This paper discusses gender construction in the everyday context of school art education and mother tongue education. The concept 'gender play' (Barrie Thorne 1993) contains the idea that construction of gender, either in or outside school, is not a one-way act of adults socialising children into boys and girls, but a process of unfolding divisions and boundaries, alternately strengthening and being challenged. The expression encompasses the grass-root complexity and multidimensionality of gender construction, especially the fact that children themselves actively, and more or less playfully or seriously, partake in the production of gender meanings and boundaries, but also in challenging them. In contrary to what we may have believed, art lessons or mother tongue lessons are not gender neutral oases in the school. Gender becomes significant in classrooms as differences in styles of being and doing, aesthetic values, reading, writing, subject matter and craft of student artwork. It becomes an issue when the teacher sets tasks or gives instructions, or when the visual and literal representations of men and women in school textbooks or magazines and other media material enter the classroom conversations. This presentation moves in the area of art educational and mother tongue educational research with a feminist, sociological, cultural studies approach. We reflect on the data, analysis and interpretations of our PhD. studies. We have both conducted ethnographic fieldwork in secondary schools in Helsinki. The main data in Tarja Kankkunen's study is based on a period of participant observation in the fall of 1996 during an obligatory 7th grade art course with eleven girl students, seven boy students and their art teacher. In her one-year ethnography Tarja Palmu observed mother tongue lessons of 7th and 9th graders and gathered teaching materials and other texts used in these lessons. Keywords: ethnography, gender, school, art education, mother tongue education