Gendered interpretations veiled with discourses of the individual

Abstract

This paper is based on a year-long ethnography of a K-1 class. I report on the way gender was a significant implicit feature of interpreting kids’ everyday classroom activities, like why boys tended to go to the computer center and girls did not. In addition to explicating the gendered interpretations, the paper also discusses the way teachers used de-gendered narratives to explain the classroom activities. Rather than acknowledging gender as a significant feature of these often reported classroom activities, teachers attributed differences in performance to personal characteristics like personality or personal preference. The major contributions of the paper include extending our study of gender and schooling to a primary class, focusing on the interpretations of gendered activities and not just on the description of those activities, and locating a disjuncture between the interpretations that emerged through observations and the explanations that were offered by teachers for those same observations. This last point has critical potential for helping us understand how gender was masked in one class. We know that gender still accounts for discrepancies in schooling experiences, but we have not been able to fully understand how gender works within the class on an interpretive and narrative level. This study helps explore some of these complexities.