Michael Tholander

Cross-Gender Teasing as a Socializing Practice

In many studies of teasing between boys and girls, researchers have concluded that teasing affirms boundaries and asymmetries between the sexes through so-called borderwork (Thorne, 1993). However, in this study of teasing during student-run group work, teasing was shown to reach far beyond mere cultural reproduction of gender differences. Not only did teasing sometimes seem to contribute to tearing down traditional gender roles, but it was also employed for many other practical purposes. The study adopts a dialogical perspective on gender socialization to illustrate the fine details of how boys and girls orient to gender in teasing practices. However, quantitative analyses also show that gender is oriented to on an aggregate level: cross-gender teasing is far more common than same-gender teasing. This finding supports van Dijks (1999) hypothesis that gender is a systematic relevance category.

Working with Rules: Lived Democracy in School.

This study focuses on an attempt by a Swedish secondary school teacher to fashion a more participatory education situation by involving his students in deciding the rules for their group work. Five group sessions were video recorded and examined using a conversation–analytic approach. The findings show a complex interplay between democratic and undemocratic elements in the interaction between the teacher and the students, as well as among the students themselves. Throughout the material, the students often reconnected to the democratic discourse of the teacher and employed it for various purposes. This also meant that the students’ work with the assignment was sometimes set aside. However, because it can be assumed that the students pick up new democratic competencies as they partake in the sessions, the teachers participatory agenda can still be defended. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research.

Doing reluctance : Managing delivery of assessments in peer evaluation

Over the past few decades new ways of conceiving the relation between people, practices and institutions have been developed, enabling an understanding of human conduct in complex situations that i ...

Students' Participation and Non-Participation as a Situated Accomplishment

Using an approach inspired by conversation analysis, the present study investigates how Swedish students draw on democratic discourse during group work. The analyses demonstrate the importance of democratic issues to students. The analyses also point to how students repeatedly employ democratic discourse for a number of strategic purposes. Moreover, the analyses show that democratic arrangements at school are not always productive for schoolwork. The results are discussed in relation to previous research. In sum, the study implies that democracy must be studied as an interactive process. This entails a focus on how students do democracy at school rather than how they appear as democratic beings or how they experience student democracy retrospectively.

‘How long was your poem?’ Social comparison among junior high school students

The present article focuses on in situ social comparison among junior high school students. Rather than studying social comparison as an individual phenomenon in experimental situations, which has been common in previous research, the study analyzes social comparison as a real‐life social practice. The results show that the practice of social comparison among students reconnects to central elements of the formal assessment system. For instance, in staging comparison sequences, the students often circulated prior teacher assessments or engaged in various counting practices. Moreover, the results show that students partake in social comparison in order to establish, protect, or recapture an image as successful students. In so doing, they are socialized into a range of useful social‐comparison practices. Despite this, some students necessarily turn out to be positioned lower than others. Thus, social comparison among students can be seen as an informal stratification process in the school system.

Mundane whistleblowing : Social drama in assessment talk

Based on recordings of naturalistic interaction, this study explores how a case of mundane whistleblowing unfolds in real time. In the analyzed recordings, a teacher instructs five students to engage in self- and peer-assessment. A few minutes into the session, one of the students indirectly accuses his peers of staging a cover-up. This whistleblowing action is analyzed in detail, but the main analytical focus is on the conversational strategies employed in response to it. These strategies — for example, emotional displays, the undermining of credibility, fabricated accusatory detailing, covert silencing, puzzle work, and threats — were used both to repair the potential damage of the whistleblowing and to punish the whistleblower. More overt and hostile strategies were used after the formal assessment was over and the teacher had left the students to themselves. Students’ participation in the studied type of activities can be seen to develop their capacity to transform social relationships, to broaden their notions of peer loyalty, and to enhance their sense of social structure.

Book Review: Age in Action. Membership Work and Stage of Life Categories in Talk

This language-centered thesis is the product of work undertaken at two academic departments: the Department of Social Sciences in Loughborough (UK) and the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology in Tampere (Finland). The data consist of 22 audiotaped interviews with Finnish men and women who, in terms of their chronological age, had turned or were about to turn 50. The title of the book says it all: ‘Age in Action’. The author, Pirjo Nikander, focuses on the accounts, anecdotes, and stories the interviewees produced as part of talking about their age with the interviewer. More specifically, the focal point is on how people accomplish certain kinds of situated interactional work by using and relating to different age-related categories and descriptions. In this sense, the book is essentially a study in rhetoric, much in line with prior research within the tradition of discursive psychology. The book consists of three parts. In the first part, ‘Re-Contextualising Life Course Research’, Nikander spells out how traditional social psychological research on age and aging differs from the current work. Most importantly, age has traditionally been treated as an independent variable that exerts its influence on individuals. Nikander’s research elegantly reverses this relation: as sophisticated language users, individuals in various ways operate with the meaning of age and aging. This, in turn, means that age is not treated as the analyst’s category, but as something that the participants themselves shape and relate to. To be sure, people can be seen to have a certain chronological age, in this case 50-something, but what people do with age categories and age descriptions is much more flexible than a plain fixed number. The first part of the book also assesses prior qualitative and language-centered life-course research, e.g. narrative, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic approaches. The argument here is that such research rarely focuses on situated language use, 787