Formations of gender in school : About maintaining, loosening and crossing gender-related boundaries

This thesis concerns issues related to gender and schooling, focus is located in different conditions and experiences girls and boys as· gendered human beings meet there. Points of departure are partly ideas and issues from post-structural feminist research that, both boys and girls would benefit from a break down or at least loosening of the dualism between man and woman and what is concerned male - female. Partly the variety of children's gender formations is focused in order to nuance the picture of boys being like that and girls being like that in a stereotype way. The aim is to understand possibilities for children to form their gender in different ways regarding: constructing and maintaining of gender-related boundaries - border-work loosening of gender-related boundaries crossing of gender-related boundaries and what that might mean to children in school The strategy used for the empirical part was a field-study with interviews from teachers and children as well as observations and field-notes. Theoretical points of departure are poststructural theories of gender and schooling and standpoint theory. The findings show that children in school are in a context where they get different contradictory messages and signals concerning gender. The children's formation of gender varies a lot from one situation to another. Different organisation of the work in school gives different gender formations. This means that it is worthwhile to regard gender as a pedagogical question.2003