Education, Cooperation and the Cultural Practices of Assertive Girls

Abstract

The aim of this article is to produce a fully contextualised, ethnographic account of how two assertive, high achieving, thirteen-year-old girls reacted to a teaching intervention designed to foster cooperative group work. The main focus is on how the girls used a ‘best friends’ strategy to control social action, maintain identities and realise their interests in the social context of the school. The girls’ practices are analysed and evaluated in terms of there being a mix of contradictory elements, some more consonant with educational ideals of autonomy and democracy than others. Although the girls’ assertiveness went some way to redress power imbalances, doubts are raised as to the educational progressiveness of the learning approaches and new order of relations thereby established. © 1994, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.