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"Det är mer okej för killar att ställa dumma frågor" - om högstadielärares syn på pojkars verbala dominans i klassrummet
2004 (Swedish)Independent thesis Basic level (professional degree)Student thesis
Abstract [en]

The importance of gender equality is emphasised in the Swedish curriculum as well as in the Swedish school law. According to the curriculum and the law it is the duty of every school employee to work actively towards equality between boys and girls. Still, a number of studies claim that teachers keep paying more attention to boys and that boys generally speak twice as much as girls in the classroom. In this essay, which confirms the theory that boys tend to dominate verbally in the classroom, 12 teachers have been interviewed about how they look upon boys’ verbal dominance. Since the Swedish school law points out that school is one of the places where children learn about gender roles, it is important that teachers in general are made aware of their own part as co-creators of the gender system. The majority of the teachers in this study, however, seemed to lack that sort of awareness. I found that most of the teachers chose to look for the reason why boys dominate during class either in society or in the children’s families. Only a few teachers mentioned the school environment and their own part as co-creators of the gender process. Instead of reflecting upon their own behaviour and gender prejudices, most teachers tended to seek the explanation for boys´ verbal dominance in an environment far away from school. Twenty teachers were also asked to mention five “interesting” pupils and describe what made them so interesting. Since research shows that teachers in general tend to consider boys to have more interesting personalities than girls, my hypothesis was that the teachers in my study would mainly mention boys. To my delight, my hypothesis could not be confirmed. Half of the pupils that the teachers chose to talk about were girls. However, I found a clear gender difference when it came to what characteristics made the pupils “interesting” in their teachers´ eyes. A great number of the “interesting” boys were said to be either clever or noisy with difficulties in concentrating in the classroom, whereas the “interesting” girls to a much greater extent where described as empathic and considerate. The teachers in my study thus turned out to be rather gender biased. They reproduced the gender system by mentioning pupils in analogy with traditional gender roles, where girls are appreciated for their relational capacities, whereas boys are seen as independent individuals. Keywords: skola, elever, verbal dominans, klassrumsobservationer, genussystem, jämställdhet, grundskola

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2004. , p. 38
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-60379Local ID: LP-01OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-60379DiVA, id: diva2:1125180
Educational program
Teacher education
Available from: 2017-07-13 Created: 2017-07-13

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
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