Tuula Gordon

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.

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.

Citizens and Others: Gender, Democracy and Education.

ABSTRACT Western democracies are premised on a social contract between equal individuals. An individual, fully defined, is a legal personality, argue Abercrombie, Hill & Turner; it is, they claim, “on these grounds that children, women and lunatics at various times have not been regarded as autonomous, separate persons” . The achievement of legal rights for women has been a longer and a more contentious process than the achievement of such rights for men. Despite the fact that women in Western societies are, in a formal sense, equal individuals as citizens, I shall argue in this paper that their individuality is nevertheless relative rather than absolute. The discussion on ‘individuality’ and ‘otherness’ is relevant in the analysis of gender and education. The formal education system constructs girls and boys in schools as ‘pupils’ with ‘neutral’ characteristics, that is, as absolute individuals with equal opportunities for achievement in the school context. At this level the location of pupils in social ...

Resources and (in(ter))dependence: Young people's reflections on parents

The lives of young people are lived in the context of social changes associated with neo-liberal politics. In neo-liberalism, individuals are considered autonomous units who steer their own futures, and the transition from youth into adulthood is understood as a change from dependence into independence from family ties. It has been assumed that autonomy is the endpoint of this development. Yet this approach has turned out to be too restricted. Several studies suggest that the family still remains a significant component in the social, educational, emotional and material lives of young people. Parents are important resources in young peoples paths to adulthood. In this article, we discuss changing reflections of young Finnish women and men on their relationships with their parents. We analyze parents as providers of material resources, as well as emotional and social ones, in order to facilitate the transition to adulthood. We suggest that whilst young people are willing to move from semi-dependence to independence in relation to material resources, in emotional and social terms they strive for interdependence. We came to know these young people in an ethnographic study when they began secondary school. This article draws from re-interviews with the same young people at the ages of 17–18 and 19–20.

Young Female Citizens in Education: Emotions, Resources and Agency.

In this article we are concerned with how young women’s subjectivities are constructed within relations of power, particularly in the context of schooling and the transition to adulthood. We focus on the possibilities and limitations for agency to be exercised by women in the education system and more generally, the resources that they can draw on, and how citizenship is implicated in this process. The process is fraught with emotion, the desire for educational achievement and for agency, ambivalence about appropriate femininity, contradictions in the route from dependence to independence. We draw on empirical research comparing young women’s experiences in Finland and the UK, placing those experiences in the broader social, cultural and political context.