Negotiating Gendered Identity in Classroom Disputes and Collaboration

Abstract

In a mixed ability co-educational secondary classroom male and female students grapple with notions of femininity and masculinity while collectively developing a play for performance. A dispute arises when some of the girls push for themes common to teen romance fiction. Other students, male and female, strongly voice their disapproval of this trend. The teacher finds it hard to arbitrate effectively. Later, a high-achieving middle-class boy and a low-achieving working-class girl collaborate on the writing of dialogue for male characters. Their concerns in this enterprise are found to be quite different. In both instances of co-educational classroom relations examined in this paper, issues of social class positioning and related orientations to the consumption and production of written texts are shown to be at least as significant as gender in explicating interactional phenomena. The question of effective feminist pedagogy is addressed in terms of these considerations.