructed in various and multiple forms. Drawing on these concepts, this study aims to highlight versions of masculinity that emerge through adolescent boys' views about their participation in male peer groups. Boys' accounts negotiate the socially prevalent discursive resources regarding what it means to be and act as a member of a male peer group. Data were drawn from 10 boy-consisted focus groups, held in the school setting and conducted on the basis of a semi-structured interview protocol. The analytic method was discursive, based on the assumption that language is a means through which one constructs identity positions and understandings of the world. Analyses revealed the persistence of hegemonic ideals about maleness and indicate the significant role of the male...