Elina Lahelma

Imagining gendered adulthood: Anxiety, ambivalence, avoidance and anticipation

In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people’s transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality between the genders. The debate is moved beyond ‘pitiful girls’ and ‘can-do girls’ by exploring how young women in the UK and Finland anticipate and try to avoid being locked into the lives of adult women.

First Day in Secondary School: Learning to Be a ‘Professional Pupil'∗

ABSTRACT The first school day of four groups of school students starting secondary school is described and analyzed. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted in two secondary schools in Finland by a group of six researchers. Initial encounters between students and the school and its teachers are discussed. The focus is on how the construction, negotiation and learning of the ‘profession’ of being a pupil in a secondary school begins. ∗We express our gratitude to the teachers in City Park and in Green Park who gave us the unique possibility to follow the first encounters of new students.

Home as a Physical, Social and Mental Space: Young People's Reflections on Leaving Home

Home is a space that consists of physical places, social practices and mental meanings. All these aspects are evoked when young people plan or dream about moving away from their parental home. Young women and men have manifold hopes concerning finding space, peace, agency and independence that moving to a place of your own seems to promise. There are a range of fears and uncertainties in their thoughts about this transition as well. Starting work, getting into further education and establishing partnership have an impact on young peoples dreams as well as on their practical possibilities of establishing their own household. Material, cultural and social resources at young peoples disposal are embedded in their dreams and plans. They vary according to their social background and gender. In this paper we discuss reflections of young women and men on moving away from the parental home. We first met these young people when they were 13 years old, in an ethnographic study in secondary schools. This paper, then, draws from an ethnographically grounded life history research ‘Tracing Transitions—Follow-up Study of Post-sixteen Students’. In the project we have re-interviewed the same young women and men at around age 18 years, and again at around age 20 years.

Gazing with intent: ethnographic practice in classrooms

In this methodological article we discuss ways in which researchers observe girls and boys in the classroom. The article is based on a comparative cross-cultural, collective ethnographic study, ‘Citizenship, Difference and Marginality in Schools: With Special Reference to Gender’, which was conducted in secondary schools in Helsinki and London. When we analysed our own actions, we realized that educational researchers – like teachers – tend to concentrate on events taking place in the classroom, particularly visible and audible action. They are less likely to direct their gaze on stillness and silence. In most of the classes that we followed, boys used more voice, time, space and movement than girls, although there were also differences among girls and among boys. In the early stages of our study, noisy and physically active boys drew our attention. But in our practice as the research continued, and in this article, we turn our gaze onto non-events, and ask reflexive researchers to problematize their categories of active and passive. Drawing from our own observations, we discuss how activity, passivity and agency are conceptualized and gendered in educational research.

Tolerance and Understanding? Students and Teachers Reflect on Differences at School

Starting from educational aims that emphasise tolerance and understanding, the focus of this article is to analyse how difference is constructed in students’ informal relations, by enactments of bullying and sex-based and racist harassment. The article also discusses how young people themselves and teachers reflect on these kinds of processes. These questions are explored using data obtained from different perspectives: 1) ethnographic observations in secondary school classes of 7th graders; 2) interviews of the students in these classes (about 13 years of age); 3) interviews of the teachers that taught these classes; and 4) follow-up interviews of the same young people at the age around 18. The findings suggest that students’ individual diversities are sometimes constructed to “different-ness” in everyday life at school. “Different-ness” might be used as a reason for bullying, racism, or sex-based harassment. In schools this is not effectively addressed by teachers.

Language of Inclusion and Diversity: Policy Discourses and Social Practices in Finnish and Norwegian Schools.

The terrain of inclusion studies in discussed in this paper from the perspective of policy discourses and teachers’ constructions on student diversity. We start by discussing the concept of inclusion from normative and analystic perspectives. We then look at the kinds of discourses that can be found in the Finnish and Norwegian curricula, as well as teachers’ interviews when they talk about their students. On this basis we analyse how the patterns of diversity and inclusion are conceived and constructed; the phenomenon of ‘diversity’, as it is formulated in policy documents and as it is expressed in categories with which teachers operate and act upon in school; and, ‘diversity’ in the context of inclusive practices. We draw from ethnographic studies in Finnish and Norwegian schools; both from mainstream and from special classes.

Gendering processes in the field of physical education

In Finnish secondary schools, girls and boys are taught physical education (PE) in separate groups. A male teacher normally teaches the boys and a female teacher teaches the girls. Focusing on PE teachers’ comments in two different ethnographic studies of seventh graders (13–14‐year‐olds), we examine the processes that reproduce or challenge the gender system and the possibilities of agency in the context of PE. Our findings suggest that the bodies of male students are regarded as strong and are, therefore, appreciated by both female and male teachers. Moreover, male teachers’ competence in PE is evaluated higher than that of the female teachers. None of the teachers questioned the male teachers’ ability to teach girls, however, heteronormativity arose as an issue. There were more doubts over female teachers’ competence to teach boys.

School Grades And Other Resources: The “Failing Boys” Discourse Revisited

Worry about the poor school achievement of boys is one of the current travelling discourses that is repeated in one country after another. One of the assumptions that is taken for granted is that school achievement, as it is displayed in school grades, has dramatic effects on young peoples paths to further education, the labour market or society at large. It has also been taken for granted that these effects are the same for young men and for young women. I challenge this assumption drawing on the educational paths of a several young people living in Helsinki, following them from the age of 13 to 20–24. I discuss how they themselves construct their lives within the positions that are available, how they interpret their achievements and failures, and what resources they use. I suggest that some resources are gendered. I argue that for young men in the current Finnish educational and political context, school grades are not as important as for young women. This paper draws from an ethnographically grounded longitudinal life history study called Tracing Transitions—Follow‐up Study of Post‐Sixteen Students.

Gendered divisions on classed routes to vocational education

In this article our focus is on the persistent gendered divisions in educational routes of young people who choose a vocational path after compulsory education in Finland. We analyse how gendered subjectivities are constructed within the practices of educational and vocational guidance and within student cultures in the comprehensive school, as well as the way in which young people process understandings of themselves and their expectations during and after vocational education. In addition, we explore young peoples ways to negotiate with disciplinary practices of the educational system. The paper draws on three ethnographic studies, and on feminist post-structural and materialist theories, intertwined with contextualised ethnographic perspectives. Our analysis reveals some patterns that might work as obstacles in the process towards reducing gender segregation in education and the labour market. We suggest that whilst gendered choices are sometimes taken for granted, gender dichotomy is often emphasised even if young people choose ‘differently’.

Temporal, spatial and embodied relations in the teacher's day at school

In this paper, we draw on a cross-cultural ethnographic study conducted in two secondary schools in Helsinki (Finland), and two in London (UK). In our analysis of everyday life in schools, space is not merely a backdrop to activities that take place, it also shapes processes and activities, and spatial relations are simultaneously temporal. Here, we follow teachers’ daily time-space paths in schools, from corridors to staff rooms to classrooms and breaks. We explore how spatial arrangements limit and control teachers’ movement and their use of time-space, examining how their bodies and emotions are implicated in this process. Whilst interested in the ebb and flow of power in the school in relation to student/teacher interactions, we wanted to move beyond a dichotomous conceptualisation of authority and resistance and the top down hierarchy of the official school, therefore, as well as processes of differentiation, those of connection and negotiation were also of interest.