Maria Rönnlund

Schoolyard stories : processes of gender identity in a 'children's place'

Drawing on data from a Swedish primary school, this article explores how the schoolyard and places within the schoolyard are discursively used in processing gender identity. The analysis of children’s narratives in relation to four identified key places indicated diverse and parallel ways of processing gender identity, and that spatial characteristics formed different conditions for processing gender identity. The analysis stresses the importance of understanding gender identity as spatial and diverse and children as active agents in processing this identity. Following the analysis outlined in the article, it is argued that a spatially diverse and multi-characteristic schoolyard is likely to meet various and parallel ways of processing gender identity to a greater extent than a schoolyard with low spatial variety. In general, representations of an ‘active’, ‘playing with everybody’, ‘rule-abiding’, and ‘gendered’ school child were not challenged to any great extent. This result indicates the power of institutional and societal forming and framing in contemporary outdoor school environments.

Vocational or academic track? : Study and career plans among Swedish students living in rural areas

ABSTRACT This ethnographic study explores how rural lower secondary school students reflect on study and career choices, focusing on the choice between vocational and academic upper secondary programs. Applying a spatial perspective, we analyze individual students’ reflections about study and career choices within a variety of rural regions, and compare patterns in the regions. The results indicate complex interactions between structural factors and individual dispositions. In places where education levels were low and the local labor market predominantly offered unskilled manual and service work, there was a stronger tendency to choose vocational programs than in places with higher education levels and access to a more varied labor market. Likewise, there was an association between strongly gendered labor markets and gender-typical choices. However, individual students positioned themselves actively in relation to the local place, its local labor market and social relations; their choices were place-bound to varying degrees, and chose upper secondary programs and presented ideas about prospective careers that were harmonious with the local labor market in some cases, but discordant in other cases. The results are discussed in the framework of individuals’ horizon for actions.

Rurality and Education relations: Metro-centricity and local values in rural communities and rural schools

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly positioned themselves in the local rural context and valorised rurality positively in education exchanges, content and interactions, with positive effects on young people’s experiences of participation and inclusion. These factors tended to occur in sparsely populated areas. An emphasis on nature and its value as materially vital in people’s lives was present as was a critique of middle-class metrocentricity. Such values and critique seemed to be absent in other areas, where rurality was instead often represented along the metrocentric lines of a residual space in modernizing societies.