Boys don't write romance: The construcion of knowledge and social gender identities in english classrooms

Abstract

Teachers have been under pressure in the United Kingdom to devise pedagogic strategies to raise boys' achievement. This article reviews the emergence of the concept of a ‘setting’ from within the sociocultural literature as the basis for considering the interaction between gender and learning. The second section reports findings from an empirical study of two teachers in one school who taught the same creative writing activity to their classes. The strategies in each classroom to improve boys' achievement in English varied, and involved mixed, gendered seating and single sex grouping. The strategies had unintended effects in terms of how subject knowledge was realised, and therefore what was available to learn and by whom. To demonstrate and explain these effects we illustrate how hegemonic representations of gender were reconstructed in each setting and present individual cases to illustrate students' experience of the settings. How settings mediate the interrelation between gender and learning at the interpersonal plane of analysis are discussed, and the reconstruction of knowledge and social gender identities at the personal plane. © 2003 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.