Conference Agenda

This contribution builds on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a 6^th turned 7^th grade class in inland Norway between January and December of 2020. The study was conducted for my PhD-project about Boys’ identity formation at school and in the classroom which has a focus on gender, social class, and identity. The research question for the contribution at hand is How is pupils’ presentation of identity at the school dance shaped by gender norms and the school's gendered practices? In a time when gender identity and gender diversity is widely discussed and focused on, understanding how pupils display their identity within and beyond gender norms in a special school setting is of interest. Identity presentations are not created by themselves in a vacuum but in an interplay between pupils, between pupils and teachers, and between the school as an institution and the people who occupy it. Understanding what room is (or is not) created for alternative, hybrid, or ambivalent gender expressions both within and outside the gender binary can therefore tell us something about how the discourse on gender diversity might develop going forward, and how society will face it in the future.

In this contribution, I will discuss gendered norms and practices at school by looking at a special event, namely, the school dance. This is because the norms found in daily life are not necessarily different from those observed in special events, but they can be exaggerated and more visible in the latter setting. By looking at concrete empirical examples of gendered practices and norms made visible I will discuss what room pupils have to express their gender identities, how different forms of masculinity and femininity are expressed, and what this can tell us about gender discourse in the 2020’s. To discuss this topic, I will use a few different theoretical lenses. As a foundation, I will look at the school dance through Judith Butler’s perspective on the term heteronormativity, and analyze how pupils, through the gendered practices of the school dance, are constituted as gendered bodies in a binary relation to each other (2004, p.159). I will also argue that Butler’s description of heteronormativity as a “discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed…” (2006, p.58) still holds true in the school context. Furthermore, I will use Marshall Sahlins’ theory about the relationship between social structures and events, and how the latter can lead to change in the former. In the context of gender norms and performance, the theory is relevant since Sahlins tells us that “An event becomes a symbolic relation” (1976, p.21), meaning that the content of the event, whatever it might be, can be used as a symbolic reference of identity. Thus, the event (the school dance) can be utilized to either confirm or break with norms and become a reference for the future.

Phenomena like truancy (Reid, 2014; Lever, 2011; McCormack 2005), indicate that education is not understood as being inherently good by every student. Consequently, within an Inclusive Education perspective, the development of more welcoming educational practices becomes crucial. In addition, a basic underpinning of the evolving field of Disability Studies in Education, is that understandings of the experiences of education for people undergoing oppression is central, both for developing critiques of the ableist structures in educational settings, as well as suggestions of how education might be otherwise (Slee, Corcoran & Best, 2021). With students as active participants, this study set out to address the phenomenon of truancy, by giving voice to a doubly marginalised group of participants, i.e. girls at a Greek-Cypriot VET school.

The research followed a qualitative, ethnographic approach. The site was the VET school where I was working as a Physics teacher. Fieldwork gradually converged to a class of ten girls, whom I shadowed throughout the three years of their upper secondary studies. Research questions involved the girls’ school experiences, patterns of resistance, factors triggering truancy and their calculation of the costs and benefits of their decision to stay out of class/school.

Findings indicate that attributing truancy to endogenous problems of the student is insufficient; the school’s culture was such that it worked as a mechanism that used truancy to ensure its survival. This is an aspect which points to an unhealthiness and anti-romanticisation of education. A culture of exchanging commodities was revealed, which bears comparison to economic notions. More specifically, negotiating over their absences was for the girls a cost and benefit calculation, since leniency over excess absences was a desirable trade-off for choosing a specific vocational study area, even if that was not the one they were interested in to begin with. This seems to have been a defining aspect in triggering feelings of meaninglessness over education, which was in turn one of the triggers of truancy. The collateral damages seemed to be massive with regard to the girls’ understanding of the purpose of education, the perpetuation of negative VET reputation and the reproduction of their vocational identities.

The idea of the ‘virtual handbag’ has been used to bring together the concepts and ideas which synthesise the thesis of this PhD dissertation; the girls carried in their virtual handbags and utilised resources given to them in order to shape their own actions, but these resources were often unhealthy. In line with the underpinnings of the theoretical framework of Social Exchange Theory, the girls’ subsequent interchange of the resources given to them was equally unhealthy, not always as a form of resistance, but as an eager reciprocation of the commodities been given to them. This was a dangerous and now perhaps a newly discussed form of pyrrhic victory, when compared to the notion as raised by Willis (1977/1981); the girls were particularly creative agents through their cost and benefit calculations and believed that they were in a win-win situation, but what they managed to do instead, was to reproduce social structures.

Despite the gloomy picture, the aforementioned findings are an indication of the importance of longer lasting ethnographic research undertaken by teachers-researchers, as a method of delving into the underpinnings of students’ identity formation. In this process, teacher training is vital. Finally, further focusing on students’ voice, especially of marginalised groups, is proposed to be a powerful future research step for the development of more inclusive understandings and interventions to truancy; I hold that the above are crucial issues to be discussed in depth within international conferences.