Gender-normative discursive representations in textbooks could have deleterious impacts on pupils' gender identity development. This study sets out to explore the discursive construction of femininity and masculinity in anthology textbooks for primary education and scrutinize children's sense-making of gender-normative discourses. Grounded in a…

A seminal body of work emerged in the 1980s recognising reading as a site for gender and class identity work. However, understandings around working-class girls' reading identities are invisible in the current Australian education policy space where gender equalities with respect to curriculum subjects have disappeared. This paper draws on a…

School playgrounds are critical arenas wherein children's gender performances unfold, and 'games' of gender subordination or domination transpire. Theoretically predicated on Butlerian and Baradian gender performativity approaches, this qualitative study analyses how children negotiate and perform gender, exploring the material-discursive effects…

Many studies have shown the importance of the socio-cultural factors that lead girls to desert scientific and technological courses. Over a long period, the contents of the French technology education (TE) college curricula may well have contributed to strengthening the feeling among girls that this discipline was better suited to boys. The choice…

Drawing on cross-cultural qualitative research in comprehensive (primary and middle) schools in Finland and Korea, this article explores students' peer relationships as well as tensions and negotiations that occur between student agency and school control. Based on school observations and interviews with students and teachers, this article…

The suburban-urban achievement gap (diminishing until the 1980s) has stopped its narrowing trend, and single-sex schools are proliferating as a reform model, especially in urban areas. In this study researchers interviewed eight elementary school girls (in an all-girls school) three times over 2 years, and the resulting 23 transcripts were…

Exploring the diverse nature of students' interpretations of their reading experiences, this study moves beyond broad generalizations about boys and girls to consider complexities inherent in the social processes that influence students' engagement in reading. While the study aimed to develop understandings about the ways notions of masculinity…