‘The world must stop when I’m talking’: gender and power relations in primary teachers’ classroom talk

Abstract

The present paper examines male and female teachers’ language practices in relation to ‘censuring’ talk in the primary classroom, in the context of the debate around boys’ ‘underachievement’ and the ‘feminisation’ of primary school culture. Through an analysis of classroom observations with 51 men and women teachers, it looks to see whether gender differences could be found in the ways individual men and women teachers communicated in terms of their ‘censuring’ comments of pupils’ work or behaviour. Secondly, the paper takes issue with the notion that teachers operate within a ‘feminised’ educational culture, by looking at the ways in which teachers’ classroom talk can be seen to be constrained by two contrasting discourses relating to the power relation between teacher and pupil: a ‘traditional’ disciplinarian discourse, and a more ‘progressive’ liberal discourse. Both discourses have complex gendered and class dimensions, challenging the conception of a ‘feminised’ primary school culture.

Keywords:

• gender
• primary
• classroom communication
• feminisation
• discipline

Acknowledgement

The Economic and Social Research Council project number is RES000230624. The project team comprised Christine Skelton (Principal Investigator), Becky Francis, Bruce Carrington, Merryn Hutchings, Barbara Read and Ian Hall. The author is very grateful to all the members of the research team, as well as the two anonymous referees, for their help and advice on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. When the term ‘we’ is used in this article, it is referring to the research project team.