Browsing by Author "Mikkola, Vera"

Studies show that gender continues to shape everyday life at school. It is important that teachers are aware of their own views on gender, as the promotion and implementation of equality is one of the core values of teaching. The purpose of this study is to analyze how teachers describe students in interviews by classifying them according to their gender and other characteristics. It focuses particularly on the category of gender, which is repeated frequently in the interviews. It also studies how gender overlaps with other categories such as the age, immigration status, and special needs of a student. This study was conducted as a qualitative interview survey. The material is from the Koskettava koulu (Touch in school) project funded by the Kone Foundation. This study analyses 19 semi-structured interviews of teachers. The interviewees were aged 35-63 and most of them have a Masters Degree in education. The method used is membership categorization analysis, which has been developed based on Harvey Sacks' categorization analysis. The study found that teachers classify students in a number of different ways in everyday school life. For instance, teachers tend to categorize students based on gender, age, ethnicity, school success, and sexuality. The interviews indicate that particularly the perceptions of girls and boys as actors are stereotypical. In the research material, girlhood and boyhood are constructed using different reports and comparisons, and girls and boys were often depicted as contrasting. However, when teachers were asked about the daily life of the school and the impact of gender on their work, the majority of teachers said they acted in a gender-neutral manner.